Rex Regnant Sed Non Gubernat

It happens all the time.

If the antiwar movement takes on the Democrats for their bitter shortcomings a few liberals are bound to criticize us for not hounding Bush instead.

It doesn’t even have to be an election year to get the progressives fired up.

They just don’t seem to get it. “How can you attack the Democrats when we have such a bullet-proof administration ruling the roost in Washington,” somebody recently emailed me, “Don’t you have something better to do than write this trash?!”

Well, not really.

It’s too cold in upstate New York right now to do anything other than fume over the liberal villains in Washington.

“Why do I write about the putrid Democratic Party?” I responded, “I’ll tell you, there’s a reason this Republican administration is so damn bullet proof -- nobody from the opposition party is taking aim and pulling the trigger.”

And that’s why the Dems are just as culpable in all that has transpired since Bush took office in 2000.

They aren’t just a part of the problem -- the Democrats are the problem.

I mean, who is really all that surprised Bush and his boys wanted to conquer the Middle East, curtail civil liberties and rampage the environment?

Not me.

That’s just what unreasonable neo-cons do: they stomp out the little guy, kill off the weak and suffocate the voiceless.

They only care about the girth of their wallets and the number of scalps they can tack above their mantles.

The Democrats aren’t just letting the Republicans get away with murder, however, some of them are also reaping the benefits of the Bush wars.

We constantly hear about Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and how his ex-company is making bundles off US contracts in Iraq.

But what we don’t hear about is how Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband are also making tons of money off the “war on terror”.

The wishy-washy senator now claims Bush misled her leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

I don’t think she’s being honest with us though, there may have been other reasons she helped sell Bush’s lies.

According to The Center for Public Integrity, Senator Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum has racked in millions of dollars from Perini, a civil infrastructure construction company, of which the billionaire investor wheels 75 percent of the voting share.

In April 2003 the US Army Corps of Engineers dived out $500 million to Perini to provide services for Iraq’s central command.

A month earlier in March 2003, Perini was awarded $25 million to design and construct a facility to support the Afghan National Army near Kabul. And in March 2004, Perini was awarded a hefty contract worth up to $500 million for "electrical power distribution and transmission" in the southern Iraq.

Senator Feinstein, who sits on the Appropriations Committee as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence, is reaping the benefits of her husband’s investments.

The Democratic royal family recently purchased a 16.5 million dollar mansion in the flush Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.

It’s a disgusting display of war profiteering and the leading Democrat, just like Cheney, should be called out for her offense.

And that’s exactly why the Bush administration is so darn bullet-proof.

The Democratic leadership in Washington is just as crooked and just as callous. 

In a repeat of the calculated insults to the Arab world coming fast and furious these days, Democratic politicians, including putative presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, are raising a ruckus over a deal in which Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation, a U.K. company that manages the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami, and Philadelphia, would be acquired by Dubai Ports World, a Dubai-based international company that manages port facilities from London to Okinawa.

Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Bill Frist, have been quick to jump on the Arab-bashing bandwagon; Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama was the first to raise the "security" issue, ahead of even Hillary and the clueless Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who wants all "foreign-owned" companies barred from managing U.S. ports. (This presumably includes U.K.-based companies such as Peninsular, and others, which together dominate the international shipping and maritime industry.)

This outcry is phony from beginning to end, starting with the ostensible reasons for the alleged "security risk" involved in doing business with a company based in the Arab world.

Phony reason number one: Two of the hijackers were born in Dubai.

This is completely bonkers: Dubai is a city of over one million, a major financial and industrial center, and an increasingly popular international tourist attraction.

Because two Islamist nutballs were born there hardly makes it a terrorist hive.

Culturally, Dubai is the freest country in the Arab world.

That doesn't matter to the Arab-haters who are driving this campaign, however: in fact, it probably just emboldens them.

The reality is that there are U.S. troops in Dubai, over 1,000 of them, and the United Arab Emirates (of which Dubai is a part) is one of our staunchest allies in the region.

Indeed, Dubai is the one city in the Middle East that is the most like America in that it is a symbol – the symbol – of the Arab world's entry into modernity.

The architecture of Dubai is a vision of futurity, and there are few urban centers in the U.S. that are cleaner or safer.

Dubai a hotbed of radical Islamist agitation?

One would hardly think so, yet demagogues in both parties are now touting the factoid that the U.A.E. was one of three countries to grant diplomatic recognition to Afghanistan's Taliban government.

What they don't mention is that the other two were Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two pillars of U.S. military and economic interests in the region. Should we stop doing business with them, too?

Phony reason number two is that the 9/11 conspirators funneled money through Dubai-based banks.

But Dubai is the major financial nexus of the Arab world, and, indeed, is right up there with any city in the West in that regard: funds traveling from sources in the Middle East are more than likely to have come through the U.A.E. in some shape, form, or manner.

Targeting DP World on account of this is like embargoing Wal-Mart because the 9/11 hijackers bought their box-cutters there.

An odd coalition of pro-union Democrats, who represent the interests of the International Longshore Workers Union, which fears dealing with non-unionized Dubai, and deluded Christian fundamentalists, such as Cal Thomas, have banded together in an effort to demonstrate that ignorance – of both economics and the rest of the world – reigns supreme in U.S. ruling circles.

