Fool Me Once - Again?
by pessimist
Ever since Bu$hCo allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur to provide the PNAC 'new Pearl Harbor' [PDF] necessary to move the American people away from total somnambulence, 9/11 has been the totem of fear to be waved about as needed. Right now, with Bu$hCo approval polling falling faster than disposable income after a trip to the gas station, that totem has become very important:
Responding this week to growing public unrest about Iraq, and declining personal approval ratings, President Bush has revived an earlier strategy of linking the current war to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.White House spokesman Trent Duffy: The President has spoken continuously about the way he approaches this war, following September 11th, 2001. On September 14th, 2001, he stood at the National Cathedral and told all of America that this was going to be a very long and difficult war, and that there were going to be some very trying moments; but that because of what happened on 9/11, that we had to view the world in a different way.
And rising up to assist with this refocusing of our vision back then was the SCLM. There is some speculation that Bu$hCo will be 'asking' for the media's 'help' again.
President Bush and many of his vocal supporters aren't content to wrap themselves in the flag. It's not sufficient to posture as more patriotic than opponents of the Iraq war. The ultimate demagogic weapon is to exploit the memory of Sept. 11, 2001. And anniversaries of 9/11 are occasions when the White House ratchets up the spin."In the ruins of two towers, under a flag unfurled at the Pentagon, at the funerals of the lost, we have made a sacred promise to ourselves, and to the world," President Bush proclaimed on Sept. 11, 2002. "We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secure. What our enemies have begun, we will finish."
When the second anniversary came around, Bush went to Walter Reed Army Hospital and visited soldiers who -- in the words of one TV network -- were 'wounded in the war on terror, both in Afghanistan and Iraq'. "This afternoon, Laura and I are here to thank the brave souls who got wounded in the war on terror, people who are willing to sacrifice in order to make sure that attacks such as Sept. 11 don't happen again."
Last year, Sept. 11 fell on a Saturday, and the president's weekly radio address gained unusual visibility. Relatives of 9/11 victims surrounded Bush in the Oval Office as he made his little speech, which -- in the words of NBC News -- engaged in "linking the war on terror to the war in Iraq."
Next month, the fourth anniversary will provide the Bush administration with plenty of media opportunities to wrap itself in the 9/11 shroud and depict Iraq war critics as insufficiently committed to defending the United States. A renewed attempt to justify the war as a resolute stand against terrorism is well underway.
With routine assistance from news coverage, the Bush administration touts the U.S. war effort in Iraq as a legitimate response to what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. With the White House now desperate to shore up its sinking political fortunes, a vast amount of such propaganda is on the horizon.
P. M. Carpenter laments this sad state of Jeff Gannon-like media affairs:
As I recall it was Henry David Thoreau who protested the reading of newspapers not only because of their sensationalism, but because when it comes to actually understanding events, the exercise is ultimately futile. What Thoreau was describing was the paralysis of intellect ...'President Bush' - a two-word phrase that leaves one’s intellect paralyzed with wonder. And we never even got to the other incomprehensibles, such as Mr. Two-Word Phrase’s defense of 'his policy in Iraq', as though what he has is a policy, and what he’s doing could be defended.
What causes people to support a party that consistently acts in opposition to its stated principles? Why do millions vote against their economic self-interest? How was it that so many in a literate nation could willingly pull a lever in support of a blithering idiot? Indeed, bluntly but accurately asked Britain’s Daily Mirror on post-election day, “How can 59,017,382 million people be so dumb?” We’re still befuddled and likely to remain so. Five years of national psychoanalysis and reams of op-ed guesses and stacks of political science manuscripts haven’t helped one bit in closing the book on how 59 million people can be that dumb.
One Web pundit suggests that the Southern diet just might have something to do with their fat-headed support for King George!
Katrina vanden Heuvel thinks that this explanation also works for Dumbya:
In Texas, Bush has taken five weeks to cut brush. He mouths the same platitudes about freedom and democracy he was using three years ago. And he cross-trains. The President doesn't just need a plan to get us out of Iraq; he needs an intervention to get him back to planet Earth.In Iraq, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds are seriously debating if they really want to be a unified country, whether women will be treated as equal citizens and how much Islamic theocracy to put into the constitution. Outside the Green Zone, the Shiite militias are arming themselves for civil war, while American soldiers are dying at a faster and faster clip.
