Don't Expect Truth From McClellan

We won't be shelling out bucks for bullshit.

That's for sure. Maybe Cheney can buy several million of this BS book. He can afford them. But from what we understand, the little dough boy and Darth don't get along all that well.

Even little press secs. have an ego.

If the Democrats can't bring themselves to act on Bush and Cheney, all is lost for America.

Were I not already dying, I would be making plans to leave.

November 21, 2007

A Final Plea To Congress To Out This Accountability-Denying, National Security-Breaching, Justice-Obstructing Administration

Former Press Secretary Scott McClellan remains the master of Orwellian obfuscation, only these days for fun and profit.

The Bushies -- who now include a long and growing list of former acolytes, such as McClellan -- as well those constitutionally charged with overseeing their misdeeds, can't even do scandal in a traditional way. You'll recall during the Nixon administration there was a thing called the smoking gun -- guns, actually. We had real investigative committees grilling thoroughly corrupt insiders and getting to the actual truth. The guns blasted and smoked almost daily. Mistakes were made, indeed, but we got to the criminal bottom of each and every one, and before the chief perp left office.

(As much as we love you P.M., we simply must add a correction. If there is anything the last 40 years have taught us it should be that we didn't get anywhere near the unholy bottom of Nixon's crimes, nor will we now, get to the bottom of the Bush crimes, all of them, I and II. What's more; Nixon should not have been allowed to resign, thus avoiding trial by the Senate. How can the U.S. ever be trusted when we allow our criminals in high office to walk away?)

In a way, those were the days. As dark and squalid as they were, we nevertheless pulled ourselves out of the muck by exposing it to the clean light of day. And we did it by the book, which is to say, the U.S. Constitution.

Today? We see medals donned on the criminally incompetent. We witness internal promotions in repayment for the most despicable of on-the-job screw ups. We watch neocon nincompoops escape accountability and settle into cushy think-tank jobs. We get Congressional excuses and foot-dragging and table-offing.

And, we get memoirs -- those telling-all while saying-nothing memoirs, guaranteed to rake in the cash for the criminals, incompetents and nincompoops.

In April, we'll get Scott McClellan's: "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington."

Mr. McClellan probably does know much of what actually happened, but if you think he's about to tell us, think again. His publisher, PublicAffairs, will release 400 pages of little more than fog and shadows. That's what "Scottie" excels at generating; and that, of course, is the principal if not only reason he was Bush's spokesman. Clarity is the enemy of national betrayal.

His story on the Plame affair, no doubt, will stop where his publisher's teaser leaves off: "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so."

What the hell does that mean? Of course they "were involved" -- an inconsequential passive usage that fails to compete with even the just as inconsequential but at least more rhetorically ominous, "mistakes were made."

Note what he didn't write: "five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were directly and knowingly responsible for my doing so."

The latter may well be the case, but we won't read or hear it from Scottie. Indeed, he's already gone as far as he'll publicly go, without penalty of perjury. On the day Scooter Libby was convicted of just that, McClellan, who had long since left his White House podium, "made no suggestion" to CNN's Larry King "that Bush knew either Libby or Rove was involved in the leak. McClellan said his statements to reporters were what he and the president 'believed to be true at the time based on assurances that we were both given.'"

What's more, "In recent conversations and in his many public speaking engagements, McClellan has made it clear he retains great affection for the president." So don't count on anything more appearing in print, come April.

So when it does come to getting at the truth, what's missing? Think back to the Nixon days, and the missing piece looms large.

An aggressive Congress; one willing to take on a sitting president, to let the subpoenas fly and the investigators delve -- one willing to demand answers that travel beyond the obfuscating fog and arrive at the liberating truth. McClellan's "teaser" may in fact say little of authentic substance, but it does profoundly add to Congress' already plentiful cause for investigating obstruction of justice at the highest level.

I realize there are Democratic swing districts that might be endangered by an aggressive Congress, and that upholding the rule of law and enforcing constitutional imperatives pale in comparison to such electoral exigencies. But millions who retain some affection for the Constitution are beggin ya: Give it a go, anyway. You might be surprised at the public's reception -- a public that has had enough of this accountability-denying, national security-breaching, justice-obstructing administration.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Imeachment, then and now

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Bush impeachment polls more like Nixon than Clinton

In March 2006, the Wall Street Journal found that public support for impeaching President Bush was nearly twice the peak support for impeaching President Clinton. This was in spite of eight years of 24/7 scandal mongering and impeachment talk and an actual impeachment trial in Clinton's case, and a virtual news blackout on the grassroots movement to impeach Bush.