This smear campaign against an entire country – indeed, against an entire region of the world – has nothing to do with the facts.

The State Department reports: "In 2004, the UAE continued to provide staunch assistance and cooperation against terrorism" and "the UAE Central Bank continued to enforce anti-money-laundering regulations aggressively."

Furthermore, the U.S. and Dubai have signed something called a Container Security Initiative Statement of Principles, the purpose of which is to do what we don't do here in the U.S., but ought to: all U.S.-bound cargo transiting Dubai ports is carefully screened.

We have also signed a defense pact with Abu Dhabi, and the emirate has been used as a base from which to pre-position U.S. troops bound for Iraq.

Our planes refueled at Dubai's al-Dhafra air base on their way to patrol Iraq's no-fly zone during the run-up to the invasion.

Dubai has borne the costs in fuel and facilities maintenance of these U.S. military operations, and receives not a dime in "foreign aid."

In addition to hosting over 1,000 U.S. troops at various air and naval facilities, the U.A.E. is contributing to the maintenance of U.S. military bases in Germany.

I've heard it said – on such Democratic Party sites as DailyKos.com – that it isn't the Arabic character of DP World that provokes security concerns, but the fact that the company is owned, in whole or in part, by the government of Dubai.

This shows complete ignorance of the reality on the ground in the U.A.E.: if Uncle Sam doesn't like you in Dubai, you are history, as was discovered by the heir apparent to the throne of one of the emirates, Ras al-Khaymah, who was taken out of the line of succession in June 2003 because he was thought to be behind pre-Iraq-war demonstrations.

The Gulf states are islands of U.S. influence in an Arabic-Muslim sea of Middle Eastern hostility: to insult them in so flagrant a manner would be to effectively sink the pro-U.S. governments that have so far remained our only faithful allies in the region.

Fearful of Iran, the U.A.E. has cozied up to the U.S. like no other country in the Middle East, except, perhaps, Kuwait.

What's more, they have developed into precisely the model free market, modernized, relatively tolerant country, culturally if not politically, that we in the West have been urging on the region.

In rejecting a Dubai-based company as unworthy, and raising the specter of terrorist-related activities or allegiances on the part of an internationally respected company with many Americans in top positions, the U.S. is saying that it doesn't matter how much the Arabs may kowtow to the West, adopt our ways, and try to enter the world of international capitalist finance and embrace globalization – we still don't want them because the whole region is poisoned by hate and therefore untouchable.

That is the message the warmongering Hillary and her allies on the Christian Right and in the Republican Party want to send to the people of the Middle East.

And they have the nerve to wonder, "Why do they hate us?"

The answer is all too obvious.

The worst demagoguery over this issue is coming out of Sen. Chuck Schumer's mouth.

The Democrat from New York avers:
"Just as we would not outsource military operations or law enforcement duties, we should be very careful before we outsource such sensitive homeland security duties."

Yet it seems as if the security-conscious senator isn't against outsourcing when Israel is the beneficiary: Israeli companies, as well as direct input from the Israeli government, practically dominate the burgeoning homeland security industry.

And the newly installed congressional phone system is franchised to an Israeli company, yet no one is making much of a stink about the security concerns raised by people like Philip Giraldi, who writes:
"One of the more intriguing aspects of the federal investigation into the activities of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff is his Israeli connections. His large $2.2 million bail is reported to be due to fears that he would flee to Israel, as some of his business associates have already done, to avoid prosecution.

Abramoff, an Orthodox Jew and ardent Zionist, set up a charity called Capital Athletic Foundation, which illegally provided $140,000 worth of weapons and security equipment to hard-line Israeli settlers."Abramoff also allegedly convinced Congressman Robert Ney, House Administrative Committee chairman, to award a contract worth $3 million to a startup Israeli telecommunications firm called Foxcom Wireless.

The contract was for the installation of antennas in House of Representatives buildings to improve cell-phone reception.

Not surprisingly, such equipment can be designed to have what is known as a 'back door' to enable a third party, in this case Mossad, to listen in.

That an Israeli firm should be given such a contract through a selection process that was described as 'deeply flawed and unfair' is inexplicable, particularly as there were American suppliers of the same equipment, and it suggests that the private conversations of some of our congressmen might not be so private after all."

When Schumer starts questioning this sweet deal, I'll listen to him when it comes to DP World.

I have a suspicion that the current ruckus reflects the economic interests of not only the unions, but also Eller & Company, the Miami-based business formerly a partner of Peninsular that is now suing for being forced into an "involuntary" partnership with those feelthy Ay-rabs.

The suit raises the security canard, and one wonders what sort of economic interests the smear campaign is intended to mask.

A press conference held Tuesday decrying the ports deal was held in Miami, and the Miami-based nature of the smear campaign tells me that something is afoot in the land of the hanging chad.

In any controversy like this, the first rule is to follow the money, and this AP report hints at the stakes:
"The lawsuit represents the earliest skirmish over lucrative contracts among the six major U.S. ports where Peninsular and Oriental runs major commercial operations: New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami, and Philadelphia.

The lawsuit was filed moments before the court closed Friday and disclosed late Saturday by people working on the case."

It wouldn't be the first time a corporate entity tried to take out the competition by raising a bogus threat to "national security."

