A sad remembrance

Has it really been two weeks since I last wrote?

Well, obviously, it has. No excuses. I've been reading, not writing. More on that later.

For now, here's a Memorial Day obituary for a dear, departed friend. All those we Americans commemorate at this time every year gave their lives in his defense. Sadly, it now appears they may all have died in vain. His name, of course, was Freedom.

Partridge: Democrats "Missing in Action"

Ernest Partridge, coeditor of the Crisis Papers, writes in a scathing indictment of the Democratic Do-nothings:

The Democratic party has at its disposal a devastating array of issues, foreign and domestic, moral and economic, and yet there it sits, at best dumb-frozen and impotent, and at worst complicit in the crimes and outrages of the Bush Administration....

The Democrats lack media access and an opulent campaign fund. But they have the issues, and with the issues alone, the Democrats have been dealt a winning hand. Even so, the GOP bluffs, the Democrats fold, and the country accelerates in its rush to disaster.

America is perhaps in worse need of true leadership today than at any time in history. We need Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans to wake up, recognize the peril facing us, unite, and reclaim our government and our way of life. Partridge provides some good suggestions as to how it can be done--but it must be done soon, before the Bush League can finish what they have started: the process of dismantling our Constitution and seizing absolute power.

WMD search team leaving empty-handed

Funny, didn't the Bush League tell us the search for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was just beginning? The President himself said on board the Abraham Lincoln that there were "hundreds of sites" yet to be investigated, and even Dubya wouldn't dare lie to the world while standing on the deck of a vessel named for Honest Abe, would he? Then on May 7, a Rumsfeld underling said only 70 of about 600 sites had been searched.

Yet the Washington Post reported Sunday that sources inside the 75th Exploitation task Force, the guts of the US weapns search team, say they're packing it in next month. They haven't found anything, and they don't expect to find anything. "Why are we doing any planned targets?" one officer asks. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."

The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are drawing down their weapons staffs for lack of work, and adding expertise for other missions.

Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.

This has to be especially disappointing for the Bush League and their apologists because not only was their forged "proof" that Saddam possessed WMDs crucial in getting Congressional and international support for the invasion, it was essential to the thin veneer of legitimacy that supposedly distinguished the campaign from what it appears now to have been all along: a war of naked aggression.

But seriously...

This really does explain a lot. Writing in CounterPunch, Sam Hamond and Elaine Cassel describe a familiar pattern of reformed alcoholics, in which the abstaining addict finds a substitute trigger for the dopamine surge that he used to get through substance abuse.

Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, according to neuroscientists. Bush's brain was changed by his substance use. And his brain did not return to its "normal" or predrinking state after he stopped drinking. Proof positive of that is that he is showing signs of a new addiction--an addiction to power. (See Katherine Van Wormer's prescient piece in CounterPunch: Dry Drunk Syndrome and George W. Bush , from October, 2002.)

He has gone from being a drunk, to being drunk on power. Iraq, rather than cooling his addiction, fueled it. As he said on the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln, off the "perilous" coast of San Diego, "This is but ONE victory." He implied there will be more victories; thus, he will need more conquests to feed this new addiction to power.

Wormer's earlier piece is also worth reading. Analyzing Bush's speech patterns, she finds many traits common to "dry drunks," AA slang for alcoholics who have stopped drinking but still exhibit the thought patterns of the addicted.

It was when I started noticing the extreme language that colored President Bush's speeches that I began to wonder. First there were the terms--"crusade" and "infinite justice" that were later withdrawn. Next came "evil doers," "axis of evil," and "regime change", terms that have almost become clichés in the mass media. Something about the polarized thinking and the obsessive repetition reminded me of many of the recovering alcoholics/addicts I had treated....

Wormer, in turn, was building on Alan Bisbort's September, 2002 essay in American Politics Journal, "Dry Drunk: is Bush making a cry for help?"