Bush's disengagement from reality is reaching the freakish level. In America, Republicans are abandoning his war as they face re-election in '06. Chuck Hagel compared Iraq to Vietnam. More than 60 percent of Americans think the invasion was a mistake, and we are not winning. And now the first Democratic senator, Russell Feingold, has broken ranks and called for a timeline for withdrawal.
There is something profoundly disturbing about the fact that the Commander in Chief is in better shape than his Army ...
On the other hand, some psychologists would claim that reality today is too overwhelming for some people, and that it is much easier for them to believe Bu$h's familiar platitudes than to deal with troubling world events. I tend to agree, considering that Americans have been manipulated very successfully through advertising for decades.
Whatever one thinks of Bu$hCo, its usage of the media has been masterful. While Bu$h himself is no genius, the same can't be said for every staff member, and I suspect that the response of the American people as a whole is largely going the way it is intended to go through the usage of incessant media manipulation.
Billmon asks the pertinent question: Is Anybody Listening?
Some stories are so obvious that I fool myself into thinking the facts will speak for themselves. I forget that we don't live in that kind of world any more (if we ever did) and that amensia is no longer just a chronic condition for the corporate media but also a willful one.
David Corn tends to agree:
Failure in Iraq? That's sure not what Bush has been talking about these past few days, as he tries once more to rally popular support for the war. Once more, Bush is peddling a comic-book depiction of the conflict in Iraq: us versus the evil terrorists. Many analysts are already describing the war there as a civil war, as militia attacks increase. Bush, though, is immune to reality. I know that's no news flash. But as the gap continues to grow between Bush's "reality" and what's really occurring in Iraq, his warmed-over sales pitch is likely not to have much impact. He's dishing out the usual rhetoric, linking the invasion of Iraq to 9/11 and refusing to acknowledge the full basis of the bloody conflict in Iraq.
Consortium News offers an example of this willful amnesia:
While there have been violent strikes against the West, such as the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington, Islamic fundamentalists generally see their struggle as defensive.Bush also repeated some of his dubious assertions about the cause of Islamic terrorism. For instance, Bush said, “our enemies murder because they despise our freedom and our way of life,” though intelligence experts have long concluded that the dominant goal of al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists is to drive Western forces and influence out of the Middle East.
The enduring paradox of the Iraq War is that Bush and other U.S. leaders insist that the presence of U.S. troops is necessary to bring political stability to Iraq, yet it is the presence of those U.S. troops that has become the driving force for both foreign jihadists and Iraqi insurgents to continue inflicting havoc across Iraq.Without the American presence to incite young Muslims to strap on suicide belts, the foreign terrorist operations in Iraq might shrivel. Even the Iraqi Sunnis, whose anti-American interests now overlap with those of the foreign jihadists, might have little stomach for the civilian-butchering jihadists if the Americans were gone. The Sunnis might well revert to Hussein’s approach of ruthlessly repressing Islamic extremists.
Some observers see the current dynamic as a vicious cycle – an escalating pattern of tit-for-tat violence with both sides nursing grievances bathed in blood. More cynical analysts go further, seeing a symbiotic relationship in which Bush and bin-Laden – whether wittingly or not – serve each other’s political needs.
Among Muslims, bin-Laden and al-Qaeda have exploited their battle against the world’s superpower to transform themselves from a marginal – albeit dangerous – organization into an international force attracting thousands of recruits in the defense of Islam. At home, Bush and his right-wing allies have used the American fear of Islamic terrorism to consolidate political control.
For their part, al-Qaeda’s leaders get international standing as warriors for the faith – rather than their deserved notoriety as thugs killing innocents – while the Bush administration gets to reorganize the United States along the authoritarian lines of a nation at war.
And as anyone who has some knowledge of American history, nothing is better for profits than an extended period of war, so there is a financial incentive for Bu$hCo to follow paths that aggravate the situation in Iraq rather than settle the unrest. Norman Solomon thinks this is the plan:
The Bush administration may ratchet up the Iraq war. A big ongoing factor is that George W. Bush and his top aides seem to believe in red-white-and-blue violence with a fervor akin to religiosity. And even if more troops aren't readily available for duty in Iraq, huge supplies of aircraft and missiles are available to step up the killing from the air.
The first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence.