Led by a disparate coalition of mindless opportunists, anti-Arab racists, and warmongering politicians, an effort to scare the American public into making a few ruthless "entrepreneurs" obscenely rich by giving them a virtual monopoly on America's port facilities shows every sign of apparent success.

The victors will be laughing all the way to the bank.

by Justin Raimondo 

It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job.

Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation.

We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.

Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc.

But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck.

Why?

Because they were designed to.

How can I make such a bold statement?

How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)?

Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.

Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to obtain.

Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.

But he became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning.

So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.

In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves.

The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."

By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board—which funded the creation of numerous public schools—issued a statement which read in part:

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands.

The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.

We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.

We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters.

We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply.

The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom.

This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places....

It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature.

School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:

We want one class to have a liberal education.

We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Writes Gatto:

"Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"

While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately.

We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.
This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day.

Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles.

Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder.

I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me.

However, she added,

"They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world." 

Nowadays, Americans have to actively journey far out of their way to blind themselves to how the country was utterly duped into fighting a completely unnecessary war in Iraq.

Last week, the former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell called the WMD rationale for the invasion “a hoax on the American people."

This week, the top CIA official in charge of intelligence assessments on Iraq reported that the administration “used intelligence not to inform decision making, but to justify a decision already made," and that “it went to war without requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any strategic level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”

Add these to the revelations which have already been made by other top officials and those with access to them – Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Bob Graham, Bob Woodward (along with Powell’s chief of staff and CIA spooks, a bunch of radical anti-American lefties if ever there were any).

Not to mention certain inconvenient facts on the ground, like the complete absence of WMD in Iraq and a war that’s gone completely off the rails.

It’s getting to the point where you have to very badly want to believe whatever the president says in order to do so.

It’s getting to the point where you have to actively hide from the evidence in order to keep your faith-based war politics safe from the cognitive dissonance induced by overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately, that is precisely what many conservatives are now choosing to do.
And to some extent, I don’t even care.

If some forty percent of the American public is crouched in such a state of perpetual fear, I guess they have problems enough without being further burdened by somebody’s extended rants on the existential threat which willful ignorance poses to a democracy.

And to some further extent, I don’t even care that they still bolster their own ideological insecurities by throwing down yet again the card which the regressive right plays so well (they must have 53 of them in their decks): the attack labeling critics of the president’s patently failed policies as traitors and threats to American security.

By the way, that group includes a heck of a lot of people nowadays.

Just once I’d like to see Bill O’Reilly question the patriotism of the 57 percent of Americans (that’s 171 million of your fellow citizens, Bill) who disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq.

But, alas, more likely that will have to wait for another lifetime...

No, even though conservatives make it their business to constantly worry about my sexual proclivities, I will not return the favor.

They are free to indulge themselves in as much private political masturbation as suits them.

But what I do mind, I really have to say, is their loudly-proclaimed belief that they are patriots, and that they support the troops in Iraq.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Nothing could further misunderstand the intentions of the American Founders to create a republic on these shores.

Nothing could be more corrosive of democracy.

And nothing could be less supportive of our troops suffering in the bottomless pit George Bush created for them in Iraq.

I don’t care if someone concludes on the other side of an educational process that this war really does make us safer, that it really was morally justified, and that those beliefs really do support the troops over there.

That’s fine – do your homework and reach whatever conclusion you reach. But, goddammit, if you’re gonna make those claims, the very least you can do is to genuinely examine the facts. The very least you can do is transcend your own fears just enough to learn the truth about the war.

People are dying in Iraq by the tens of thousands, and that destructive project is entirely dependent on the acquiescence of the American people in allowing it to continue in their name, and financed by their tax dollars (or, more accurately, by their children’s tax dollars which will be used to pay back the massive loans we are racking up in China and Japan).

No one who is a true patriot can support such a grave policy decision until they have seriously examined it.

No one who really supports the troops can put them in harm’s way without studying and analyzing carefully the justification for doing so.

Anyone who does otherwise is, in fact, an unpatriotic coward.

For what could be more unpatriotic than to support a war – the most serious decision a government can make – without learning the facts?

What could be less supportive of the troops than to allow them to go kill, to die and get maimed without being sure there is a good justification for doing so?

And if the reasons for thoughtlessly sending people off to war are either laziness or fear of one’s own inadequacies, what could be more despicable?

Recently I published an essay suggesting that the President of the United States was at war with Americanism, for all the obvious reasons (see the Bill of Rights for further elaboration).

That piece produced the following emailed response (with the subject line: “Get A Life”) from a conservative reader: “I read your article.

Have you ever had any family or friends hit by the terrorists?

In my opinion you are just another loser liberal. I served in the military.

Did you?

Go ‘W’.”

So I wrote back at some length, posing some difficult questions for my interlocutor to consider.

He did not.

But he did write back to tell me of his surprise at receiving my note and his admiration at my actually responding.

I get this all the time.

I think the shock troops of the fearful right must be so bought into their own stereotypes (and perhaps also inadvertently reflecting their own level of political comprehension) that they figure all of us on the other side are just mindless Michael Moore clones taking our marching orders from Havana.

They seem so surprised when you show them that you can think on your own, that you’re willing to engage in dialog, that you have facts to support your arguments, and that you can actually string two coherent sentences together, back to back.

