Is our current Administartion insane, evil or

[speyfly]

I found this on another BB. A very intersesting read. Enjoy

IRAQ

Beyond Democratic Constraint?

It is hard to avoid the chilling conclusion that the corporate plutocrats and arch-imperialists in and around the Bush administration do not think they are required to speak or act with even moderate respect for the political intelligence and/or relevance of the citizenry. They believe that basic rules of evidence and democracy, which require justifications and debate rather than simply edicts from policymakers, offer little if any constraint on their actions and pronouncements. They think they have achieved something like the status of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. Big Brother never had to make real sense to his population, which was in no position to respond to the absurdity of his nonsensical pronouncements – War is Peace, Love is Hate, etc. – or to his constant manipulation of history to fit the current party line.

How else to explain the veritable flood of preposterous pronouncements and contradictory policies flowing with regularity out of the Bush administration?:

* The claim that it is in the interest of the American people to enact massive tax cuts for the rich that will do nothing to stimulate a sluggish wealth-top-heavy economy and will combine with massive “defense” expenditures to deepen the federal deficit and undercut desperately needed social expenditures.
* The claim that jetliner attacks carried out with box-cutters illustrates the need to spend untold billions on a fantastic and unworkable high-tech missile defense shield.
* The claim of the existence of a global “Axis of Evil” comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, three states with little basis (beyond common demonization by Uncle Sam) for mutual alliance and considerable difference and enmity between them.
* The truly fantastic claim that the Iraqi regime is a threat to send unmanned airplanes carrying chemical and biological weapons to the US.
* The claim to be seriously concerned about the human rights of Iraqi and other world citizens while the White House aggressively supports governments that inflict massive terror on subject and occupied peoples, including Columbia, Israel, Turkey, China and many others.
* The claim to be concerned for “democracy” and “freedom” around the world while deepening relationships with numerous authoritarian states in the name of the War on Terrorism and using 9-11 as a pretext to roll back cherished civil liberties at home.
* The claim to champion democracy while openly embracing the short lived oligarchic coup conducted last April against the popular elected and constitutional Chavez government of Venezuela – a state too friendly to the poor for the White House tastes.
* The claim to be grievously offended by the use of “special preferences” (race-based affirmative action at the University of Michigan) in college admissions even while Bush refuses to criticize the aristocratic legacy system that provided the only possible basis for his admission to Yale.

The list of Bush absurdities along these lines goes on and on.

Spinning Divergent Responses to “Evil Axis” Others

Perhaps the most relevant Big Lie currently rolling out of the White House spin factory relates to the nature and objectives of the Iraqi government. Here we have the neo-Stalinist North Korean regime of Kim Jung Il announcing its determination to significantly expand an already existing stock of nuclear weapons. A million North Korean troops have been placed on alert, ready to do battle with jackbooted enemies from what North Korean state television calls “the citadels of imperialism.” And here we have Iraq, still reeling from the first Persian Gulf “war” (a one-sided assault by world history’s most powerful military state) and a subsequent decade of deadly US-led sanctions. The second nation poses no serious military threat to its own neighbors, much less the West. United Nations inspectors under Bush’s sneering glare are hard pressed to find significant evidence that significant “weapons of mass destruction” are being manufactured and/or stored in the land of Saddam Hussein. They are reduced to reporting the discovery of empty containers, hardly a refutation of former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a former American military intelligence officer, who insists that Iraq has been effectively disarmed.

Bush’s response to the first threat is to put it on the back burner, promising diplomacy and negotiation, oiled by reassuring words that America does not seek to attack or invade. The White House response to the second situation is a full front-burner preparation of its awesome air-, land-, sea- and space-based military machine for another bloody assault on Iraq, followed by occupation and “reconstruction.”

How does the Bush administration explain such divergent responses to “Evil Axis” perfidy, especially when the threat posed by North Korea would appear to be so much greater? Kim Jong Il, the Bush administration tells us, is a “rational actor,” subject to constraint and deterrence. He can be argued with and persuaded. He is possessed of common sense and realism, a special instinct for survival and a sense of limits.