This got me wondering--what did Nixon's impeachment poll numbers look like when he resigned rather than face impeachment?



I searched the net a couple of times and couldn't find the relevant stats, so I had to go into the LA Times archives. It turns out that a day before Nixon resigned, his poll numbers were not that different from Bush's: 55% of Americans wanted him removed, and 64% thought there should at least be an impeachment trial in the Senate.

SOURCE: click to see full-sized

The earliest polls I could find nine months before that showed LESS support for impeaching Nixon than Bush. One poll showed the public divided on impeachment and the other solidly opposed. This was a week and a half after the "Saturday Night Massacre" when Nixon fired Justice Department officials until he found someone willing to fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, so the public had some idea of his wrong-doing.

click to see full-sized articles:

So how is it one president was impeached when most of the public didn't think it was necessary, one president ran out of office when a solid majority thought he should be impeached, but a third president with a similar majority in favor of impeachment remains untouched?

For a while, you could blame the media and Congress equally. The public clearly saw the laws, treaties, our constitution, and basic human decency being violated, but the media turned a blind eye or excused it, and Congress either ignored the crimes or retro-actively made them legal. The Democrats at least had the fig-leaf that they were not in control of Congress to hide behind for their inaction.

Now they do not.

Nor can they say that the media is entirely subservient to Bush since even a corporate boot-lick like Chris Matthews feels free to criticize Bush.

Even if the media were still entirely hostile, they would be obliged to cover impeachment proceedings, and when the offenses of the Bush administration were cataloged and described without Karl Rove or Fox News' spin support for impeachment would likely grow even greater.

The real issue of course is not whether impeachment will succeed or fail, or how popular it is, but whether Congress will represent us, whether we have a real democracy or just enough of a semblance of one to lull us to sleep, whether our most basic laws apply to all people including the most powerful, and whether this country belongs to all the American people or just the few that can afford to buy the friendship of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

And apparently, the friendship of most of our Congress, Democrat as well as Republican, is bought and paid for as well--and not by us.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Nixon Paved Way For Bush Debacle

No Shit, Sherlock!

The only thing the Republicans have learned from their past crimes is how to commit present crimes better; more efficiently.

No tapes...no stained blue dress (except the one we are all wearing, metaphorically speaking) no nothin'.

Until Bush and Cheney are tried and imprisoned, Republicans will learn nothing.

What is the chance of that happening, do you think?

Published on Monday, August 13, 2007 by the Baltimore Sun

Nixon Set the Stage for Bush’s Excesses

by Robyn Blumner

It was a matinee crowd. This was apparent by all the gray heads around, for those lucky enough to still have hair. And then there was that 10 minutes of disruption at the show’s beginning when stragglers were seated and the hard of hearing yelled to their companions, “Is this the right seat?” as the remainder of the audience shushed them loudly. So began the trip back to 1977, the year that British talk show host David Frost snagged 20 hours of interviews with disgraced President Richard M. Nixon.

The Broadway show Frost/Nixon (which closes Sunday, but watch out for the movie) is a wonderful exposition of how that interview came about and how it came off. Who would have thought that reliving the constitutional crimes of a president 30 years later would be so timely?

I had just turned 16 years old when the marathon interviews entered our living room. Mr. Nixon, I thought, would be the worst president in my lifetime. How could he not be? His list of offenses seemed endless: Sending young men and women to their deaths in a useless war, justified by cooked claims of impending victory. Getting the Internal Revenue Service to audit those on an enemies list of political opponents and uncooperative journalists. Asserting executive privilege in order to cover his own lawbreaking. Employing dirty tricks to gain and hold power.

It all was so beyond the pale, I naively thought that no American president would ever again come close to such official depravity.

Enter the boy king, George W. Bush, and his regent Dick Cheney, who have far surpassed Mr. Nixon on the dragging-America-down scale. This duo has beaten Mr. Nixon at every nefarious turn, from starting an unnecessary war on false premises, to stretching executive privilege to laughable lengths, to turning the Justice Department into a strategic operations unit of the Republican Party, to transforming the Constitution into a suggestion box. At least when Mr. Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, it was intended to actually clean the air, as opposed to Mr. Bush’s anti-environmental “Clear Skies” initiative.

