Bush and his people are filth. More from the Washington Post on the cesspool they have made of the Department of Homeland Security. Go read it all.

“After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and after the Bush administration assumed a tough new stance on immigration in its campaign against terrorism, the Justice Department still sounded wary about drugging deportees. In March 2002, a Justice lawyer laid out two options. One choice, he wrote, was to “seek a court order … in every case where the alien’s medication is not therapeutically justified.” The other choice was to create a regulation to grant immigration officials explicit permission to sedate deportees, perhaps including safeguards that would give people a warning that they might be medicated — and a chance to object.

Top immigration officials chose neither. Instead, in May 2003, just after ICE was created, they internally circulated a new policy: “[A]n ICE detainee with or without a diagnosed psychiatric condition who displays overt or threatening aggressive behavior … may be considered a combative detainee and can be sedated if appropriate under the circumstances.”

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, as it used to be called, was previously the lead standard for dysfunctional government agencies. By comparison even the FBI was efficient.

Then came the Homeland Security Act of 2002, legislation of a stupidity so stunning that even George W. Bush, in a rare divgation into common sense, at first opposed the measure.

But Senator Joe Lieberman (Likud-CT) shepherded this bureaucratic camelope into law. The old INS disappeared into the bowels of the new Department of Homeland Security, where part of it was reborn as a miscarriage called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This new monstrosity, created from the conflation of racism and xenophobia with the paranoia of Bush’s “war on terror,” appears to be even more cruel, more indifferent, more sluggish, less accountable and more of a cause for national shame than its unfeeling predecessor.

The Washington Post has exposed the mess to daylight in a shocking series of articles by reporters Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein. This is the kind of thing that newspapers can still do better than any other institution we have. Here’s a good place to start, and I hope you will.

In all the coverage of the subprime mortgage mess, there has been a key element missing: the sales pitch.

This is where the rubber meets the road, where the actual swindle goes down, where the trap snaps shut and the sucker is held fast till he can be skinned alive. It is the Glengarry Glen Ross moment.

We must understand these moments when we listen to the head hogs — Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp, AIG and the other giant loan sharks — as they whine that the whole disaster is all the fault of deadbeat borrowers who should have known better.

And these moments are all committed to paper somewhere, except I don’t know how to get my hands on it. So I’m asking for help. Does anybody out there know somebody who was or is involved with a subprime mortgage outfit?

These moneylenders don’t just send their high-pressure sales force into battle unprepared. Like any other high-pressure sales outfit, mortgage brokers must use work sheets, talking points, training manuals and even scripts. These are to be followed, sometimes word for word. That’s what it means when the voice on the phone says, “This conversation may be recorded for training purposes?”

Every reasonable objection the prospect may raise has been anticipated, and a suitably deceptive answer prepared. Every evasion and obfuscation and misdirection has been scripted. And I’d like to put this stuff on the internet where it belongs — not to expose or embarrass any individual, but to expose the shabby trickery of the foundation upon which the huge banking firms are built.

The most likely source for such documentation, it seems to me, would be a remorseful or disgruntled former employee of a mortage broker who hasn’t bothered to throw out the old scripts and manuals.

Do you know any such person? I would offer him or her, and you, complete anonymity of course. Written backwards, my phone number is 0075793068. In the same way, I can be reached on line here: moc.liamg@elttilood.emorej

As the Pigmy President and his warhogs continue to beat the drums for an attack on Iran, the need for Americans to step outside our media’s echo chamber becomes more and more desperate.

Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar gives us a chance to do so, in this analysis from TomDispatch, via The Smirking Chimp. Samples:

Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to “wipe Israel off the map.” That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time.” He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel…

Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as “the army of twenty million”) are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities to strengthen the country’s theocratic regime and their faction of it…

Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime’s de facto number two, his quest is not only to “save” the Islamic Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran’s regional power and reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran’s major cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.

If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to …

Mayday is the international distress signal. We should have known what was coming, on that Mayday five years ago when the Pigmy President promised us Mission Accomplished. But instead we mostly slobbered and drooled and wagged our tails like ecstatic puppies — the fierce watchdogs of the media very much included.

Only a few habitual whiners failed to join in the general joy, and a search of the archives shows, to my relief, that I was one of them:

I just watched George W. Bush on the seven o’clock news, landing on an aircraft carrier to kick off his reelection campaign.

Here are a few paragraphs from CNN’s account of this photo op:

“ABOARD USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN — President Bush made a historic landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday, arriving in the co-pilot’s seat of a Navy S-3B Viking after making two fly-bys of the carrier…

“The exterior of the four-seat Navy S-3B Viking was marked with ‘Navy 1’ in the back and ‘George W. Bush Commander-in-Chief’ just below the cockpit window…”

I tried to imagine other wartime presidents landing on an aircraft carrier, wearing a flight suit for the cameras and saluting every sailor in sight. Roosevelt? Don’t be silly. Truman? Eisenhower? JFK or LBJ? Nixon or George Herbert Walker Bush?

Of them all only Johnson, who habitually wore an unearned Silver Star ribbon in his lapel, would have been capable of a trick so cheap, so tasteless, so tacky.

And two days later, on May 3, I was writing this:

During his campaign kickoff speech Thursday aboard the USS Photo Op, President Bush used the curious phrase, “a target of American justice.”

Of course he didn’t write the words himself, but somebody did and many other somebodies reviewed and approved them. What does the oddly awkward phrase say about all these somebodies and about the president who employs them?

The full sentence is, “Any person involved in committing or planning terrorist attacks against the American people becomes an enemy of this country, and a target of American justice.”

A person can be the target of terrorists or extortionists or the police, but justice does not “target” and indeed in theory cannot. Justice is blind. That is, or once was, the whole idea of the thing.

That this is no longer so in Bush’s America may explain why nobody at the White House seems to have found the language of the speech peculiar. Targeting, after all, is integral to this administration’s concept of justice. Do profiling and preventive detention amount to anything more than targetting? Mr. Ashcroft may aim badly or indiscriminately, but he aims. He is not blind.

Mr. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war is not blind, either. Here again the target is chosen and the punishment carried out in advance of a trial. There is no longer any real need for a trial — no need, that is to say, for what Americans have long thought of as justice.

But what this president thinks of as justice is actually vengeance. They are very different things, as Abraham Lincoln well knew and George W. Bush does not.

And after four more days, this:

Senator Byrd was getting at my objections when he talked about exploiting the trappings of war and assuming the garb of a warrior. In this Mr. Bush did worse than violate some mere law of the state. The president put himself in contempt of what Albert Jay Nock once called “that court from which there is no appeal.” He violated the canons of good taste.

For which, see below:

Just finished listening to Bush regurgitating his customary gobbets of misinformation about his -- and unfortunately our -- open-ended military occupation of Iraq against the expressed wish of most Iraqis and most Americans. Same-old, same-old, except for two things.

First off, by now even the talking heads of TV have figured out that it might be part of their professional responsibility to point out, immediately following another presidential eructation, the lies of which it is composed. At least on CNN, they did just that.

Second, at one point Bush said that failure to fund his miscarriage of a war would “lead to massive humanitarian casualties.” Tough times ahead for all you humanitarians, but then of course you already knew that.