But Saddam, the White House insists, is no such animal. He is hopelessly reckless, driven and brutal. He simply cannot be deterred from acting on his bizarre and sinister determination to use weapons of mass destruction. If we let a lunatic like Saddam get nuclear weapons, the argument runs, it is certain that he will use them against us and our allies, either directly or by “handing them off” to al Qaeda or some other like-minded group. The likelihood that such an action would lead to his total annihilation is irrelevant, we are told. The failure to launch a preemptive war against this madman, we are instructed, will be written in mushroom clouds over our cities.

The proof, the White House argues, for this judgement is found in the record of Saddam’s thoroughly irrational, even “insane” past behavior. That historical record includes his attacks on Iran (1980) and Kuwait (1990), resulting in millions of Iraqi deaths, and the use of chemical weapons against “his own people” (the Kurds of northern Iraq) and Iranian soldiers.

The Real Saddam: Sinister, Yes; Suicidal, No

It’s a transparently manipulative and false historical argument whose primary purpose is to frighten the American people into war. A related goal is to divert the citizenry from the terrible shortcomings of domestic White House policies that exacerbate the growing social and economic insecurity of the population while distributing wealth and power upward.

The historical facts are clear. When Saddam started a war with Iran in 1980, he did so because that nation faced a very real and serious threat from a zealous revolutionary nation (Iran) that was aggressively pursuing hegemony throughout the Middle East. He fought a strictly limited war seeking a large protective swath of expanded border territory. He never pursued the conquest of Iran or the overthrow of its revolutionary leader Ayatolla Khomeni. His war was fought with the reasonable and realized expectation that other nations, including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and France, would offer considerable financial, diplomatic and technical support to stem the spread of Iran’s Islamic revolution.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, his goals were far from reckless. He sought, after years of fruitless diplomacy, to punish Kuwait for its refusal to write-off debts incurred in a war that arguably protected that nation’s oil fields from Iranian conquest. He was also responding in arguably rational, Machiavellian ways to Kuwait’s insistence on deflating world oil prices, reducing Iraqi profits, by producing beyond OPEC quotas. When he invaded, he weighed his options carefully, concluding that he had definite reason to expect US approval, thanks to a now famous communication from Bush I’s Ambassador to Iraq - April Glaspie. “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts,” Glaspie told Hussein, “like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Glaspie’s State Department had earlier told Saddam that it had “no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.”

Saddam proceeded, in short, on the assumption of a “green light” from Bush I. His invasion of Kuwait cannot be reasonably seen as proof of his non-deterrable nature since the US never attempted deterrence.

When the US responded with a devastating air campaign, Saddam communicated his willingness to retreat prior to the launching of a US ground war. But Bush I refused this option, unacceptably insisting that Saddam leave his military hardware behind in Kuwait. This impossible demand set the stage for an American massacre of Iraqi troops that is curiously deleted from the official record of “pathological” atrocities in the Middle East.

During the Persian Gulf “war,” which he curiously survived (contrary to White House doctrine on his “suicidal” nature), Hussein never used chemical or biological weapons against Israel, Saudi Arabia or the coalition forces that were pounding his military. He knew that using weapons of mass destruction would lead to his annihilation by the US. Hussein was also deterred by US troop mobilizations from efforts to change the inspection regime in 1994.

What about Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against “his own people” (if that’s what we really want to call the minority Kurdish population he has long terrorized) and Iranian soldiers during the 1980s? Those actions certainly indicate Saddam’s undeniable savagery, but they are not proof of his reckless and suicidal immunity to deterrence for two reasons. First, the people targeted were in no position to respond in kind. Second, Saddam gassed Kurds and Iranians with the support and assistance of the one country that happened and happens to possess the world’s largest stockpile of deterrent weapons chemical, nuclear and biological. That would be the United States. During the 1980s, in fact, the US assisted Saddam’s biological weapons program by providing him with American strains of anthrax, West Nile virus and botulinal toxin.