Yet, in the fascinating way that history inexorably marches over expectations, Mr. Nixon’s presidency set the stage for the excesses of President Bush. It did so by radicalizing a young Nixon aide, Mr. Cheney. Unlike virtually everyone else, Mr. Cheney didn’t see Mr. Nixon’s tenure as an object lesson in the dangers of an imperial presidency. To him, it wasn’t Mr. Nixon’s acts but Congress’ response that was the problem. Laws like the War Powers Act resulted in constraints on executive power that were for Mr. Cheney a strike against the president’s realm of absolute authority.

This view was laid out bluntly when, as a congressman from Wyoming during the Iran-contra scandal, Mr. Cheney supported the actions of President Reagan in secretly selling arms to our enemy, Iran, for money sent to the Nicaraguan contras. It didn’t matter that these actions explicitly violated the Boland Amendment that barred U.S. assistance to the contras. Mr. Cheney didn’t think the law should get in the way of a president - a point of view he has amplified during his vice presidency.

So, in Frost/Nixon, when the gravelly voiced Frank Langella, playing Mr. Nixon, said the chilling line, “When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal,” the audience laughed. We weren’t laughing because it was funny in a “ha-ha” way but rather in a sick, gallows-humor way. The joke was on us, and we knew it.

The Frost interviews were an opportunity for Mr. Nixon to make amends, lay out his abuses of power and apologize for his misdeeds. That didn’t happen. Instead, Mr. Nixon hijacked the interviews with long-winded remembrances and walked away with more than $600,000 for participating - real money back then.

The play’s denouement suggests that the lightweight Mr. Frost triumphed by wangling an admission and apology from Mr. Nixon, who was confronted with Oval Office transcripts in which he discussed money to silence the Watergate burglars. But all Mr. Nixon really said about his complicity was that “a reasonable person could call that a cover-up,” adding quickly that “I didn’t intend it to cover up.” The “very deep regret” he offered was halfhearted and defensive at best.

Yet, I bet the Frost/Nixon grudging admission is far more than we’ll ever see from Bush/Cheney. The devastation they have wrought to the constitutional order will last generations. Still, it is likely that the only satisfaction we’ll ever get is to see Mr. Bush swagger out of office while his American audience holds its applause.

Robyn Blumner is a syndicated columnist. Her e-mail is blumner@sptimes.com.

© 2007 by The Baltimore Sun

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Another Time In The American Political Twilight Zone

Of Madmen and Mice.... (Rats?)

The odd couple, Kissinger and Nixon.........

By Evan Thomas
Newsweek

May 14, 2007 issue - Richard Nixon was nearing the end. It was Aug. 7, 1974, and the president had just told congressional leaders he planned to resign. Shortly after 6 p.m., Nixon's secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, found the chief executive sitting in the Oval Office, staring into the Rose Garden. The relationship between the men was, to say the least, ambivalent. As Kissinger was well aware, Nixon suspected him of self-aggrandizement. Kissinger, for his part, told reporters (privately, of course) that Nixon was a "madman." When, a few months earlier, the president called Kissinger and his new wife, Nancy Maginnes, on their honeymoon, Nixon offered perfunctory congratulations. Then he warned Kissinger's bride not to pick up poisonous snakes—and if bitten by one, to extract the venom quickly.

And yet Kissinger was moved by Nixon's misery. Though neither man was a hugger, Kissinger put an arm around the president's shoulder. The awkward embrace is an oddly touching scene in Robert Dallek's at once damning and partly forgiving pointillist portrait, "Nixon and Kissinger." The men aimed to be the most powerful foreign-policy duo since Harry Truman and his secretary of State, Dean Acheson; Nixon and Kissinger's global achievements nearly matched their ambitions.

Given the backbiting between them, however, it's amazing they accomplished anything. Dallek's book is part history of Great Men Aiming High—and a chronicle of astonishing pettiness. It is a reminder that human beings can behave at their worst while seeking to realize the noblest aspirations, and that the line between baseness and grandeur, love and hate, is fine.
A southern California Quaker, Nixon was shy. Kissinger, a former Harvard professor tied to the East Coast elite, fostered the improbable image of statesman and swinger. But both saw themselves as outsiders, and both were insecure. They shared an immense drive, and they knew how to play on each other's weaknesses. They were cynical about the conduct of foreign policy—and each other.