Mark Danner is an exceptionally useful citizen who teaches journalism at Bard College and the University of California at Berkeley. What follows are excerpts from a long piece that I hope you’ll be tempted to read in full. Professor Danner has given an explanation as intelligent and convincing as any I’ve seen of why we were dragged into Bush’s Folly in the first place. As to a plan of escape, he has none. No “peace with honor” is by now possible, any more than it was in Kennedy’s, Johnson’s and Nixon’s Folly.

Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on “terrorism” — a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target — was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, “Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.…”

That broader story comes down to a matter of two strategies and two generals: General Osama bin Laden and General George W. Bush. General bin Laden, from the start, has been waging a campaign of indirection and provocation: that is, bin Laden’s ultimate targets are the so-called apostate regimes of the Muslim world — foremost among them, the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud on the Arabian peninsula — which he hopes to overthrow and supplant with a New Caliphate.

For bin Laden, these are the “near enemies,” which rely for their existence on the vital support of the “far enemy,” the United States. By attacking this far enemy, beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden hoped both to lead vast numbers of new Muslim recruits to join Al Qaeda and to weaken U.S. support for the Mubarak and Saud regimes. He hoped to succeed, through indirection, in “cutting the strings of the puppets,” eventually leading to the collapse of those regimes…

The latter perception — that terrorism as it struck the United States arose from political factors and that it could only be confronted and defeated with a political response — strikes me as incontestable. The problem the administration faced, or rather didn’t want to face, was that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded, and sustained by the United States.

We see an explicit acknowledgment of this in the “Bletchley II” report drafted after 9/11 at Defense Department urging by a number of intellectuals close to the administration: “The general analysis,” one of its authors told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important ... But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable ...”

The United States has made possible the rise to power in Iraq of a Shiite government which is allied with its major geopolitical antagonist in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States has been fighting with great persistence and distinctly mixed results a Sunni insurgency which is allied with the Saudis, the Jordanians, and its other longtime friends among the traditional Sunni autocracies of the Gulf…

At this moment, the Iraq War is at a stalemate. Confronted with a growing threat from those “enemies allied with its friends in the region,” the Sunni insurgents, the Bush administration has adopted a practical and typically American strategy: it has bought them. The Americans have purchased the insurgency, hiring its foot soldiers at the rate of $300 per month. The Sunni fighters, once called insurgents, we now refer to as “tribesmen” or “concerned citizens.”

General David Petraeus blames Iran for yesterday’s mortaring of our occupation headquarters in the Green Zone. Maybe, but maybe also we should keep in mind the legal principle of cui bono.

Suppose you are the public face of a “surge” which you claim has greatly reduced violence by al-Qaeda in the country your troops occupy. And suppose your own headquarters has just come under heavy bombardment.

Then suppose you run right out and tell the press that al-Qaeda had nothing to do with the attack. No, indeed. Instead, by one of those happy coincidences to which we have become so accustomed since 9/11, it was outside agitators. What’s more they were from Iran which — what are the odds? — your own commander-in-chief happens to be desperate to invade. What a fortunate confluence of God’s own truth and your own self-interest that would be!

And there was more to come, of a surprising nature:

In response to the news that 4,000 US military personnel have now been killed in Iraq, [Petraeus] said it showed how much the mission had cost but added that Americans were realistic about it.

He also said a great deal of progress had been made because of the “flipping” of communities — the decision by Sunni tribes to turn against al-Qaeda militants. The extent of this had surprised even the US military, he said.

Before we let it surprise us, however, we might want to read the full article in Rolling Stone from which this excerpt comes. The author speaks Arabic, which turns out to be handy once you leave the Green Zone. Apparently everybody out there talks funny except the ones who report to General Petraeus.

Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government…

In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. “Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems,” as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it “balancing competing armed interest groups…”

“Before the war, it was just one party,” Arkan tells me. “Now we have 100,000 parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back into service. First they take money, then they ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good.” He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. “In Saddam’s time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite,” he says.

The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, with their religious sects having only personal importance. Intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites. Under Saddam, both the ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi army were majority Shiite.

Still mongering fear after all these years of plummeting polls, America’s protector spake thus this week to his troops at the Department of Homeland Security:

We're in a battle with evil men — I call them evil because if you murder the innocent to achieve a political objective, you're evil.

The events of September the 11th, 2001 demonstrated the threats of a new era. I say "new" because we found that oceans which separate us from separate — different continents no longer separate us from danger. We saw the cruelty of the terrorists and extremists, and we glimpsed the future they intend for us. In other words, there's some serious lessons on September the 11th that it's important for all Americans to remember.

Two years ago, Osama bin Laden warned the American people: "Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished." All of us, particularly those charged with protecting the American people, need to take the words of this enemy very seriously. And I know you do.

At this moment, somewhere in the world, a terrorist is planning an attack on us. I know that's an inconvenient thought for some, but it is the truth. And the people in this hall understand that truth. We have no greater responsibility, no greater charge, than to stop our enemies and to protect our fellow citizens.

The wonder of it all is that the nation doesn’t collapse in laughter or shame or both when Bush trots out this evildoer stuff. Let us start by understanding that most fights are not between a good guy and a bad guy. Most fights are between two bad guys. The good guys aren’t hanging around bars looking for trouble; they’re home playing with the kids or watching other people fight on TV.

So, in the interest of reason and common sense, let’s drop all this crap about what a rotten swine Saddam was. Of course he was. He deserved to die a thousand times over.

Let’s put him at ten on the evil meter, okay? And let’s assume that leaving this butcher in power over the last five years would have resulted in the murders of 100,000 innocent Iraqis.

Now let’s do the math, our unit of measurement being Iraqi corpses. According to every calculation of Iraqi casualties, even the Pentagon’s, George W. Bush outscores Saddam on the evil meter by at least five to one and probably closer to ten to one.

Set against that pile of corpses Bush’s good intentions will count for nothing when his personal End Time comes. St. Peter knows what the road to hell is paved with; if Bush actually believes in a Judgment Day, he’d better hope he’s wrong.

More news from Halliburton, which as you will recall has Vice President Dick Cheney on its payroll to this day. I urge you to read it the whole story in the Boston Globe. Benumbed as we are from our long wallow in the squalor of the most corrupt administration in American history, this still retains the power to shock.

CAYMAN ISLANDS — Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

When Texas pipe-fitter Danny Langford applied for unemployment compensation after being let go by Service Employers International Inc., he was rejected, he was told, because he worked for a foreign company.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq — including about 10,500 Americans — are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars…

Things aren’t as bad as you thought. Once again, they’re worse. This excerpt is from James Fallows’s look back at the Hart-Rudman Commission which, as few now alive remember, predicted in early 2001 that terrorism would be our greatest national security problem.

The commission was wrong, of course. Our greatest national security problem lurked in the West Wing of the White House — and also, it turns out, back in the vice-presidential mansion at Number One Observatory Circle.

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.

The same thing happened at the second meeting — discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.

“Her name was Lynne Cheney,” Hart said. “I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today.” Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China’s back!)