- George Will, column in the April 7, 2004 Washington Post
It matters why people are critical of the U.S. war effort in Iraq. If the main objections stem from disappointment that American forces are not winning, then the war makers in Washington retain the possibility of creating the illusion that they may yet find ways to make the war right. Criticism of the war because it isn't being won leaves the door open for the Bush administration to sell the claim that -- with enough resolve and better military tactics -- the war can be vindicated.It's time to close that door.
But before that door can be closed, the prop that holds it open has to be defined - and removed. The San Francisco Chronicle attempts to do so:
Our mission in Iraq has mutated
Some critics say President Bush has failed to define just what it is we're trying to do there, but he and his handlers have defined it over and over. The trouble is, just about everyone understands by now that they've been lying all along. So media questioners twist themselves into pretzels trying to figure out some polite way of asking them to tell the truth, just once.Instead of admitting they were mistaken or not telling the truth, they just make the old excuse inoperable. We're supposed to erase it from our memory banks the same way they erase it from their latest explanation. Bush and his aggressively incompetent collection of business-suited bunglers paid to think up some kind of mission are running out of any [explanations] that have even the slightest connection to reason or reality.
Those gangs of hardcore devotees who can't for the life of them spot any Bush mistakes are the folks Lincoln talked about when he said you can fool some of the people all of the time. They actually believe those of us who want the United States out of Iraq now are undermining our troops.
From the sad story this Gold Star Family has to relate, the people undermining our troops might be the military itself:
Every time the wound begins to heal at Ray and Diane Maida's house, something comes along to rub salt into it.First came news that their son, Mark Maida, a 22-year-old Army sergeant, was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb on May 26. To top it off, despite repeated efforts, Army officials failed to provide details of Mark's death. More than two months later, the Maidas finally got the details of his death, not from the Army, but from the Washington Post.
Then, a week after his death, the Army gave only hours' notice that the body would be arriving at Gen. Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, forcing the grieving family into a frantic scramble to retrieve it for a funeral two days later. Ray said an Army official even admitted, unofficially, that the Army lacked a proper protocol for dealing with the families of dead soldiers.
"They can take a $1 million missile and put it up some Iraqi's ass and they can't tell me what time my son's coming in?" Ray fumed.
(Photo by Mike DeVries/The Capital Times)
"This is why my son's dead, this total incompetence."
The last wound, they maintain, could have been averted if someone from the Army - someone who knew Mark and could tell them what happened - had called. "Mrs. Sheehan wants to talk to the president a second time," Ray said. "I just want to talk to a lowly officer in a company level command or a battalion level command."
Maybe Ray Maida should raise his sights to match Cindy Sheehan's. Wouldn't he like to ask George why his son had to die for a land which is suffering more sophisticated and boldly lethal attacks in order to protect a contentious process intended to create a constitution for Iraq - one which isn't popular with secular Iraqis? In fact, it is proving so unworthy of support that the Shi'a are very divided over allowing the Kurds autonomy, something the Kurds are willing to allow the Shi'a in return.
But the odd-men out, the Sunni, are the big losers under the Iraqi Federalism proposal, which may explain why Saddam's political party is growing in popularity with them.
Wasn't one of the Oil War goals the elimination of Ba'athist power in Iraq?
But I digress.
So far, Iraq looks like a costly failure for those who will look at the facts and not blindly accept Bu$hCo blather about staying the course:
The Trillion-Dollar War
Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce from 1999 to 2001, teaches budgeting and public finance at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
The human cost of the more than 2,000 American military personnel killed and 14,500 wounded so far in Iraq and Afghanistan is all too apparent.But the financial toll is still largely hidden from public view and, like the suffering of those who have lost loved ones, will persist long after the fighting is over. The cost goes well beyond the more than $250 billion already spent on military operations and reconstruction. Basic running costs of the current conflicts are $6 billion a month - a figure that reflects the Pentagon's unprecedented reliance on expensive private contractors.
Other factors keeping costs high include inducements for recruits and for military personnel serving second and third deployments, extra pay for reservists and members of the National Guard, as well as more than $2 billion a year in additional foreign aid to Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and others to reward their cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill for repairing and replacing military hardware is $20 billion a year, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office.