That became more evident when my correspondent wrote “I don't follow or believe the likes of Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, Hillary and of course, the great Jesse.

I have to assume these are the leaders you follow.

Your arguments mirror these jerks.”

Leaving aside the rich irony of his presumption that I’m a fan of Hillary Clinton’s, what I think this comment reveals is a mind set in which politics is a game where citizens pick the ‘leaders’ they then slavishly follow and support, never quite coming to their own conclusions or interpretations.

In my book, it is a politics which is a lot more reminiscent of either baseball or religion than it is of citizenship in a participatory democracy.

Which brings to mind another comment my friend on the right made in this second and last note to me, after apparently believing he had parried the questions I posed to him: “I will concede you are a good writer.

You must teach English.”

This I took to actually mean, “Your words make a lot of sense, and so does the evidence you present, but that can’t be right because you’re a liberal and these ideas contradict my political gospel.

Therefore you must be tricking me with your fancy rhetoric.”

After receiving from me just a handful of challenging questions, my right-wing correspondent replied “How do you know the W planned to invade Iraq before 9/11?

How do you know Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11?

How do you know the W is a liar? All liberal propaganda.”

And then he concluded with this: “Please do not write back.

I will not open your mail again.

I see neither of us winning this war of words.

I'm too busy thinking about more important issues.”

Clearly, he is saying that he doesn’t want to think about this stuff.

Rather than letting me answer his questions, which is easily and conclusively done, he immediately writes it all off as “liberal propaganda”.

But, just to make sure no errant facts should crawl beneath the door and invade his warm cocoon of self-deceit, he then not only asks me not to write back, but insists that he will refuse to look at anything I send.

Why he didn’t just come right out and say “See No Evil”, I don’t know.

‘Course, I wrote him back anyhow.

‘Course, I know he read my note, too – though he was careful not to give me the satisfaction of telling me so.

I have no desire to pick on this nice gentleman, who appears from his own description to be a good family man, successful career guy, etc.

I just think he is entirely reflective of a very pervasive mentality in this country, and that this mentality is crippling us.

This is the reason why those of us on the thinking left are just so incredulous, so paralyzingly shocked at the support that exists for George Bush.

It is as if someone wrote the textbook on how to be a disastrous president and he walked into the part as an object lesson.

Imagine if everyone, left and right, had sat down five years ago and agreed (which to some large degree we probably could have) on the criteria to define a successful presidency.

We probably would have included items like protecting American security from foreign attack, proactively protecting against natural disaster and responding competently when it hits, building on the federal surpluses in order to pay down the national debt, honest and open government, improving relations with our allies and American moral leadership in the world, making the world environmentally safe for our children, improving the standard of living for all economic classes, serving as a force for peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, preventing WMD proliferation and discouraging it by our own actions, deploying American forces prudently so as not to decimate the military, genuinely supporting the troops by providing them proper armor and numbers adequate to the task, and more.

What is so shocking is that George W. Bush has failed every objective test, including all those which virtually all Americans, regardless of their ideological commitments, would have agreed to five years ago.

But what is even more shocking is the degree to which this has pushed so many of us into simply going post-empirical, so that we can avoid the ugly task of confronting a reality contrary to our political beliefs.

The absolute easiest way to see this is just to consider what these folks would be saying if we took the entirety of the last five years’ historical record, completely intact, and simply changed one word.

Imagine the howls of foaming outrage which would bellow across the land if this president, with this track record of unending failure, was named Clinton.

I don’t know what’s gotten into the perhaps forty percent of Americans who cannot seem to be dissuaded from supporting this president, regardless of how badly he screws up.

What I do know is that we progressives need to think broadly and deeply about this very question if we hope to save the republic from Cheneyism, the Founders’ worst nightmare come to life.

These legions of the willfully mindless are the death knell of American democracy if ever there was one.
I suspect the causes for Bush’s support are multiple.

Obviously, if you’re one of the narrow sliver of Americans in the economic elite and all you care about is your own wallet, Bush is your man.

Moreover, poll data shows that ridiculous percentages of Americans believe that they will be joining that club one day and so are tempted to swallow anything, including a war consuming their neighbors’ children, to receive their precious would-be, someday, tax cuts.

I think other Americans are simply tuned out of politics for a variety of reasons, making them easy prey for the Rovian tactic of employing simplistic, emotional-button laden politics, of which conservatives are now the undisputed masters.

Between educational failures, shameful media commercialization and trivialization of news, and pounding conservative ideology that government is the problem, we have dumbed down sufficiently to become a very politically unsophisticated country, perfect fodder for the politics of fear, caricature, personalization and slogan which the right employs ruthlessly, even against such radical leftist threats like John McCain.

Some Americans undoubtedly don’t have time for politics. With a criminally low minimum wage of five bucks and change, many people have to work all the time to stay afloat.

It is especially ironic that they can’t spare the time somehow to change the government’s law (if not the government itself) so that they could then get some rest.

At a campaign stop, the president once marveled at the greatness of America when a woman announced that she worked two-and-a-half jobs.

No wonder he and his ilk would. Low wages, high profits, prostrate politics – hey, what’s not to like about that? (Oops, sorry – am I engaging in ‘class warfare’? We can’t have that.)