From Reuters. I’m guessing that Stiglitz knows a little something about economics, since he won the Nobel Prize for it. (On the other hand Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize and what he knows about peace could not only fit in the barrel of a gun, but did.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is severely underestimating the cost of the war, Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes write in their book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War" (W.W. Norton), due to be published on Monday…

To illustrate how the money could be spent elsewhere, Bilmes cited the annual U.S. budget for autism research — $108 million — which is spent every four hours in Iraq. A trillion dollars could have hired 15 million additional public school teachers for a year or provided 43 million students with four-year scholarships to public universities, the book says.

From BBC News:

The United States has ordered a warship into position off the coast of Lebanon…

"The United States believes a show of support is important for regional stability. We are very concerned about the situation in Lebanon. It has dragged on very long," said the unnamed US official.

Speaking as a former unnamed US official myself, I hope the poor bastard at least permitted himself a wink as he dished up this beauty. Probably not, though. When first we practice to deceive, it’s usually on ourselves.

Imagine this. Democratic candidate John Doe is set to speak at a local campaign rally that his advance men have prepared.

Chosen to warm up the crowd is a well-known local Communist. He comes out and berates the Republican candidate, dissing his race, religion and capitalist beliefs.

It's on film. When Doe finds out about the speech, he apologizes and says it will never happen again.

A local political commentator explains the Communist has a large following and is good at getting out voters. That explains why Doe's staff chose him to deliver his harangue.

Instantly Doe is pilloried by both Republicans and Democrats and is driven into early retirement. Too bad for him he wasn’t a Republican.

Republican neocons and the GOP's mean trash-talkers are tolerated, even revered, by the Republican establishment.

And yet neocons, having captured the executive branch, have caused far more harm to the United States than any domestic Communist ever dreamed of doing. Still, they are tolerated or embraced by a major American party.

The far left of the Democratic party, on the other hand, has been branded as dangerous to the nation. The mainstream Democrats ousted them and would never choose one of them to warm up the crowd at a political rally.

So which party is radical ? Which one harbors anti-Americans in its ranks? Which tolerates members who are a proven threat to the United States ?

If you liked the Southeast Asia War Games (as we players sometimes called them), you’ll love Bush’s war of choice in the Middle East. Excerpted from the Times of London:

The cost of direct US military operations — not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans — already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion.

Last year — very late last year — Chuck put up a link to Jon Swift’s list of 2007’s best blog postings, as chosen by the bloggers themselves. One of them was mine.

I didn’t remember Jon’s request, or that I had submitted anything to him. And when I read my February posting myself, I couldn’t even remember having written it. This is one of the considerable joys of a fading mind: the world becomes full of wonder and fresh delights. All things are new again.

Actually this guy’s stuff holds up pretty well, it seemed to me once I had rewritten it to disk. In fact it’s more or less what Noam Chomsky finally got around to saying in CT Review just last month. Maybe he stole it, who knows? And so here’s an authorized re-posting, on the theory that maybe it will be new again to you, too:

In the current Newsweek Evan Thomas has an unusually vapid review of a book by Andrew Roberts which may or may not be equally vapid, depending on how accurately Thomas has described it. The review is in a section called “Ideas,” and here is Thomas’s: People who speak English are really, really special, and the rest of you owe us a really, really lot.

This idea is hardly worth engaging, and so let’s pass on to one which is worth engaging — although only because it has invaded the national brain like some ghastly tumor threatening the very values that Thomas supposes us to possess:

The English-speaking peoples have been seriously threatened by force four times: twice by German aggression, once by Soviet totalitarianism, and most recently by Islamic fanaticism. The forces of freedom and democracy reeled after the first blows—at Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor in World War II and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11. “The English-speaking peoples rarely win the first battle,” writes Roberts, “but they equally rarely lose the subsequent war.”

Would such dubious prizes be worth the life of even a single George Walker Bush or Richard Bruce Cheney? Like millions of other Americans neither man thought so at the time. But that, of course, was before Richard Nixon gave us the precious gift of a volunteer army.

From a fascinating and discouraging Newsweek piece (see note below) about how mindless fear trumps reason in the human brain:

In the final days of the race, most polls showed Kerry leading Bush by about 2 percentage points nationally and edging ahead in such key states as Ohio (50-46), Florida (49-45) and Iowa (48-47, according to the CNN/Gallup poll).

On the Friday before voters went to the polls, however, the Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera broadcast excerpts from a videotape of Osama bin Laden speaking into the camera to Americans, proudly taking responsibility for September 11 and patronizingly explaining "the best way to avoid another Manhattan."

Clips of the diatribe were broadcast repeatedly on American stations over the weekend and described in newspapers. Four days later, the president won re-election. Ohio, Florida and Iowa put him over the top.

Giving Osama bin Laden an instrument like George W.Bush to play is like handing Jascha Heifetz a Stradivarius.

Bin Laden has got from Bush virtually everything he wanted: U.S. troops are out of Saudi Arabia, his enemy Saddam is dead, the Al Qaeda franchise has gone international, his hideout in Pakistan is safer than ever, the Taliban is resurgent, the Great Satan is globally hated and isolated, and Bush has done, praise be to Allah, effectively nothing to end the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Sweet!

The only tiny cloud on the horizon is the possibility of a Democratic president in 2009. Whichever warhog winds up with the GOP nomination, can anyone doubt that we’ll be hearing from Bin Laden again, in late October or early November of 2008?

(Note I: Maddeningly enough, the URL above takes you to Newsweek’s index page, with no visible link to the story. To access it, you have to do a site search for “Roots of Fear.”)

(Note II: Modulator adds this valid point:)

The way things have played out Bush has gotten from Osama virtually everything that he wanted: a huge popularity hit in his first term, a mission accomplished photo op, a 2nd term in office, billions in oil profit windfalls for his cronies around the world, the war on terror, the shredding of the bill of rights and so on ad infinitum.

It is not at all clear who is pulling the strings.

Perhaps they are each other’s sock puppet and, if so, perhaps they are partners.

The invaluable Pierre Tristam lays out Bush’s most recent lies about the occupation of Iraq and refutes them one by one. Read it all at The Smirking Chimp.

A Brookings Institution survey of Arab opinion in six countries last year showed bin Laden’s popularity never breaking five percent. Bin Laden’s popularity in the Middle East is itself an invention, convenient to the Bush administration’s offensive posture there, inconvenient to Arabs who must pay its price. Bin Laden is the Arab world’s Timothy McVeigh, a fringe loon, but one lucky enough to be constantly revalidated by Bush’s monomaniacal war on Islamowhatever …

Peace isn’t breaking out in Iraq. A colder, longer war is. It’s further miring the United States in the shards of the Sunni-Shiite divide. And it’s confirming once again in Arab eyes that America’s end game is control of the Middle East’s authoritarian houses of cards. If Enron were an emirate, Bush would be its principal shareholder right now, with America’s foreign policy as collateral …

From Jenny Anderson’s column, “The Insider,” in today’s New York Times:

For limited [hedge fund] partners, there is cause for concern. Take the fund’s investments. Private equity firms theoretically buy undervalued companies, lever them up, cut waste sharply and then sell, ideally at a higher value. As a public company, they will need to focus on quarterly earnings and those results may influence when they buy or sell — taking in fees when they buy and profits when they sell. (Equity firms insist in their prospectuses that they will not manage investments to meet quarterly earnings).