As for the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Saddam, there is no reason to think that he is willing to invite a devastating nuclear assault on Iraq and perhaps most significantly (for him) himself – the certain result of starting a nuclear war in the region. Also preposterous is the notion that Saddam would “handoff” nuclear weapons to historical blood enemies in al Qaeda or other extremist Islamic terror networks. The Bush administration’s abject failure to prove that Iraq is cooperating with al Qaeda is hardly surprising to any serious student of Middle Eastern politics.


The Homegrown Threat to Liberal Democracy

One does not have to be a radical critic of American imperialism to see through the transparent Orwellian absurdity of the White House’s line about the Iraqi regime’s non-deterrability. Even Thomas L. Friedman, the openly imperialist and Arab-baiting foreign policy columnist of the New York Times correctly noted today that Saddam is “a twisted dictator who is deterrable through conventional means” and “loves life more than he hates us.” More substantively, the counter-argument to Bush’s claims of Saddam’s reckless non-deterrability can be found in a recent article by two leading mainstream academics in the establishment journal Foreign Policy (John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “An Unnecessary War,” FP, January-February 2003). It can also be found, in greater detail, in Carl Kaysen et al, War With Iraq: Costs, Consequences and Alternatives (December 2002), produced by no less of a “respectable” organization than the Committee on International Security Studies of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

What’s missing in these very useful mainstream pieces is a broader framework in which to place and thereby understand the nature of the White House’s deception. For that, we must consider the balance of global petro-capitalist relations that provide the basis for America’s provocative presence in the Middle East in the first place. We should also consider the numerous domestic failures from which White House wishes to divert popular attention in the industrial world’s most unequal and incarceration-addicted nation – the “world’s most prosperous state,” where more than 45 million people lack basic health insurance.

Also recommended is an essay titled “The Orwell Diversion” (1986), written by the late Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey and included in his 1997 book Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty. In that essay and elsewhere, Carey argued that the most relevant long-term threat to liberal democracy has never come from the state totalitarians of the Stalinist left or the fascist right. It comes instead from the homegrown, big business-connected “Respectable Right” that arose within the liberal-democratic societies of the West (chiefly the US) largely to protect concentrated corporate power against its natural homeland antagonist - the popular democratic tradition.

More then fifteen years after Carey’s essay, the Soviet Union has joined **** Germany in history’s proverbial dustbin and the last classic 1984-style regime (if such a thing has ever existed) bangs its little nuclear drum for global food assistance in North Korea. Meanwhile, a homegrown version of Big Brother stalks the corridors of domestic and imperial power in Washington D.C., wearing the uniform of the Respectable Right. He is deeply enabled by a corporate communications and entertainment empire that combines Huxley with Orwell to muddy the waters of popular perception in ways that modern red- and brown-fascist state-totalitarians could only dream about. He is ineluctably if perhaps unconsciously drawn to the wisdom of Orwell’s chilling axiom: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Street (pstreet@cul-chicago.org ) is a political essayist and social policy critic in Chicago, Illinois.

[HOGTIDE]

Are you sure this wasn't penned by a man named Zaher Wahab? He was one of my college professors. An extreme radical socialist, ol' Zaher could incorporate intellectual-speak, with political spin and misrepresentation to confuse any issue to the point that you believed he must be right...simply by the virtue of his eloquence.

Zaher was a bannished Pakistani who dispised everything patriotic America stood for, and found an evil profit oriented agenda in every foreign policy move our country made. Strangley enough, Zaher proudly walked around Lewis & Clark college collecting a 6 figure salary in US dollars and working about 15 hours a week.

It must be exciting to sit on the sidelines and play the role of the 'trendy' accuser! I don't think i care for Paul Street.

[GutshotApe]

Me either.

[Boedy]

I haven’t seen that much spin and down right fabrications since Bill Clinton left office.
The author did everything but call Saddam a misunderstood saint. You sure he isn’t some Iraqi just pumping up you left wing conspiracy nuts out here?

I think you may have just copied it from the Baghdad Times editorial page. The way I they justified the killing of 2 million people as a misunderstanding was classic Iraqi spin.