The United States currently pays more than $2 billion in disability claims per year for 159,000 veterans of the 1991 gulf war, even though that conflict lasted only five weeks, with 148 dead and 467 wounded. Even assuming that the 525,000 American troops who have so far served in Iraq and Afghanistan will require treatment only on the same scale as their predecessors from the gulf war, these payments are likely to run at $7 billion a year for the next 45 years.All of this spending will need to be financed by adding to the federal debt. Extra interest payments will total $200 billion or more even if the borrowing is repaid quickly. Conflict in the Middle East has also played a part in doubling the price of oil from $30 a barrel just prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to $60 a barrel today. Each $5 increase in the price of oil reduces our national income by about $17 billion a year.
This is over and above the $8.18 trillion national debt ceiling. Per capita, this is more than $25,300 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
How does it feel to know that everyone in America could soon owe much more than $36,600 - EACH - for the excesses of George Bu$h and the BFEE/PNAC Petroleum Pirate Posse?
This has to stop.
Who Will Say 'No More'?
By Gary Hart
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
History will deal with George W. Bush and the neoconservatives who misled a mighty nation into a flawed war that is draining the finest military in the world, diverting Guard and reserve forces that should be on the front line of homeland defense, shredding international alliances that prevailed in two world wars and the Cold War, accumulating staggering deficits, misdirecting revenue from education to rebuilding Iraqi buildings we've blown up, and weakening America's national security.But what will history say about an opposition party that stands silent while all this goes on? To stay silent during such a crisis, and particularly to harbor the thought that the administration's misfortune is the Democrats' fortune, is cowardly.
The real defeatists today are not those protesting the war. The real defeatists are those in power and their silent supporters in the opposition party who are reduced to repeating "Stay the course" even when the course, whatever it now is, is light years away from the one originally undertaken.
At stake is not just the leadership of the Democratic Party and the nation but our nation's honor, our nobility and our principles. The truth is we're way off course. We've stumbled into a hornet's nest. We've weakened ourselves at home and in the world. We are less secure today than before this war began.
Who now has the courage to say this?
Apparently not the DLC!
DLC helps spread claim that 'progressives destroyed America'
There is no case to be made that any non-right-wing lunatic should take part in an event at the fringe-conservative Heritage Foundation entitled "Did the Progressives Destroy America?" It is an event designed to perpetuate among the Washington, D.C. insider establishment the worst right-wing dishonesty. Any participation by our side helps legitimize this nonsense.Yet, incredibly, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is headlining the event.
That's right, Will Marshall - President of the DLC's Orwellian-labeled "Progressive Policy Institute" - is lending his name to the event and taking part. I guess we shouldn't be surprised - this is the same Will Marshall who calls Iraq War critics 'anti-American'.
Since Hillary is sucking up to the DLC to support her campaign to achieve her life's ambition - the Presidency - can any progressive ever give serious thought to supporting her candidacy?
I hope not.
But I digress.
Hillary isn't the topic of this post, King George is - and he's breaking the bank with his credit card crude conflict. Ted Rall thinks that this war should be paid for by those who support it:
It's not my duty to suffer for this pointless war. I've been against it all along, and you can stick your victory garden where the desert sun can't penetrate.David Hendrickson, a scholar at Colorado College, tells the New York Times: "Bush understands that the support of the public for war - especially the war in Iraq - is conditioned on demanding little of the public."
Sacrifice is a hard sell down here among the citizenry when we don't see it starting where it should start, among our leaders. Northwestern University professor Charles Moskos says: "The political leaders are afraid to ask the public for any real sacrifice, which doesn't speak too highly of the citizenry."To which I say: Screw that.
I'm already sacrificing too much for a war I always believed was stupid and wrong.
* I'm paying three dollars a gallon for buck-fifty gas and walking through gauntlets of over-armed National Guardboys at airports and bus stations.
* I'm in greater danger than ever before of getting blown up by a pissed-off fanatic.
* And I dread the giant tax hike we'll eventually need to pay off Bush's deficit.
But these aren't enough sacrifices for Bush and his vainglorious generals, who are planning "a Civilian Reserve, a sort of Peace Corps for professionals ... a program to seek commitments from bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, electricians, plumbers and solid-waste disposal experts to deploy to conflict zones for months at a time on reconstruction assignments, to relieve pressure on the military."
If you voted for Bush, here's your chance to plant your butt where your ridiculous car magnet is, smack dab in the middle of the Sunni Triangle. Good luck.