Our civil religion — unbridled and seldom-questioned capitalism — has led us to believe that cutting jobs is a public service. It is not.

The old company’s profit went, in considerable measure, to provide a living wage to, let’s say, a thousand workers. The new company has now been slimmed down, trimmed. modernized, or streamlined. (Notice the vocabulary, incidentally. We would have a very different view of the process if we used words like gutted, looted, squeezed, or plundered.)

The new company now has five hundred workers. To simplify matters some, but not much, the wages of the other five hundred workers are now in the pockets of a handful of lawyers, moneylenders and stock market gamblers with inside knowledge. (Again, words matter; they prefer to call themselves investment bankers, hedge fund managers, investors, and financiers.)

The true worth of the company may have been — in a more moral society would be held to be — the jobs of the employees, and the value of the goods or services created by the company.

The latter may continue, although very possibly the personnel reductions will result in worse service or shoddy goods. But the jobs lost are gone forever, to the detriment not only of the individuals but the community.

You might as well say that a tick creates value, when all it does is suck your blood for its benefit and leave you with Lyme disease.

Putin isn’t the only one to oppose Bush’s idiot plan to protect Europe from nonexistent Iranian missiles with an unworkable antimissile system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

This pointless and childish attempt to restart the Cold War is just as unpopular with the people it’s supposed to protect, the McClatchy Newspapers report:

There are only about 600 people in this poor but bucolic village in the Brdy district west of Prague, but the view along the cobble-stoned streets is nearly unanimous: they are against the U.S. plan …

In a recent referendum, 98 per cent voiced opposition to the U.S. plan. In nearby Sedlec, 96.5 percent were against it. In Vranovice, it was 96 percent. And, just up the road, in Rozmital, 94.5 percent oppose the plan. Throughout the Czech Republic, public opinion is 60 per cent against the plan …

Magnus Ranstorp, research director for the Swedish Defense College, and one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism, put it this way: “It's a defense system that doesn't yet work intended to stop a threat that does not yet exist…”

Experts said the Bush administration negotiated the radar deal directly with Poland and the Czech Republic, leaving NATO and European nations out of the loop. By doing so, thereby weakening NATO's stature in Europe …

The unilateral U.S. drive for an unproven system has in fact divided Europe, according to Otfried Nassauer, an expert on defense policy at the German research center Berlin Institute for Trans-Atlantic Security.

“In the end, Europeans have to decide whether a theoretical defense system is worth a very real split in Europe,” he said. “It's classic Bush. He had a plan and he's going ahead with it, no matter the costs or arguments against it.”

From an interview with Chalmers Johnson, historian and military expert:

The world’s balance of power didn’t change one iota on September 11th, 2001. The only way we could lose the power and influence we had at that time was through our own actions, and that’s what we did.

Instead of calling it a war on terrorism, we should have called it a national emergency. We should have gone after the terrorists as criminals, as organized crime, because of their attacks on innocent civilians. Tracked them down — we have the capacity to do that — arrested them, extradited them back to the United States, tried them in our courts, and executed them. Had we done that, we would have retained the support of virtually the entire rest of the world, including the Islamic world, as the victims on 9/11.

The more important question underlying Bush’s firing of the eight U.S. attorneys has not been what they did to lose their jobs, but what the hundred-odd other U.S. attorneys did to keep theirs.

For a frightening part of the answer see this editorial in today’s New York Times. And bear in mind that Bush has been spreading his poison throughout the government — not just the relatively visible Justice Department.

How many thousands or tens of thousands of dedicated, competent public servants have been replaced by ideological and often corrupt hacks in the Park Service, the Government Printing Office, the Social Security Administration, the National Insitutes of Health, , the General Accounting Office, the Federal Highway Administration, OSHA, the Departments of Labor, Agriculture, Energy? On and on.

Most of our government is largely uncovered by the press and unknown to the electorate at large. This is where Bush has done the greater part of his damage to our nation, and it will take generations to undo.

Richard Perle, the Israeli war party’s most effective mole in the American government ever since the Reagan days, writing in the December 4, 2001, issue of Israel Insider.

By the way, for those who are not sufficiently concerned about the possibility of the anonymous delivery of biological weapons from Saddam’s arsenal of those weapons, he is busily at work on a nuclear weapon. One of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam defected to the US in 1996, a man named Khidhir Hamza. He has written a book that I recommend called “Saddam’s Bomb maker.” I met with him in Washington.

Until I started taking him around, the senior-most person Hamza had met with was a GS15 at the State Department. We’ve now gotten him in to see some pretty senior officials. Hamza described the reaction to the bombing of the Osirak reactor as follows: We knew then that we should never again put so much of our program in a single location where it would be vulnerable, so we began to build uranium enrichment facilities, many facilities, and we built 400 of them and they’re all over the country. Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, and some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them.

More from Sy Hersh’s exposé of Bush’s continuation of Nixon’s and Reagan’s attempts to subvert democracy by setting up secret black ops units within the government:

Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then — notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams — are involved in today’s dealings.

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress.

As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office” — a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

The anticonstitutional wing of the Republican Party (or do I repeat myself?) keeps learning lessons from each of the messes it keeps making. The lesson of Vietnam, to these deep thinkers, was to muzzle the press. George Herbert Walker Bush did this to great effect during his little Panama weenie-wagger, his son to lesser effect with the embedding process in Iraq.

But none of these congenital meddlers ever stumbles on the real and perfectly obvious lesson taught by their own repeated catastrophes. That lessson, briefly stated:

Last week Dante came across an article in Le Monde about Bush’s plan to install missiles in Czechoslovakia and Poland — on Russia’s doorstep. Dante called to tell me that this was a really big deal. He doubted, however, that the American press would pay much attention.

He was right on both counts. The Boston Globe ran a Reuters story and on Saturday the New York Times editorialized about it. And the dependable Guardian of London put an article up on its website.

But by and large the memory hole swallowed the news that Bush is doing his best to reignite the Cold War — and to hamstring the past efforts of better men to defuse the threat of nuclear missiles.

I could go on about this at greater length, but Dante has spared us a thousand words with one picture. Look, read the linked articles, and pray for the Republic.

As I was reminded by Bill Maher a week or so ago, Bush campaigned in 2000 as “a reformer with results.” Here, from McClatchy Newspapers, are some of them. It is important to remember that these “results” are not collateral damage inflicted accidentally by Bush’s economic and regulatory policies. They are the point of those policies:

The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation’s “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen …

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy’s review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn’t confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

This is from Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, by Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein. Lawrence Wilkerson was former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff.

In May 2003 the Iranian government approached the U.S. government with an urgent request to open up negotiations. There had been only one other official communication between Iran and the United States since Iranian radicals seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration. Now the initial U.S. success in Iraq had the Iranians coming to the bargaining table as supplicants.

“The Iranians came to us through the Swiss ambassador after they saw how fast we moved through Afghanistan and Iraq,” Wilkerson says. “This was in 2003, right after [the invasion of] Iraq.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not yet president and the moderates in charge in Iran wanted to deal.