But many of us have that free time – especially those among the more potentially influential segments of society – and we spend it mesmerized by yet another football game on the idiot box, yet another life lived vicariously in the pages of celebrity magazines, yet another pathetically self-affirming episode of reality TV degradation.

I know it’s easy for me to preach. I love my work, and if I had to dig ditches or wait tables for twelve hours, I’d probably be inclined to collapse in exhaustion at the end of each shift, no more interested in intellectual stimulation than physical.

But I still think we have an obligation to muster up the energy to do more, especially if we’re fond of calling ourselves patriots.

We have eighteen year-old kids, fellow citizens who are willing to slog through the hell George Bush created on Earth, all in the name of protecting our security.

Can we not give up one game and educate ourselves about their lot?

Can we not forego one more breathless article on why Brad left Jen, and devote that time to learning about the war being fought in our name?

Could we not turn off American Idol and instead read the Downing Street Memo?

And if we can’t, could we at least please just stop calling ourselves patriots who nobly support our troops in the field?

If ol’ Zell Miller were to experience a momentary lapse into sanity, he might rightly ask, “Support the troops? With what? Bumper stickers?”

Never mind that the last years’ deluge of such ‘stickers’ (tellingly magnetic, not actually stuck on) are fading, when they can be seen at all.

I guess we can’t even be bothered with that anymore.

There is a war going on in Iraq which is fast consuming America’s blood, treasure, reputation and security.

The simple fact is, this war goes on in our name.

The rest of the world certainly believes that, and they are right to do so.

Whether they are also right to condemn we individual Americans for our actions in Iraq is a matter we ought to care about, for reason of our reputation and honor alone.

But, of course, a better reason is that people are dying there with our acquiescence.

Patriots?

Supporters of the troops?

I say if you can’t be bothered to learn about this war which your taxes, votes and silence enable, you are a traitor and a coward.

While the country – or, rather, the American media – is fixated on an accidental shooting by the vice president, and the airwaves are filled with the natterings of the chattering classes over this inconsequential albeit unfortunate matter, the real shooting is being largely ignored: the slaughter continues in Iraq. While reporters and pundits rush to track down every niggling detail of Quailgate, the story of how we were lied into war – and set up for a sequel – is largely untold.
Such is life in the post-9/11 Bizarro World we've all been consigned to: the trivial is spotlighted, while the real news occurs under cover of darkness. Scattered fragments of the story come out, however, and it is left for the inquiring reader – that's you and me, my friend – to fit together such pieces of the puzzle as we have and try to discern some consistent pattern.
The big news is that the Justice Department probe into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by Scooter Libby and his cohorts has taken a new and very interesting turn, one that perhaps sheds new light on a key aspect of the case: the motivation of Libby and his co-conspirators. As Raw Story reporter Larisa Alexandrovna reveals in the first really substantive addition to the story since Libby's indictment, Plame's highly sensitive work for the CIA – involving nuclear proliferation issues – had a very specific focus at the time of her outing:
"According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
"Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program."
The exposure of Plame and her entire operation – Brewster Jennings & Associates, the CIA front company that cloaked this super-secret tracking program – effectively blinded the U.S. to the evolution of Iran's nuclear program. Not long after the outing of Plame – and just after a grand jury began hearing testimony in the Fitzgerald investigation – another security breach involving Iran made headlines: the Iranians had been alerted to the fact that the U.S. had broken the code governing their internal government communications, with the chief suspects being the neoconservative version of Che Guevara, Ahmed Chalabi, and his Iraqi National Congress, the source of much of the phony pre-invasion "intelligence" about Iraq. The truth about Iran's WMD (or lack of same) was rendered inaccessible, leaving the field open for the neocons and their foreign operatives to move into the vacuum and keep their very effective lie factory working overtime.
At the same time, the chief analyst at the Pentagon's Iran desk, Larry Franklin, a committed neoconservative, was making contact with two officials of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the heavy-hitting Washington lobby, feeding them information that they subsequently passed on to Israeli embassy officials, including Naor Gilon, the embassy's chief of political affairs, and another yet-to-be-named official (who some speculate may be Danny Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the U.S.). The focus of the Franklin-AIPAC spy cabal: U.S. intelligence on Iran.
And that's not all. More interesting reportage by Alexandrovna points to a third prong of this disabling operation aimed at U.S. surveillance of Iran:
"Several U.S. and foreign intelligence sources, along with investigators, say an Iranian exile with ties to Iran-Contra peddled a bizarre tale of stolen uranium to governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the spring and summer of 2003.
"The story that was peddled – which detailed how an Iranian intelligence team infiltrated Iraq prior to the start of the war in March of 2003, and stole enriched uranium to use in their own nuclear weapons program – was part of an attempt to implicate both countries in a WMD plot."
A familiar cast of characters stars in this tale of intrigue and disinformation: Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian arms merchant and master of deception, who, along with neoconservative guru Michael Ledeen – another player in this drama – was entangled in the Iran-Contra affair. Larry Franklin makes a guest appearance at a meeting in Rome where the plot was reportedly hatched. Oh, and a mysterious Iranian named "Ali," who, it turns out, is the pseudonym for Fereidoun Mahdavi, a former minister under the Shah, now a secretary to Ghorbanifar.
It would have been Plame's job to debunk Ali's tall tales. Knocking her and Brewster Jennings out of the running was necessarily a top priority for those with an interest in targeting Iran. There is a lot more here than has come to the attention of the "mainstream" media, and, again, Alexandrovna is digging where others fear to tread.
All indications are that an active campaign to set up Iran for attack was going full gear even as George W. Bush was declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq. As we look at the different pieces of the puzzle, a definite picture begins to emerge: what we are seeing are the outlines of a coordinated covert action, engineered by neoconservative ideologues in and around the Pentagon and Dick Cheney's office, and carried out in cooperation with the Israelis. Their objective: gin up a war with Iran, even as we marched into Iraq. A one-two punch that will speed the forces of "democratization" and visit upon the region what Ledeen lauds as "creative destruction."
It is commonly assumed that the outing of Plame was retaliation for her husband's vocal opposition to the war and his debunking of the myth that Saddam sought uranium in the African nation of Niger with which to make a nuclear bomb. Yet this explanation was never really very satisfactory: it assumed an extraordinary amount of self-indulgent pettiness on the part of the leakers in the White House, and a level of vindictiveness bordering on stupidity.
As we begin to understand the nature of Plame's work, her exposure takes on new significance: the War Party was intent on blindfolding U.S. policymakers by ensuring that no one with any expertise or interest in debunking their lies would remain standing. Spared the sight of reality – which is that Iran is at least 10 years away from building a viable nuclear weapon – U.S. officials would then be free to do what they did in the case of Iraq: make it up as they go along.
Libby has already been indicted, but others, as we have seen, are knee-deep in this quagmire. As the investigation deepens and broadens, and the trial date (a year from now) approaches, the twists and turns of the scandal – which ought to go down in history as Neocongate – will be mapped by the meticulous Fitzgerald, as the story of how we were lied into war is laid bare.