Let's hope they take their equally ridiculous gas-guzzling SUVs with them. But if they don't already have one, George is promoting additional vehicles made larger and even more fuel-inefficient than even the Hummer H1. I'm sure he'll give them a great deal! After all - Moody's lowered GM and Ford bond ratings to junk status. They are going to need all the cash they can raise - maybe by offering models at the executive discount rate instead of that lame deduction offered mere employees?
On The Road To Pray-toria
Reality-based observers see things that Red Staters choose not to even look at because it doesn't match the dream being sold dearly to them. [A Venezuelan example of this willful blindness can be read here.] They, like their C-Average Sovereign, aren't going to know that there is a historical precedent for our current predicament:
The US is reeling, like imperial Britain after the Boer war
If you want to know what London was like in 1905, come to Washington in 2005. Imperial gravitas and massive self-importance. And yet, gnawing away beneath the surface, the nagging fear that your global supremacy is not half so secure as you would wish.In the British case, the angst was a result of the unexpectedly protracted, bloody and costly Boer war, in which a small group of foreign insurgents defied the mightiest military the world had seen; concern about the rising economic power of Germany and the United States; and a combination of imperial overstretch with socio-economic problems at home.
In the American case, it's a result of the unexpectedly protracted, bloody and costly Iraq war, in which a small group of foreign insurgents defies the mightiest military the world has seen; concern about the rising economic power of China and India; and a combination of imperial overstretch with socio-economic problems at home.
Remember that after the British had declared the end of major combat operations in the summer of 1900, the Boers launched a campaign of guerrilla warfare that kept British troops on the run for another two years. The British won only by a ruthlessness of which, I'm glad to say, the democratic, squeamish and still basically anti-colonialist United States appears incapable. In the end, the British had 450,000 British and colonial troops there (compared with some 150,000 US troops in Iraq), and herded roughly a quarter of the Boer population into concentration camps, where many died.
Iraq is America's Boer war.
None of this is to suggest that the United States will decline and fall tomorrow. Far from it. The United States, like Edwardian Britain, still has formidable resources of economic, technological and military power, cultural attractiveness and, not least, the will to stay on top. As one British music hall ditty at that time proclaimed:
And we mean to be top dog still.
Bow-wow.
Yes, we mean to be top dog still.You don't have to go very far to hear that refrain in Washington today. The Bush administration's national security strategy makes no bones about the goal of maintaining military supremacy.
China and India are to the United States today what Germany and America were to Britain a hundred years ago. China is now the world's second largest energy consumer, after the United States. It also has the world's second largest foreign currency reserves, after Japan and followed by Taiwan, South Korea and India. The Chinese go around the world quietly signing big oil supply deals with any oil-producing country they can find, however nasty its politics, including Sudan and Iran.If you are, by any chance, of that persuasion that would instinctively find this a cause for rejoicing, pause for a moment to consider two things: first, that major shifts of power between rising and falling great powers have usually been accompanied by major wars; and second, that the next top dog could be a lot worse.
The first point bears a bit of closer inspection. The country America Still Loves To Loathe - Japan - initiated the Pacific War with their attack on Pearl Harbor expressly to eliminate the American naval threat to Japanese initiatives to take by force much-needed oil supplies from the Dutch East Indies. Their country had been slapped with an embargo of strategic commodities, such as oil, in an effort to end their invasion of China - which was intended to be an economic colony for Japanese exploitation as the American Occupation of Iraq is to be. China has been relatively belligerent lately, making threats of atomic attack and forming military alliances with Russia and Iran.
Thus, in an effort to avoid World War Three, I would heed this warning:
So this is no time for schadenfreude. It's a time for critical solidarity.A few far-sighted people in Washington are beginning to formulate a long-term American strategy of trying to create an international order that would protect the interests of liberal democracies even when American hyperpower has faded; and to encourage rising powers such as India and China to sign up to such an order. That is exactly what today's [America] should be doing, and we should help him do it.
To paraphrase the old saying, the world helps those who help themselves. We will need to ask our wrong-wing friends to consider the following nightmare (for them) scenario and put themselves in our shoes for the good of our nation:
Imagine ... what if it's November 2008, and Hillary Clinton has just won the presidential election? (Calm down there, Red. Remember, it's only make-believe.)