The letter delivered by Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann offered concessions on Iran’s nuclear program, Israel policy, and al-Qaeda. “Israel policy,” of course, involved Tehran’s support of Hezbollah. According to Wilkerson, the Iranians offered to exchange al-Qaeda prisoners they held for Mujahedeen e Khalq prisoners the United States had in custody. The MEK was a guerrilla group Saddam Hussein had used in his war against Iran. After the war they engaged in terrorist attacks against Iran and are designated terrorists by the U.S. State Department.

More than a hundred billion dollars, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, America’s allies’ unflagging opposition to the war, and a deeply divided public. Finally it was all paying off. One of the countries Bush had placed in the Axis of Evil was coming in out of the cold.

“We told them no,” Wilkerson says in an interview at George Washington University. “Not only did we tell them no — we wrote a letter of protest to the Swiss for interfering in our foreign policy.”

The entire diplomatic endeavor was immediately curtailed. Asked if he knows who made the decision to reject the Iranian request for negotiations, Larry Wilkerson didn’t miss a beat.

“Yes, I know,” he says. “It was the vice president of the United States.”

Way back in 1992, when the world was young and Dick Cheney was sane, here’s what he told the Discovery Institute in Seattle, defending George H.W. Bush’s decision not to invade Iraq:

If we’d gone on to Baghdad, we would have wanted to send a lot of force. One of the lessons we learned was don’t do anythng in a halfhearted fashion … If you go into the streets of Baghdad … all of a sudden you’ve got a battle you’re fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques …

Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq …

I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.

And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don’t think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war.

And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.

Suburban Guerrilla pointed me to Bill Moyers’s superb speech to the West Point cadets last month. Here is an excerpt. Go read the whole thing. Please.

The Armed Services are no longer stepchildren in budgetary terms. Appropriations for defense and defense-related activities (like veterans’ care, pensions, and debt service) remind us that the costs of war continue long after the fighting ends. Objections to ever-swelling defensive expenditures are, except in rare cases, a greased slide to political suicide. It should be troublesome to you as professional soldiers that elevation to the pantheon of untouchable icons —right there alongside motherhood, apple pie and the flag—permits a great deal of political lip service to replace genuine efforts to improve the lives and working conditions—in combat and out—of those who serve.

Let me cut closer to the bone. The chickenhawks in Washington, who at this very moment are busily defending you against supposed “insults” or betrayals by the opponents of the war in Iraq, are likewise those who have cut budgets for medical and psychiatric care; who have been so skimpy and late with pay and with provision of necessities that military families in the United States have had to apply for food stamps; who sent the men and women whom you may soon be commanding into Iraq understrength, underequipped, and unprepared for dealing with a kind of war fought in streets and homes full of civilians against enemies undistinguishable from non-combatants; who have time and again broken promises to the civilian National Guardsmen bearing much of the burden by canceling their redeployment orders and extending their tours.

North Korea has the bomb.

North Korea developed the bomb because it was scared of George Bush.

North Korea became scared of Bush after noticing that when a murderer of 3,000 Americans fled to Pakistan, a country with the bomb, Bush reacted by invading Iraq, a country without the bomb.

George Bush weakened America, and made America less safe, by invading Iraq.

George Bush, Weakener-in-Chief.

North Korea has the bomb.

Easter Lemming points to a fascinating post by J.D. Henderson at Intel Dump. Henderson is a former infantry officer, drill sergeant, and rifleman. Intel Blog is written by men like him: lawyers with extensive military backgrounds. It is not an antiwar blog. It is not an antimilitary blog. Plainly Henderson has come to his conclusions only with great reluctance.

This makes his post especially compelling and convincing — and pay particular attention to the comments. If Bush has lost guys like these, he has lost the military. And the military has got the guns.

The ground under the Decider’s feet is giving away. While I certainly wouldn’t expect the military to turn its guns against the warhogs in the White House, I wouldn’t expect it to turn them against Iran, either. Generals are first and foremost bureaucrats. They know lots of ways to nullify orders without technically disobeying them. Let’s hope so, anyway.

The National Intelligence Estimate that everyone is talking about shows, once again, that George Bush’s strategy to fight Islamic terrorists has failed. Instead of reducing the number of young Muslims who hate America and want to kill Americans, the one-track Iraq policy has increased the young haters whose ambition is to kill Americans.

Instead of using the National Guard for its natural mission of securing guarding our ports, chemical plants, and refineries at home, Bush has left our homeland’s belly exposed by sending Guardsmen and women to die in an age-old ethnic strife in a land that did not attack or threaten America.

Instead of building on the unprecedented international primacy and leadership we Americans were accorded in the wake of the 9/11 butchery, he has alienated our friends, and stripped us of much-needed strength.

All this, and much more, is the reason Bush can, and should, be called “the Weakener-in-Chief:” he has weakened, not strengthened our country; he has lifted Osama bin Laden up, not brought him down; he has endangered us, not made us safer.

Given that the Bush strategy in the war on terror has failed so plainly, the “with-us-or-against-us” rhetoric should not work at all any more. George Bush had his chance to fight Islamic terrorism, for five years now, and he has failed. Because of incompetence.

The matter needs to be stated plainly: we don’t hate Bush because he is fighting terrorism, we want to replace him because he is not good at fighting terrorism.

It’s not that Bush’s critics are against the war on terror; quite the contrary, it’s that we want George Bush out of the way because he has failed to launch an effective war on terrorism. We want to start one now. Five years too late, and against an enemy much strengthened by the Bush missteps and bungling, and without many allies by our side any longer, but we’ve got to start sometime.

And, we have to win a few elections at home, before we can start to win the war on islamic terrorists overseas.

So, criticism of Bush, and political opposition to him, is not a way to aid terrorists; it is actually the first step to eradicating them.

As I’ve said before, there are some horrific pictures of dead children out there. If the US had tried from the start to broker a peace agreement under a cease–fire, it might have done some good for America’s image not to mention saved hundreds of children’s lives. But no, Bushco had to condone the atrocities.

The images of the dead children in southern Lebanon played across the television screens on Sunday over and over again — small and caked in dirt and as lifeless as rag dolls as rescuers hauled them from the wreckage of several residential buildings pulverized hours earlier by the Israeli Air Force.

The images were broadcast on all of the Arab-language satellite channels, but it was the most popular station, Al Jazeera, that made the starkest point. For several hours after rescuers reached Qana, Lebanon, the station took its anchors off the air and just continuously played images of the little bodies there.

“This is the new Middle East,” one report from the shattered town began, making a sarcastic reference to a phrase Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice uttered last week when visiting Beirut and rejecting calls for an immediate cease-fire. American weapons caused the deaths, the report said.

It’s amazing the work Bushco is doing throughout the world in America’s name.

(read more)

There is nothing illegal, unethical, or underhanded about this. Just another one of the hundreds of low-profile ways George Bush, a/k/a the Weakener-in-Chief, has found to weaken and divide our country.

Having spent the past four years turning Iraq from a despotic backwater commanded by a dictator with a 30-year record of not attacking America into the world headquarters for America-hating terrorist recruitment and training, is there anyone out there who doubts that the Weakener-in-Chief will not now do what he can to bolster and strengthen the America-hating elements in neighboring Iran?