Whether George W. Bush is or was an alcoholic is not the point here. I am taking him at his word that he stopped what he termed "heavy drinking" in 1986, at age 40. The point here is that, based on Bush's recent behavior, he could very well be a "dry drunk." Of course, he may just be an immature bully who will gladly sacrifice thousands of lives to get his way even against the advice of the most respected and mature members of his own party....

Bisbort and Wormer wrote their essays during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq--but Bush's pattern of "stinking thinking" continues today, as long-time allies abroad and loyal Americans at home who don't happen to share the Bush League's paranoid world view and grandiose schemes are vilified and demonized, and seemingly every issue is spun into a struggle between the Champions of Truth, Justice, and the American Way (the Bush League) and the unpatriotic and un-American agents of evil (anyone who dares disagree). Take for example Bush's recent pronouncements on the judicial confirmation process, which has approved his nominations at an unprecedented 98% rate. Suddenly it "is broken and it must be fixed for the good of the country," because a Democratic filibuster threatens the confirmations of two controversial, right-wing nominees.

As Bisbort points out, Congress--and the media, and the American public--are acting as "enablers" by tolerating or ignoring Bush's pathological behavior when not supporting it outright. An out-of-control addict needs intervention. It's past time we intervened. We need, in Bisbort's words, to "demand more than temper tantrums and pouting from the Commander in Chief...before it's too late and a dry drunk's dream of glory becomes our national nightmare."

The question is, with his party in control of both houses of Congress, and showing no signs of anything but rubber-stamp approval of his megalomaniacal excesses, who can effectively make such demands?

So much for nuclear disarmament

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Paul Richter says the Bush League is on the way to developing a new generation of nukes.

The annual defense authorization bill recently passed by the Senate Armed Services committee removes prohibitions on testing small nuclear weapons that has stood for ten years, and also authorizes development of a nuclear "bunker buster."

Unlike the proposed low-yield bombs, which have an explosive force of no more than 5 kilotons--five thousand tons of TNT--this weapon would have yields in the range of tens of kilotons, to a megaton, making it at least six times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

It would be intended to generate shock waves that could crush targets 300 meters below the earth, experts say. Critics contend the fallout would cover such a wide area and cause so many casualties that presidents would be reluctant to order its use.

Of such stuff is the Bush League's' Pax Americana made.

Asking the wrong Jesus

This explains a lot.

'A Troubling Speech'

Here is what the watchdog press ought to be saying about Dubya's antics on board the Abraham Lincoln.

President Bush's address to the American people announcing combat victory in Iraq deserved to be marked with solemnity, not extravagance; with gratitude to God, not self-congratulatory gestures. American blood has been shed on foreign soil in defense of the President's policies. This is not some made-for-TV backdrop for a campaign commercial. This is real life, and real lives have been lost. To me, it is an affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq for the President to exploit the trappings of war for the momentary spectacle of a speech. I do not begrudge his salute to America's warriors aboard the carrier Lincoln, for they have performed bravely and skillfully, as have their countrymen still in Iraq, but I do question the motives of a deskbound President who assumes the garb of a warrior for the purposes of a speech.

Debunking the myth of the liberal media

Eric Zorn, writing in the Chicago Tribune,says the media went AWOL in ignoring the hypocrisy of George W's flight suit-clad grandstanding last week, but notes that it's nothing new. Cowed by right-wing cries of "liberal media," they have given the Bush League a pass from before Day One:

"If he is elected president, how will he be able to deal as commander in chief with someone who goes AWOL, when he did the same thing?" Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey said to the Boston Globe, where veteran investigative reporter Walter V. Robinson, a former Army intelligence officer, wrote several major stories on the subject. "This stinks."

Yes, but like Bush at the end of his hitch, it didn't fly. A search of all news publications and programs archived in the LexisNexis database for the last seven months of the 2000 campaign found 114 stories referencing Bush, the Texas Air National Guard and Alabama. Over that same span, nearly 10 times that many stories--1,076 to be exact--referenced Al Gore and the expression "invented the internet," an allusion to the bogus charge then haunting Gore that he had wildly inflated his role in the online revolution.