Yes, Clinton won, but only after another bruising, vicious campaign season that divided the country into screaming opposites, and only after a another squeaker at the polls. It was a close 'un, I tell you. And in one or two of those states with a pivotal role in the Electoral College, it could have gone either way, depending on ... say ... that ice storm in Cincinnati, or those lost ballots in Orlando.But by midnight on the West Coast, the Republican candidate had graciously conceded defeat and Hillary was giving credit for her victory to a massive turnout of Unitarians and Scientologists. Tom Delay and Bill Frist issued a joint statement saying, "The American people have spoken, and it is now our duty to put the rancor behind us and cooperate with the new president." (I realize some of this may be hard to imagine. But look, it's easier to swallow than the notion we'll be done in Iraq anytime soon, isn't it?)
So the wheels were greased for a smooth transition of power. Only, in the days and weeks since the election, accounts have been pouring out of the suburbs of Cincinnati and Columbus, Toledo and Cleveland and Dayton, that indicate there was something fishy about the way the election was run. There are reports of persistent and unexplained voting machine malfunctions in dozens of Ohio precincts, and in several rural counties, warehouses full of the machines were not even deployed, leaving citizens in those areas to stand in line for hours to cast their ballots. Every county, every precinct, and every polling place with a suspicious story to tell were in areas known to be most heavily populated with Republicans. Very odd, don't you think?
Then there were those crazy exit polls, every one of which put President Clinton's opponent ahead by substantial margins early in the day, and every one of which proved wrong. Curiouser and curiouser. How could it be that every last darn thing that went wrong, went wrong in Clinton's favor?
Finally, the doubts accumulated to such a degree that Congressional Republicans demanded an investigation, and what they found was disturbing, indeed. Fraudulent and illegal pre-election maneuvering, a concentrated effort to disenfranchise voters in GOP neighborhoods, an insidious scheme to keep reporters and other observers away from polling stations ... to sum it up, the inquiry led the House committee to the conclusion there were "massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies." And most of these anomalies seemed to center on the Ohio secretary of state, who-what a surprise-also served as the co-chair for Ms. Clinton's Ohio campaign committee.
Trouble is, nobody but the most ardent Republicans paid any attention. Democrats ridiculed the whole thing, calling the findings "laughable, if it weren't so sad," and pundits dismissed it all as the ravings of the "looney right." The so-called "fair and balanced" media buried the affair, all except for CBS (sic) anchor Katy Couric, who joked about the complainers being "totally divorced from reality ... duh!"
But for all purposes, the deed was done and the message was apparent to anyone who cared: Whether Clinton was aware of it or not, it has become clear that powerful figures in the Democratic Party set about systematically to steal the 2008 election. And it appears they got away with it.
That's it, Republicans. You can open your eyes now. Story's over. And please, feel free to tell me how you feel.Outraged, perhaps? That such a thing is even conceivable? That after 230 years of America being the beacon on the hill, the bright and shining light to all those down-trodden fledgling democracies around the world, a cabal of self-serving criminals could so easily turn our election process into an unsolved crime scene?
I'll bet you're even thinking that if such a thing were to happen, it would be time to get those citizen militias kicked up another notch. That somebody - probably a lot of somebodies - should hang. If such a thing were to happen, I mean. That this foul betrayal is the highest treason a democracy can suffer, and that if justice is not served, maybe a little civil war is in order to set things right ... if such a thing were to happen.
By the way, if you truly give a damn about America like you pretend you do, Mark Miller's article is in this month's Harper's, so you don't have to wait until 2009 to get outraged. He ends with this: "This nation can survive a plot to hijack an election. What it cannot survive is our indifference to, or unawareness of, the evidence that such a plot has succeeded."
Oh, and the article is not about the future - and it's not about Hillary.
I have already stated publically on this blog that I cannot support a Hillary Clinton candidacy, so let's not go there.
The issue that I do want to discuss in the comments is the future survival of our nation is severely threatened by the incompetence of Bu$hCo's men running the Oil War. The only possible way to stop them soon would be to change the makeup of the Congress in 2006. But there is an impediment - single-party government. To continue to allow single-party government, aided and abetted by the criminal subversion of honest elections by that single-party government, threatens our freedoms far more than anything else. That was the real topic presented above, using Hillary to get your attention.
You claim to love your country? Prove it. Do something to save it from its domestic enemies - just as you rant about others taking action to save it (and you) from the foreign ones.
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