[HeavyMetal BankFisherman]

Don't think i'll get started on a reply to this. Obviously. :depressed:

[skein]

[img]graemlins/lurk.gif[/img]



Was there anything else you wanted me to add?

Skein

[1pump]

I was gonna take that with a grain of salt, but forget it. I'm going down to the feed store and get a whole lick.
I lean a little to the left, but that was ludicrous. I thought I was reading Pravda for a minute. The part about Saddam's motives for invading Kuwait was accurate, but rest of that was tripe.

[ 01-25-2003, 09:50 PM: Message edited by: 1pump ]

[blacktail]

Total hogwash!

Mike

[Thumper]

Kinda sorry to see Speyfly post this. Sort of spoils the intellectual challenge. Do you really buy this, Speyfly???

[RichH]

Of course the current administration is evil. And Santa Claus is really Satan living in the north pole, surrounded by his friends the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. :tongue:

[Joe Schwab]

You mean to tell me that Saddam is really the good guy in all this? Dang I had that guy all wrong. Makes me want to just find him and give him a great big hug.

One, two, three, let's all hear it for ------- NOT!!!!

[ 01-26-2003, 08:50 AM: Message edited by: Capt. Hook ]

[SLEDDER]

Some people have no gray matter in thier skulls. Sadam is

[speyfly]

Hey Thumper. I said that it was an interesting read, not that I believed it. I will tell you this. I believe this just as much as much as the crap the White House and the Neo-Conservatives in Washington are spewing. Every sound bite I read and hear are the talking points put out by the right. Here is some info that I do believe that was written by informed and Patriotic Americans just like you and I.

It was a bad week for the Bush administration, and it's likely to get worse. The American people are beginning to understand the folly and greed that inform its economic policy. And most of the civilized world has turned decisively against the Iraqi adventure. The great coalition that George W. Bush proposes to lead against Saddam Hussein is now a coalition of two, and British prime minister Tony Blair has lost the support of his own people, most especially members of his own Labor Party, who warn of a political revolt if Britain goes to war without a new UN resolution.

In France, 75 percent oppose Bush's policy; in Germany the number is 76, in Italy it's 61. In Turkey, a country crucial to the Administration's military effort, opposition to the war, according to the Wall Street Journal, registers at between 80 and 90 percent.

Even the Journal is wondering what's up. As staff reporter Gerald F. Seib wrote on Jan. 22, "President Bush's policy toward Iraq is in distress, and the reason is stunningly simple: His administration hasn't made a very effective public case for war with Saddam Hussein."

In the United States, confidence in the Bush Administration is evaporating, and it's no wonder. Reality is out-running the rhetoric. The Administration has announced probable federal deficits of $200-300 billion over the next two years (which many experts conclude will be higher). While Bush proposes huge tax-breaks for the wealthy, the General Accounting Office says that social security faces tax increases and benefit cuts if it is to remain solvent.

Anticipating the coming deficits, the Administration has shamelessly cut veteran benefits to what it describes as higher-income veterans. In fact, the new cut-off applies not to wealthy veterans but to middle-class veterans with annual incomes of $30,000 to $35,000.

Many states are confronted with multi-billion dollar budget deficits and will have to raise taxes, most of which will fall on working people, the middle class and the poor. In an attempt to save money for the states, the Administration is moving to limit emergency room access to Medicaid patients; i.e., to senior citizens and low income families. Is there not a pattern emerging? Slash taxes for the rich, slash services for everyone else?

Bush introduced his plan to abolish the tax on stock dividends by saying "double taxation is wrong." But, as Daniel Altman wrote in the New York Times (1/21/03), "Corporate dividends "are not the only kind of income that is taxed twice. Other taxes create a double, triple or event quintuple burden. And unlike the double taxation of dividends, which mainly affects the wealthy, the burden of other forms of multiple taxation – sales taxes, import taxes, payroll taxes, among others – often falls most heavily on poorer Americans."

Yes! What Bush proposes is class war.