Remember, the most precise guide to the foreign policy behavior of the Bush Administration has been simply to imagine what America can do to lift up Osama and let him soar. From attacking Afghanistan but letting Osama escape, to attacking Osama’s sworn enemy Saddam Hussein, to failing to mount a serious rebuilding effort in Afghanistan and perfectly executing a troop-light and rebuilding-light occupation of Iraq that allowed plenty of time for resentment and America-hate to build while providing no security or any other benefit to the people of Iraq — the Bush Administration’s response to 9/11 in every particular has been carefully calculated to please and strengthen Osama bin Laden, while weakening America.

Since we know that bombing Iran would serve the Weakener-in-Chief’s difficult-to-understand but plain-to-see twin goals of weakening America and strengthening America-hate and terrorism, we can be sure that the Weakener-in-Chief will do it.

To find out when America can begin a long-delayed real war on terrorism, click here.

Wow. I missed this one: The Pentagon hired a contractor “to help it collect data on houses of worship, schools, power plants and other locations in the United States.”

KR leads the way again:

A review of military data shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year.…

The numbers also show that U.S. forces dropped bombs on more cities during the last five months than they did during the same period a year ago. Airstrikes hit at least 11 cities between Oct. 1, 2004, and Feb. 28, 2005, but were mostly concentrated in and around the western city of Fallujah. A year later, U.S. warplanes struck at least 22 cities during the same months.

If you had any doubt that our adventure in Iraq is spinning badly out of control.

To paraphrase the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now who stands on the beach and revels in the smell of the napalm after leading a dawn helipcopter gunship assault on a seaside village, “I love the smell of progress in Iraq in the morning. … Smelled like … victory.”

Ah yes. That special Bush touch, that certain je ne sais pas, that incomparable and consistent mix of utter blithering incompetence and nation-weakening lawlessness (via):

On February 8, 2006, President Bush signed into law a version of the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005 that was different in substance from the version that passed the U.S. House of Representatives. Legal scholars have advised me that the substantive differences between the versions — which involve $2 billion in federal spending — mean that this bill did not meet the fundamental constitutional requirement that both Houses of Congress must pass any legislation signed into law by the President.

Rep. Waxman: “If the President signed the Reconciliation Act knowing its constitutional infirmity, he would in effect be placing himself above the Constitution.”

… Bush continues to bungle what should have been Item One in any real war on terrorism: finding and killing Osama bin Laden, and getting rid of the Taliban. Both are thriving in Pakistan while we are off frying bigger fish such as tax cuts for the wealthy.

Instead, we’re off weakening our own country by continuing to refuse to do basic, real war-on-terror stuff, such as insuring that freight entering our country is actually inspected. (And, of course, the “it costs too much” defense is ridiculous, since a number of advanced and economically successful ports abroad, such as Hong Kong, in fact do have effective, 100 percent inspection programs: “This low-cost system of inspection is being carried out with no adverse impact on the marine terminals operations and without any U.S. government funding. It could be put in place globally at a cost of $1.5 billion or roughly $10 per container.”)

And, since the apparent goal of the Bush Administration is to weaken our country as much as possible, the proactive steps that the Bush Administration has taken, such as spying on U.S. citizens with no warrant and alienating all our allies, are both ineffective at detecting terrorist plots and corrosive of the strong, liberty-based, individual-protecting model that made our country great.

(For the record, I don’t pretend to know exactly why Bush has made it his goal to weaken and tear down our country; I suspect that with respect to the president personally, it has to do with revenge against the Big Daddy father who so clearly holds him in contempt to this day. But this doesn’t explain his legions of eager enablers, both in his administration, in congress, and in the media. Some crazy self-destructive biological urge like lemmings’ mythical rush to the sea? I don’t know. But it really doesn’t matter why Bush is weakening the country in every way he can. The only important thing is to identify that it is happening, and that the process cannot be reversed until Bush is either hobbled or leaves office. More BA posts on Bush as the “Weakener-in-Chief” here.)

Only then can a real, non-scared shitless, world community-based struggle against the forces that created the murderers of 9/11 begin.

The United States is about to start subsidizing the retiree health insurance plans of big corporations. Like the current disastrous Medicare drug benefit, this amounts to an ill-considered injection of inefficient (because profit-driven) private insurance companies between the health care consumer and the appropriate ultimate payor, the federal government. Because of the proven efficiency of the government — as demonstrated by Medicare and the Veteran’s Health Administration — in delivering health care at the least possible expense, single payer is the way to go. Allowing insurance companies to interfere and create a dense private bureaucracy to cream off unnecessary profits while operating under the strongest possible incentive (i.e., the profit motive) to deliver the least amount of health care possible is a disaster-in-waiting for our already hobbled health care system.

Naturally, though, this is precisely the tack taken by the Weakener-in-Chief, since allowing health insurance companies to rip off patients and taxpayers accomplishes W’s twin goals of weakening the nation and helping big business.

More on the nation-weakening folly of the Bush Administration’s relentless drive to erode America’s scientific pre-eminence, by measures such as keeping foreign graduate students out of this country. Now, the Weakener-in-Chief’s war on science and scientists has reached the point where prominent scholars from other countries can’t get a visa to come here temporarily for conferences:

A leading world science body denounced tougher U.S. visa policies on Thursday after its Indian-born president said he failed to get permission to enter the country on charges he was hiding information that could be used for chemical weapons.

Professor Goverdhan Mehta, 62, an internationally recognized organic chemist, invited to a conference by the University of Florida, has denied the charges and said he was rejected because he could not recall details of research he did 40 years ago. …

Mehta, a former head of the Indian Institute of Science who has taught in the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Japan, said the [U.S.] consulate accused him of hiding information that could possibly be used for chemical weapons when he could not give details of his doctoral thesis.

“I did my Ph.D 40 years ago,” he told the Deccan Herald in Bangalore, the southern Indian high-tech center where he lives. “I told them I did not remember the topic. Science has progressed and changed completely since then.”

Forty years. Sounds about right. Wasn’t that the age of the barrels of supposed WMD that Bush and Rove were creaming over for a couple of news cycles back in the days when the WMD hunt in Iraq was still on?

The scientific community, after years of shrugging their shoulders at the Bush Administration anti-science stuff, finally is starting to realize just how dangerous the Bush Administration is to them personally, and to the nation's scientific pre-eminence. That pre-eminence being, of course, the single most important pillar in the creation of America as the dominant nation of the last century-and-a-half.

More on privatizing profit while publicizing risk:

…when Medtronic and Guidant recalled certain heart defibrillators, both companies provided new devices free and agreed to reimburse patients up to $2,500 in out-of-pocket expenses for replacement operations. …

Neither producer, however, offered to pick up hospital and doctor bills. Instead, publicly funded plans like Medicare and private insurers are typically paying them. …

Manufacturers of implantable devices insist that their responsibilities are clearly spelled out in product warranties and that medical costs related to a device's replacement are not covered.

I'm sorry … somehow, I didn't take the time to read the warranty and replacement policy and maybe do some comparison shopping … ON MY HEART DEFIBRILLATOR!!??