by Justin Raimondo

NSA Snoop Fiasco: Democrats Sell the Constitution Down the River

Monday February 13th 2006, 10:25 am

If we are to believe the corporate media, Bush's "secret eavesdropping
program" is useless and "out-dated" because a shrewd "al-Qaeda" has
"undoubtedly has changed its means of communication to avoid
Washington's monitoring," according to the Associated Press. "Does
anyone really believe that, after 50 days of having this program on the
front page of our newspapers, across talk shows across America, that
al-Qaida has not changed the way that it communicates?" said Rep. Peter
Hoekstra

the House intelligence-committee chairman, thus expecting us to believe
al-Qaeda once utilized cell phones and email as it planned terrorist
attacks. Since "al-Qaeda" is actually al-CIA-duh, it has no need to
communicate via cell phone or email, that is unless it wants to leave a
conspicuous trail to be used later to frame patsies.

As we know, the massive NSA violation of the Fourth Amendment of the
Constitution at the behest of the Bush neocons is not intended to catch
"al-Qaeda" bad guys, but rather monitor and eventually snare Americans
who disagree with the Straussian neocons, Machiavellian followers of Leo
Strauss and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt who hate the Bill of Rights and
the very idea of a constitutional republic and are in the process of
destroying its last proud vestiges. NSA snooping has nothing to do with
preventing rogue intelligence terrorism and everything to do with
subverting the liberties of American citizens. In the 1960s and 70s, the
NSA compiled intercepts on U.S. peace activists and it was this
unchecked and illegal behavior that resulted in the creation of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Bush (or rather his
neocon handlers) circumvented the FISA process precisely because they
were (and are) snooping on their domestic enemies---it has absolutely
nothing to do with the CIA-created fake terrorist group called "al-Qaeda."

All of this---including the trashing of the Bill of Rights---shall now
move forward under a nod and wink provided by spineless Democrats.
"Having failed at turning the NSA program to surveil international calls
connected with suspected terrorists into a 'domestic' spying scandal,
Democrats have reversed course and now want the program to continue but
under new Congressional rules," reports Free-Market News Network . "The reversal
has shown that President Bush's offensive against the critics, starting
with his immediate acknowledgement of authorizing the program, has once
again damaged the Democrats on national security and has pushed them to
settle the issue quickly." In other words, the Democrats---understanding
well the NSA snoop scandal is all about domestic opposition---have sold
the Constitution down the river, a traitorous act that should not be
surprising, and warrentless snooping will soon be considered fine and
dandy, so long as Congress makes "rules" on how the Constitution should
be violated.

Iran Attack: Turning America into a Straussian Totalitarian State

Monday February 13th 2006, 6:50 am

In the weeks before the Straussian neocons invaded Iraq, we were told
only a few thousand Iraqis, at most, would die in the initial onslaught.
Of course, thanks to the Pentagon, uninterested in body counts, we do
not have a good idea of how many Iraqis died in the initial assault, and
to make matters worse, "Iraq's Health Ministry ... ordered a halt to a
count of civilians killed during the war and told its statistics
department not to release figures compiled so far," the Associated Press

reported in December, 2003, months after the invasion. The following
year, however, a British medical journal, the Lancet, conducted surveys
in Iraq and determined that over 100,000 Iraqis had died since the
invasion, the Washington Post

reported. Now we are told a "major American attack on Iran's nuclear
sites would kill up to 10,000 people and lead to war in the Middle
East," according to the Oxford Research Group .