Utilizing a Reagan-era tax loophole that grants larger business deductions to pick-ups than it does to ordinary cars, the Bush Administration, according to the Times (1/21/03), would "increase by 50 percent or more the deductions that small-business owners can take on the biggest and most expensive sports utility vehicles and pickups."

Thus, if a small business owner buys a gas-guzzling (10-11 mpg) Hummer HI, with a list price of $102,581, he or she can deduct $75,000 from the price as a capital equipment deduction. A business that purchases a gas-efficient (45 mpg) Toyota Prius with a $20,500 sticker price, can't even deduct half of that cost, even with the $2,000 deduction the government is allowing for fuel-efficient vehicles included.

In a radio address on Jan. 18, Bush declared that his tax cuts would give 23 million small business owners an average tax cut of $2,042 a year." As New York Times economist Paul Krugman noted, an "average" is a meaningless figure. If one business owner gets a tax-break of $20,420 and nine business owners get nothing, the average tax-break is $2,042, as Bush has described it. The reality, however, as Krugman pointed out, is that most business owners will get less than $500 and about 5 million business owners will get nothing. Bush's promise of a tax windfall to help the economy is a sham. And the public is catching on.

A CNN-Time poll shows support for Bush down to 52 percent, just 1 percent higher than Bill Clinton's worst showing during the era of Monica Lewinsky. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll registers Bush's support at 54 percent, his handling of the economy at 44 percent and his handling of foreign policy at 51 percent. By more than two to one, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, Americans prefer more spending on education, health care and social security than a tax cut, which 61 percent correctly perceive as benefiting the wealthy. A dwindling majority still supports a war against Iraq, but only with U.N. backing and only after the weapon inspectors are given time to do their job.

Bush could take credit for getting the U.N. to focus on Iraq and effectively containing Saddam, but he seems to be intent on war. Faced with the European demand for diplomacy, Bush had a snit fit.

"This looks like a rerun of a bad movie and I'm not interested in watching it," he declared.

Those are not the words of a statesmen or a world leader. As an American, I am embarrassed. As more and more people are coming to understand, this isn't a movie we're watching. It's real life with real consequences, and many people are going to die. A war in Iraq risks destabilizing the Middle East, invites terrorist attacks against Americans all over the world, and will encourage politically motivated attacks on civil liberties here at home.

Bush is losing it. His composure, his "good-guy" image, the debate about economic policy, the sympathy and support of the international community and, as polls indicate, the backing of the American people.

Marty Jezer's books include The Dark Ages: Life in the U.S. 1945-1960. He writes from Brattleboro, Vermont and welcomes comments at mjez@sover.net

[GutshotApe]

This guy is full of it, too. :depressed:

[speyfly]

OK GSA, since you're such a smart guy please tell me what part of my last thread it is untrue, a lie or not factual?

[fishwhenican]

speyfly I'm not really all that concerned with what the socialist of Europe think. The French always seem to think that they can negogiate thier way out of every thing. The Germans tell you what you want to hear and then do something completly differrent.

I do not agree with many of Bush's policies, but as a general rule the "neo-conservatives" as well as the old -coservatives try to take fewer of our rights that the neo-liberals.

I support all Individual rights! Can you say the same?

[toonboater]

Why is it that a true conservative has a bent towards the isolationist position, at least along the lines of John Adams' admonition that we "not seek demons to destroy around the world" (paraphrase), unlike the Bush neoconservatives who are Wilsonian internationalists and who can get the country into a world of trouble. Bush's advisors are bad news....even more so because I don't think the man has the capacity for original thought.

I voted for Bush and am sorry I did.....not that I had a real alternative.

[Silver Hilton]

Fishw,

It matters what the European nations think, because if they and the UN don't agree with our approach, we're in this alone. That affects what the middle eastern nations think. If they don't support the war, then we don't have places to land the planes and base the troops. Turkey in particular is important, because if we can't use their bases our planes have to come from much further away, and our troops would have to come up from the south, adding several hundred miles to the attack front.