The Bush Administration gives, as one of the reasons for letting the medical device makers get away with this, that keeping track of who gets what medical devices implanted is just too much paperwork. As if this precise type of inventory control were not practiced painlessly by every mom-and-pop retailer in the continental United States.

Of course, foisting risk off on the public to insure risk-free coporate profits is a classic way to weaken the nation while strengthening the corporations. That's why W is the Weakener-in-Chief, and re-earns the title every day.

President Bush entered office five years ago hungry to weaken the country. And, oh, how he has succeeded, our little Weakener-in-Chief! We’re weaker now than even the greediest drown-it-in-the-bathtub Weakentrooper could have dreamed.

Here’s what he and his Weakentroopers got up to as soon as he got in:

In 1999, [the federal mine safety agency] proposed strengthening standards on breathing devices, including requiring mines to stock “caches” of extra rescue devices and conduct more frequent hands-on training in how to use them. But by September 2001, the Bush administration withdrew the draft rule, citing “resource constraints and changing safety and health regulatory priorities.”

David Lauriski, the former Bush mine safety official who put the rule aside, is having second thoughts. “In retrospect, maybe we ought to have had requirements for more caches” of the breathing devices, he said Tuesday.

Only now, after an unacceptable number of corpses showed up on the evening news in or near the swing state of Pennsylvania, do we get even a nominal, lip-service, Clinton-level return to strength.

But once the TV lights dim, they won’t follow through. There’s only one real solution.

If you’re like me, you knew that the new Medicare drug program would somehow weaken the nation by ripping off poor old people while lining the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, even if you didn’t know exactly how this was going to be accomplished. Now, as the program takes hold, the disgusting machinery is coming to light:

The boost in profits comes from a shift in the drug coverage of 6.4 million poor and elderly people from Medicaid to the new Medicare drug benefit. Unlike Medicaid, which requires drug companies to charge their lowest or “best price” for medications, the Medicare program relies on competition among private drug plans to keep prices low. By eliminating the need to discount drugs for the government, the industry can now pocket the savings.

“The net effect over 10 years is probably closer to $40 billion in extra profit,” said Stephen Schondelmeyer, a pharmaceutical economics professor … profits would likely increase in coming years as more businesses cut retirees’ drug benefits and steer their former employees into the Medicare drug plans.

I hope Grandma’s got experience taking it up the back door, ‘cause she’s gonna need it.

The Weakener-in-Chief (a/k/a, “W”) and his zany sidekick Weakentroopers are up to their old tricks of … you guessed it, further weakening the nation while bolstering next quarter’s results for the giant industry du jour. Now, they have come up with a creative and terrific new approach to regulating harmful industries: have the government literally stop enforcing the laws for an extended period, such as four years, and ask the companies in exchange to keep track of how much and to what extent they are breaking the law. The rationale is that this benefits the public good by giving the government an opportunity at the end of the study period to really quantify and get a handle on the scope of the problem, at which point, the government will be in the best position to crack down.

Here’s the first use of this great new enforcement tool: end all environmental enforcement at massive and massively polluting hog and poultry farms for four years. The Weakentroopers at W’s EPA as part of the deal also are letting slide any past violations by these massive farms. In exchange, the farms don’t have to do anything except measure and report how much they are polluting. Am I kidding? Sadly, no:

The Environmental Protection Agency has signed agreements with 2,681 animal feeding operations in the egg, chicken, turkey, dairy and hog industries. They would be exempt from having to pay potential fines of up to $27,500 a day for violations either in the past or over the next four years.

On Monday, the agency said its Environmental Appeals Board had approved the first 20 of those agreements…

The Weakentroopers claim that the public will benefit because at the end of the so-called “study period,” the government will have all the information it needs to start enforcing the law. Others — that is, those whose primary aim is to keep our country strong, rather than boosting next quarter’s profits — say:

The fact is that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) already has the ability under the Clean Air Act to get this information from the polluters and doesn’t need to give them a special “get out of jail free” card in order to find out about their emissions.

What is most disturbing is that the deal was created by the polluters and for the polluters. Industry lobbyists approached the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the fall of 2001 with their own proposal, and the administration’s final deal closely mirrors the polluters’ wish list.

Please note that the four-year study period takes us out past January 20, 2009.

After the recent Sago Mine disaster in which 12 men were killed in a mine with a deep history of recent safety violations, KR reported that the federal mining safety watchdog agency had grossly weakened enforcement under the current administration of George W. Bush (a/k/a, the “Weakener-in-Chief”). The administration said, “No, KR, you unpatriotic bad liberal press organization; look at our figures.” So, KR did look and the administration’s own figures — and found that:

When Knight Ridder conducted a new analysis in the manner suggested by [Mine Safety and Health Administration spokesman Dirk Fillpot] using MSHA’s newest database, it showed the same dramatic drop.

The newest data show a 43 percent reduction in proposed median major fines from the last five years of the Clinton administration when compared with the first five years of the Bush administration. That’s the same percentage reduction found in Knight Ridder’s original analysis, using a smaller, online database of MSHA violations.

Here is the misleading and inaccurate MSHA rebuttal that KR smacked down (but read it fast; the Bush Administration already took it down once, and no doubt will again if criticism continues). And here are 11 KR questions that the Bush Administration refused to answer.

After five years, this usual question — more administration lies, or just more incompetence — is getting pretty darn old. Especially when the measure is in wasted American lives, be they overseas or underground.

The lies of this administration are just so reflexive and consistent:

President Bush agreed with great fanfare last month to accept a ban on torture, but he later quietly reserved the right to ignore it, even as he signed it into law.

Acting from the seclusion of his Texas ranch at the start of New Year’s weekend, Bush said he would interpret the new law in keeping with his expansive view of presidential power. He did it by issuing a bill-signing statement — a little-noticed device that has become a favorite tool of presidential power in the Bush White House.

UPDATE: As Fast Eddie points out in comments, the linked article goes on to note that Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito during his time as a Department of Justice attorney in the Reagan Administration wrote a memo encouraging the use of such bill-signing statements.

Just amazing. Wherever you look — or, try to look — Bush is shutting down government transparency, and ignoring public information laws. Check this out. What reason could there be for not continuing the IRS’s 30-year practice of sharing audit information and statistics, other than to keep regular Americans from knowing that they are being increasingly audited, while rich individuals and corporations are not?

The Bush administration has broken the law by stopping the public release of detailed tax-enforcement data, which has been used to show which kinds of taxpayers get the most and toughest audits, a noted tax researcher says.

Professor Susan B. Long of Syracuse University said … the Internal Revenue Service has violated a 1976 court order requiring the release of the data. … Ms. Long, who has researched and written about federal tax administration for more than 30 years, used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to win the court order in 1976 directing the revenue agency to provide her regularly with its data on criminal investigations, tax collections, the number and hours devoted to audits by income level and taxpayer category, and other enforcement records. …

Despite filing regular FOIA requests for the material, the last data Ms. Long received arrived Nov. 1, 2004, and covered only the first six months of fiscal 2004, through March of that year, she said. “They really shut down access,” she said.

Transparency is what makes a government endure. Shutting down access to information weakens the government and the nation. Why does this man hate freedom of information so much? Is he trying to destroy the country?