The gift that keeps on giving

What part of this does not constitute illegal use of weapons of mass destruction?

Bush's 9/11 trifecta: a lucky bet, or was the fix in again?

While the White House continues to stonewall efforts by Congress to get at the facts behind the security breakdown that resulted in the September 11, 2001, destruction of New York's World Trade Center...it is perhaps fitting to look back at this article by Brad Carlton, originally published on June 12, 2002 in the Baltimore Chronicle.

Bush, in the weeks before September 11, pledged to honor the sanctity of the Social Security lockbox except in the event of recession, war, or a national emergency. But after "everything changed" on 9/11, he reportedly gloated to his budget director, Mitch Daniels, "Lucky me--I hit the trifecta!" At the time, this comment (a variation of which is being recycled for laughs at current GOP fundraisers) seemed merely offensive. But in light of revelations that Bush's August 6 briefing memo was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.," Bush's "luck" and weird prescience are worth more than passing scrutiny.

The real 'Saving Private Lynch'

Not that the Bush League would lie to us (it's just a matter of emphasis, you know), but there are some doctors an nurses in a certain Iraqi hospital whose recollection of the daring rescue is a little different from what we heard at the time.

Of course you won't hear this story on Fox news or Clear Channel Radio, but you can read it in the Toronto Star:

Branded on to our consciousness by media frenzy, the flawless midnight rescue of 19-year-old Private First Class Jessica Lynch hardly bears repeating even a month after the fact.

Precision teams of U.S. Army Rangers and Navy Seals, acting on intelligence information and supported by four helicopter gunships, ended Lynch's nine-day Iraqi imprisonment in true Rambo style, raising America's spirits when it needed it most.

All Hollywood could ever hope to have in a movie was there in this extraordinary feat of rescue ? except, perhaps, the truth....

"A mean-spirited America: Today, I fear my own government more than I do terrorists"

MSNBC's Jill Nelson writes:

I do not feel safer now than I did six, or 12, or 24 months ago. In fact, I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am afraid of. In less than two years the Bush administration has used the attacks of 9/11 to manipulate our fear of terrorism and desire for revenge into a blank check to blatantly pursue imperialist objectives internationally and to begin the rollback of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and most of the advances of the 20th century.

Time: What about the weapons?

Even Time Magazine, which many on the left regard as a mouthpiece of the White House, is asking: whatever happened to those weapons of mass destruction?

After all, it was not for failing to topple a brutal dictator that U.S. officials chided the United Nations, but for failing to respond to an imminent WMD danger. To that end, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a detailed indictment of Iraq at the UN Security Council on February 5. But so far, little evidence has emerged to back up some of his allegations. Powell had warned, for example, that the Iraqi military had, last November, dispersed rocket launchers and warheads containing biological weapons to various locations in Western Iraq, where they were hidden in palm groves and moved every four weeks to avoid detection. None of these have yet been found. Nor have checks of some of the other locations mentioned by Powell in his presentation yet divulged any evidence. Other administration officials had said, prior to the U.S. advance on Baghdad, that Special Republican Guard units around the capital had been issued chemical weapons. Again, none have materialized, so far.

More and more, America's print media seem willing to acknowledge at least the possibility that the Bush League may have been less than completely honest with us. Somehow, though, the broadcast media still seem to parrot the party line.

Murder by land, lying by sea

Last night as George W. Bush preened and strutted and bragged that we can accomplish our military objectives without harming civilians, I was looking at photos of civilians lying dead in the streets of Al-Fallujah, gunned down by automatic weapons fire because a kid threw his shoe.

An eyewitness account by a reporter from London's Mirror describes the scene: "It started when a young boy hurled a sandal at a US jeep - it ended with two Iraqis dead and 16 seriously injured."

Bush's taxpayer-funded, self-congratulatory bloviation is so full of demonstrable lies that it takes an incredible feat of doublethink for anyone who knows the facts to swallow it. I hope the media don't let him get away with it again, as they have ignored his duplicity up to now.