And that matters because the harder the war is, the more casualties we are likely to experience. Which means more mothers get a very sad message from our government, that their son won't be coming home.

[toonboater]

For those of you who are not out fishing or watching the SB, you might get a kick out of this little game called Gulf War II. While it does come from a liberal leaning web site, it has a hint of truth and may very well be prophetic. [img]graemlins/icon_argue.gif[/img]

http://www.idleworm.com/nws/2002/11/iraq.shtml

[speyfly]

toonboater, cute... I think that the scenario (game) just might come to pass.

[speyfly]

Come on GSA, don’t just spew rhetoric for the sake of it. Back up what you say. Oh! Wait one minute…. I understand, you can’t back it up. :tongue:

[GutshotApe]

OK, I give up.

George Bush is evil & insane.............Dick Cheney is evil & insane...............Colin Powell is evil & insane...............Condoleeza Rice is evil & insane.........................

NOT! :grin:

Sorry, don't have the time or energy to pick thru those screeds line by line. Some of the hard facts may be "correct" but the overall tone and slant is so extreme left that I don't have to give a detailed critique.

What do you guys want? Throw out Bush/Cheney et al. and insert Al Gore??

Right-wing talkshow host Michael Savage thinks liberal left-wingers are mentally ill suffering from a form of psychosis.......I wonder if he's right. :whazzup:

[speyfly]

Lets see........ How should I vote?

Idiot #1 Gore.
Idiot #2 Bush.

Hmmmmm....

I am truly sorry to say that I voted for Idiot #2. The one that is trashing our economy, taking the US into a unnesessary war and just bascially screwwing up on every front.

[Re:Play]

Did Patty Murry ( WA Senator) use the same info when she was telling a high school group that we need to look at all the things Saddam has provided for the people etc-----?

[GutshotApe]

Speyfly - Most of it. :tongue:

[BonkBonkBonk]

its pretty simple here
current US goverment, both left and right=corrupt, bad stupid ect...

anymore its socialist party a or socialist party b
the only real diffrence is how they will turn this country into a police state...

Bonk,
Sad but true. We need a electable 3rd party.

[Cool Texan]

Originally posted by speyfly:
Lets see........ How should I vote?

Idiot #1 Gore.
Idiot #2 Bush.

Hmmmmm....

I am truly sorry to say that I voted for Idiot #2. The one that is trashing our economy, taking the US into a unnesessary war and just bascially screwwing up on every front.

<font size="2" face="verdana,arial,helv">Spey...you really think the economy wouldnt be in a recession if someone other than Bush were in the White House?

It took Clinton 8 years to trash the economy. The CEO's and Directors commited their crimes under Janett Reno's watch.
And we had "No controlling legal authority"

[TheRogue]

Let's see....the administration constantly trashes(rightly so) Sadaam for ignoring the UN and all it's resolutions. GW rightly says that Sadaam must comply with these resolutions, or face punishment by the UN. [img]graemlins/applause.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/applause.gif[/img]

And then, the administration turns right around, and says the UN doesn't matter, and we will take out Sadaam by ourselves if we have to.

So, the UN is a good thing to be fully supported when it fits this administration's goals.....but when it doesn't jive, well, it's just a foolish group of unknowledge-able idiots that doesn't know what good for it??

Don't get to play the game that way anymore. What's going to be worse, 90% of the world ****ed at us, or one dictator in one backwards country, who we have bottled up right now, who we can take out at anytime we want?? I'd hate to find out, but we're going to real soon, that's for sure.

TR

TR,
What do you expect, he's a politician

[GutshotApe]

I hope nothing happens...and Bush & Co. have rounded up 3000 terrorist suspects to see that nothing does. But if terrorists (most likely aided by Iraq) set off a nuclear bomb in NYC, or a conventional bomb to spread radiation in DC, or unleash a coordinated chemical agent attack in the 25 largest US cities, or start a smallpox epidemic etc, etc...you doves are going to change your tunes, and pronto, I bet . You'll probably be criticizing Bush for being too slow to act!