At one point last year, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined a coal company a scant $440 for a “significant and substantial” violation that ended in the death of a Kentucky man. The firm, International Coal Group Inc., is the same company that owns the Sago mine in West Virginia, where 12 workers died earlier this week.

The $440 fine remains unpaid.

One would think it would go without saying that worker safety was fundamental to building a strong, healthy nation. In the era of George W. Bush, a/k/a the “Weakener-in-Chief,” one would be dead wrong.

Here’s another group of patriotic Americans who are appalled by the White House’s warrantless wiretapping because they understand just how deeply the decision to launch such a lawless program has weakened the nation and damaged the real war on terrorism (which currently is expected to be launched, seven years too late, on January 20, 2009): America’s intelligence professionals.

The White House decision to order surveillance of international phone calls by U.S. citizens without a warrant violated longstanding practices and could undermine a key U.S. intelligence agency that’s critical in the struggle against terrorists, former senior intelligence officials and other experts said this week.…

“The damage it’s done to [the National Security Agency’s] reputation is almost irreversible in my view,” said a longtime top intelligence official with intimate knowledge of the agency’s workings.…

The officials said that morale in the CIA’s Operations Directorate, the spy service, is plummeting and that some senior officials are leaving or planning to leave and others have declined to take assignments.

The Bush Administration’s hypocritical bitch-slapping of veterans and the military continues, and the Democrats need to call him on it:

Nearly 2 million poor veterans or their impoverished widows are likely missing out on as much as $22 billion a year in pensions from the U.S. government, but the Department of Veterans Affairs has had only limited success in finding them.

Widows are hardest hit. According to a VA estimate, only one in seven of the survivors of the nation’s deceased soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who likely could qualify for the pension actually get the monthly checks. …

The VA knows that many veterans and widows are missing out on the benefit.

“We obviously are here for any veteran or survivor who qualifies,” said Tom Pamperin, a VA pension official. “But so many of these people — we don’t know who they are, where they are.”

Indeed, a VA report from late 2004 recommended that the agency “improve its outreach efforts” with public service announcements and other pilot programs.

While it made limited efforts to reach veterans or their widows through existing channels, it is “difficult to determine” whether such efforts have been successful, Pamperin said.

Let’s get this straight: those who have borne the burden of defending our contry, and their families and widows, are owed $22 billion per year for the services they rendered; and the Bush Administration hasn’t done a blessed thing to find and pay these vets the money they are owed.

“We don’t know who they are, where they are?” Are we talking about al Qaeda operatives, or our own veterans? This may be one of the areas where privatizing of government functions may make sense: pay a $100 bounty to anyone who brings in a veteran who is missing out on the benefits he earned while in uniform. The Bush Administration ’s dogged refusal to try to do the right thing by poor veterans is especially disgusting given that the men and women of the military are the crucial pawns in Bush’s political strategy to get and keep power.

This weakens America in lots of ways. One example: why does the Bush Administration think that they are missing their military recruitment numbers? Could it be because veterans are not valued? Jerks.

And isn’t this a perfect political opportunity to highlight the reality that despite Bush’s flag-waving and chest-thumping, it is the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who support and value veterans and military personnel? It’s simply not acceptable for veterans, especially those who are known to the VA because they are receiving VA health benefits, to be unaware that they are owed pension benefits. The Democrats need to introduce legislation requiring the VA to start a new program to identify the veterans and widows who are being bilked. Let the Republicans oppose that one.

More Bush Administration incompetence, or just more thumbing its nose at the international community? You decide:

Despite U.S. assurances that any mistreatment of prisoners will be investigated and punished, German prosecutors have been waiting since May for the American government to respond to charges that the CIA kidnapped and mistreated a German citizen named Khaled al-Masri.

The thing about Bush is that he’s a uniter, not a divider. The entire Middle East, most of Europe, and just about all of Latin America are now united in their hatred and mistrust of our nation under Bush.

Take for instance Evo Morales, the populist who just won election as president of Bolivia. Here’s how that news struck democracy-lovers in Bush’s State Department:

Several State Department officials said the primary challenge that the United States faced in Latin America was the fragility of democratic governments in the region, which makes them vulnerable to populist leaders who, they said, were almost by definition anti-American. Those leaders, the officials said, also tended to chip away at democratic freedoms.

Historically our officials have preferred leaders who don’t chip away democratic freedoms, but instead destroy them instantly and utterly. To name only a handful: the Somozas, Trujillo, Pinochet, Batista, Duvalier, Stroessner, Noriega, Videla and his fellow fascists in the Argentine junta …

Want to be the first kid on your block to own a deck of playing cards featuring murderous puppets we have installed south of the border? Just click here.

The Justice Department has barred staff attorneys from offering recommendations in major Voting Rights Act cases, marking a significant change in the procedures meant to insulate such decisions from politics, congressional aides and current and former employees familiar with the issue said.

Yes – it makes America much stronger to leave 100 percent of decision-making in voting cases to elected officials and their appointees, without soliciting the advice of career voting enforcement people. (via)

Key Republicans yesterday called for a cease-fire on political attacks over the war in Iraq, which they say will weaken national security.

Too late. “Key Republicans” mis-reacting to 9/11 already have weakened national security and strengthened al Qaeda – by invading Iraq. Now is the time to unite the parties and the American people, declare victory, and leave.

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Oh. You mean like the Bible?

Two things have been the strength and backbone of this country’s breathtakingly rapid two-century rise from wilderness to unprecedented global dominance. The first is immigration, and the second is public and private respect for and support of scientific and technological development.

The historically unprecedented war on science by Bush (a/k/a, “the Weakener-in-Chief”) and his Congressional allies (a/k/a, “Weakentroopers”) is well-known. It’s an important part of the Weakener-in-Chief’s easy-to-see but hard-to-understand plan to run America aground. Also well known, and equally important to the effort to dilute America’s strength, is the drive to create a meek and powerless underclass by denying immigrants any sort of legal status. (Note that this is not the same as trying to prevent immigration, something the Weakentroopers have no interest in; they want the cheap labor, it’s just that they want to insure that immigrants never gain the rights and powers of citizenship.)

Here’s the latest effort to create a permanent immigrant underclass by circumventing the clear constitutional dictate that any baby born in the U.S. is an American citizen:

Now some conservatives are taking aim at that birthright.

They call the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants “anchor babies” because at age 18 the children can apply to bring other family members here from abroad, and a growing group of House Republicans wants to change the policy. They hope to add a provision to the immigration bill that the House of Representatives will consider next week that would deny citizenship to those children.

Little brown babies aren’t the anchor keeping America from forging ahead; that would be shortsighted scared white men who want to end the thrill and promise and strength of coming to America.

9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick:

“I think that we're less safe than we were 18 months ago,” she added. “We have a tremendous agenda and we have just not been about doing what we need to make us safe.” …

When the 9/11 commission released its report, it was met with “tremendous interest,” Gorelick said. Yet there was no follow through.

“You know, we have short memories,” Gorelick said. “The interest has faded. We’ve gone on to other issues.”

The irony and incompetence continues: every move the Weakener-in-Chief (a/k/a, “W”) makes ostensibly to fight terrorism and make this country safer, instead winds ups building terrorism and making this country dangerous and vulnerable.