Attacking the Bushehr nuclear facility alone would be a nightmare,
releasing radiation into the atmosphere, the report notes. "To attack
Iran's nuclear facilities will not only provoke war, but it could also
unleash clouds of radiation far beyond the targets and the borders of
Iran," Elias Tuma of the Arab Internet Network, told the Federal News Service last March.
In addition, it is almost a certainty Iran would retaliate by hitting
Israel's Dimona nuclear complex (military experts view this as unlikely,
however Europeans "are fretting over the risk of radiation releases from
Dimona and, more likely, Iran's bombed nuclear plants," according to
Eric Margolis ).

However, even more Iranians will die from nuclear blast and radiation
poisoning, as the United States Strategic Command, under instructions
from the war criminal Dick Cheney, has drawn up a "contingency plan"
that "includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both
conventional and tactical nuclear weapons." According to Philip Giraldi
(a former CIA officer) of the American Conservative, "the response is
not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism
directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers
involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of
what they are doing---that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked
nuclear attack---but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing
any objections." Obviously, the lives of a few hundred thousand Iranians
(the population of Tehran is 12,059,000) are not worth the career of one
air force officer.

"Precision bombing could put Iran's weapons program back five to 10
years but within a month the situation would become 'an extremely
dangerous conflict', says Prof Paul Rogers, the report's author," the
Daily Telegraph reports. "The attack would result in 'a protracted
military confrontation' involving Israel, Lebanon and some Gulf states."
Not mentioned here is the most crucial component---if the United States
and Israel attack Iran, U.S. troops in Iraq will have hell to pay,
especially in the Shia south of the country. Iranian retaliation "would
surely start with attempts to mobilize Shia partisans in Iraq to try to
turn the Iraqi south into an extension of the insurgency in the Sunni
triangle," Gary Sick, professor of Middle East studies at Columbia
University and former National Security Council adviser to then
President Jimmy Carter, told a congressional panel last February.

Moreover, within "minutes of any attack, Iran's air and sea forces could
threaten oil shipments in the Persian Gulf as well as the Gulf of Oman.
Iran controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow
waterway through which oil tankers must navigate, and could sink ships,
mine sea routes or bomb oil platforms," according to a Center for
Strategic and International Studies report . Closing the
Strait of Hormuz, and Iran turning off its oil spigot, would create
immediate havoc in the world economy, so closely tied to petroleum. "Oil
prices on the international markets would shoot up to $400 a barrel if
an attack were to be carried out on Iran, a senior Revolutionary Guards
commander warned" last September, according to Iran Focus.
Billionaire globalist and neolib investor, George Soros,
was a bit more modest, telling CNN Money last month that "Iran is on a
collision course and I have a difficulty seeing how such a collision can
be avoided" and this collision might jack oil prices up to $262 per barrel.

Either Cheney or the Straussian neocons are insane---courting depression
and social and political disaster---or something else is up their
sleeves. In order to understand what the Iran attack means in the larger
context, it pays to examine the Straussian philosophy.

"Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is
united by an external threat, and following Machiavelli, he maintains
that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured,"
writes Shadia Drury. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to
be governed," Strauss wrote. "Such governance can only be established,
however, when men are united---and they can only be united against other
people." Strauss' established governance, according to Drury, is made
possible through "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," and
"[p]erpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in."
According to Jim Lobe, "Strauss'
neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a
'national destiny'---as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983---that
goes far beyond the narrow confines of a 'myopic national security.'"

Attacking Iran, with its ensuing financial and social chaos, is
precisely the sort of "national destiny" the Straussian neocons have in
mind for America. "A sense of perpetual crisis and war cements the
society together with absolute loyalty" to the ruling Straussians,
explains Michael Doliner. The Straussians "are
not, as some think, merely agents of Israel," Doliner continues.

Nor was the war fought merely for oil. They did not ally themselves
with the religious right merely for expedience. They do not seek
primarily to further the fortunes of Halliburton and Bechtel. All
these are real motives, but they are peripheral motives. Their goal
is to turn America into the Straussian State and rule it
perpetually. Consequently, the debacle in Iraq [or the coming
debacle in Iran] does not seriously affect their plans. Even the
Katrina aftermath might not shake them. A Straussian society needs
an endless war to supply a "them" against which "we" will do endless
battle. The endless war, such a horrible prospect for the rest of
us, provided the political glue to transform the United States of
American from a liberal democracy to a Straussian totalitarian state.

Attacking Iran and courting disaster will provide the Straussian neocons
with the perfect excuse to turn America into a dictatorship under the
exigencies of nuclear war because they "want an endless war and the more
embattled Americans feel the more inclined they will be to accept a
strong ruler and the rest of the Straussian program."

And what is the "the rest of the Straussian program"? Doliner again:

Straussians would rip up American traditions starting from the
Declaration of Independence, an Enlightenment document if there ever
was one. Nothing could be more repellent to them than the rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is a description
of decadent liberalism. They prefer death, bondage, and the fear of
God (for others.) Straussians are orders of magnitude more
subversive than any communist ever was. Paradoxically, Straussians
do think that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey died for a noble cause, the
transformation of the United States of America into the Straussian
State. But of course they can never say so for their goal must
remain a secret one. It must remain secret because the Straussian
state is the good society only for the philosophers. Everyone else
remains deluded and oppressed. While the "philosophers play with
their puppies" the rest of us slave away or go off to die.