CONTINUED

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Bush is Dangerous

"Bush is very dangerous, because he's an unguided missile, he's a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can't change what he wants to do. He can't deviate from his policy, and that's frightening when somebody has as much power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as committed to democracy -- whatever that means -- as he is in the Mideast. I really do believe that's what drives him. That doesn't mean he's not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks democracy is the answer." -- Seymour Hersh, when asked if Bush is worse than Nixon, Link

(We agree that Junior is dangerous in the extreme, but we don't think that Bush has so much as a clue what Democracy is. Besides, it isn't Democracy he is interested in so much as free markets for his pals and contributors to the Rethug Party and capitalism on steroids.)

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers
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Is Cheney Having Late-night Talks With Nixon's Portrait

Peace with "honor":
Cheney channels Nixon, and the history of a disastrous promise

And I pledge to you tonight that the first priority foreign policy objective of our next Administration will be to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We shall not stop there. We need a policy to prevent more Vietnams.
-- Richard Nixon, accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Aug. 7, 1968.


They say that in Nixon's final days in the White House in 1974, the disgraced soon-to-be-ex-president roamed the hallways, talking to portraits of dead presidents. Frankly, you have to wonder if Dick Cheney is having an animated conversation with Nixon's portrait these days.

Cheney's long strange trip through American politics pretty much began in the Nixon White House in the early 1970s, and much of his public life seems like a crusade to avenge his misunderstood ex-boss. At the height of Watergate, he told friends it wasn't a scandal but "a power struggle," and as top aide to Nixon's successor Gerald Ford, he chafed so much at the post-Watergate restrictions on White House power that he honed his bizarre theory of an all-powerful unitary executive.

Those aren't the lessons that most Americans took away from the Nixon years, and yet they are shaping our nation's government some 33 years later. Even so, we never expected Cheney to look to Nixon for inspiration on handling the fiasco that is Iraq. Until now.

Check out the echoes of 1968 in what Cheney said earlier this week on his Asia junket:

"And I want you to know that the American people will not support a policy of retreat," he added. "We want to complete the mission, we want to get it done right, and we want to return with honor," said Cheney, who heads on Thursday for Australia to meet Prime Minister John Howard, another backer of Bush's Iraq policy.

It's an old line, but it's new to Cheney and the Bush White House. And if you know the history of Richard Nixon, you can see why the word "honor" is so important. You see, we all know what "war" looks like, and we all know what "peace" looks like. But "honor," well that is truly in the eye of the beholder.

For Richard Nixon, "peace with honor" was not synonymous with "peace."

It meant "war." A lot of war.

Not long after taking office in 1969, Nixon -- without authorization from Congress -- initiated a secret air campaign against enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia that dropped 2,750,000 short tons of bombs, more than the alllies used during all of World War II. He later undertook a massive bombing campaign of Hanoi and Haiphong, and his efforts didn't bring much peace on the homefront, culminating in the slaughter of four bystanders during a 1970 protest at Kent State.

Finally, in January 1973, Nixon declared "peace with honor."

There are three things you should know about this.

1) When Nixon gave that speech at the GOP convention, it had been 1,467 days since the alleged incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that triggered the American escalation of the war. When he finally achieved his "peace with honor," it was another 1,633 days later, so more than half the fighting came after the "peace with honor" promise.

2) More importantly, from the start of 1969 through the end of the war, some 20,604 American soldiers died in pursuit of "peace with honor," more than one-third of the total (58,202) for the entire war.

3) In the end, "peace with honor" didn't look all that different than "peace" -- i.e., if Nixon had merely brought the troops home on Jan. 20, 1969. As we all know, Saigon still fell, in May of 1975.

So now we have another White House saying that troops can come home from Iraq (one of those more "Vietnams" that Nixon pledged to prevent, by the way), but only if they do so with "honor." You can bet that means "honor" is an elusive target that won't be achieved in the next 23 months, until the next president takes office.

"Peace with honor," when sought through further bloodshed, is neither peaceful nor honorable. That makes sense, but not when Dick Cheney is too busy engaged in his dialogue with Dick Nixon's portrait.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.