It is, of course, far too late to stop the Straussian neocon Iran
attack. However, as negative as it may sound, we can take a bit of
solace in the possibility that the United States will bite off more than
it can chew. If the entire Middle East rises up in response to the
unprovoked attack upon Iran---and, more ominous, Russia and China
support the Muslim enemies of the perfidious Straussian neocons---there
is a distinct chance the Straussian project will collapse and fail.
However, the specter of nuclear war remains, as the fascistic Straussian
neocons will certainly not go down without a fight---or without killing
millions of innocent people. Before this happens, hopefully sanity will
rule at the Pentagon and officers less concerned with their careers than
the fate of mankind will step up and depose the Straussian neocons.

I dream of a day when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz,
Feith, Libby, et al, are paraded before TV cameras in orange jumpsuits,
shackled and humiliated, and soon to suffer the fate Hermann Goering,
Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg Trials.
However, the people of America (not unlike the people of Nazi Germany or
Stalin's Russia before them), as Wilhelm Reich knew before he was thrown
in prison, "give impotent people with evil intentions the power to
represent [them]. Only too late do [they] realize that again and again
[they] are being defrauded. [They] must come to realize that [they] make
[their] little men [their] own oppressors, and that [they] made martyrs
out of [their] truly great men." Our oppressors, fast at work
undermining what remains of our constitutional republic, are the
Straussian neocons.

More Evidence Nuking Iran is on Schedule

Sunday February 12th 2006, 3:38 am

In a story appearing in the Sunday Telegraph,
the newspaper once owned by the Canadian criminal finagler and neocon
"Lord" Conrad Black, amoral strategists "at the Pentagon are drawing up
plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched
ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a 'last
resort' to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb." If not so
deadly serious, the idea that the Straussian neocons will shock and awe
Iran only as a "last resort" would be comical. In fact, they have long
planned to bomb Iran---imaginary nukes or not---and kill as many
Iranians as possible and decimate the civilian infrastructure, as they
have done in Iraq (some estimates put the death toll thus far above
130,000). "Central Command and Strategic Command planners are
identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for
an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt."

In fact, the Pentagon has long mapped out its targets, including
"secondary targets," usually civilian airports, radio and TV
installations, telecommunications centers, government buildings,
conventional power plants, water and waste treatment plants, highways
and bridges, and rail lines. In Iraq (twice) this sort of "targeting"
resulted in massive suffering and death (coupled with sanctions after
the first Bush Iraq Invasion, more than a million Iraqis died of
starvation and disease, a stunning crime against humanity).

These criminal strategists, basically no different than the German
Wehrmacht strategists who planned Operation Barbarossa, "are reporting
to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, as America
updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the
Islamic republic's nuclear bomb ambitions." Of course, this "diplomatic
offensive" is designed to fail, as the "diplomatic offensive" prior to
the Iraqi invasion failed (and the "diplomatic offensive" in Afghanistan
failed, even though the Taliban were ready to turn over Osama bin Laden,
if only the Americans were able to provide evidence of his complicity in
nine eleven, something the Americans were unable and unwilling to do
because they did not have compelling evidence and, besides, they had
planned to invade Afghanistan well before nine eleven, as plenty of
evidence attests).

"This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," a
senior Pentagon adviser told the Telegraph. "This has taken on much
greater urgency in recent months."

Indeed, the shock and awe dismemberment of Iranian society is considered
more "than just the standard military contingency assessment," as the
PNAC Straussian neocons have long told us. It has "taken on much greater
urgency in recent months" because the Bush administration, a front for
the Straussian neocon nihilists, is winding down and it will take months
to obliterate Iranian culture and civil society. Moreover, the neocons
need to fit in Syria, at minimum---they would prefer to do Lebanon,
Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, but this is obviously too ambitious, that is
unless they can figure out a way to keep Bush in office.

"The prospect of military action could put Washington at odds with
Britain which fears that an attack would spark violence across the
Middle East, reprisals in the West and may not cripple Teheran's nuclear
program. But the steady flow of disclosures about Iran's secret nuclear
operations and the virulent anti-Israeli threats of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad has prompted the fresh assessment of military options by
Washington. The most likely strategy would involve aerial bombardment by
long-distance B2 bombers, each armed with up to 40,000lb of precision
weapons, including the latest bunker-busting devices. They would fly
from bases in Missouri with mid-air refuelling."

Nonsense, Tony Blair is fully onboard with the plan to reduce the Middle
East to a simmering cauldron of violence and dead, mutilated bodies.
Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al, are ecstatic over Ahmadinejad's highly
suspect anti-Semitic (or rather, anti-Ashkenazi, since the majority of
Jews in Israel are white Europeans and not Semites) declarations,
leading more than a few people to believe he is a Mossad agent or has an
as of yet unknown reason for egging on the Israelis and Americans.
Either way, Ahmadinejad is courting disaster.

As former CIA intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi told the American
Conservative last July, the United States plans to nuke the be-jesus out
of Iran. "The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President
Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command
(STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response
to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan
includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional
and tactical nuclear weapons." All of this despite the fact Iran is a
non-nuclear country, a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,
and working with the IAEA, although the latter reported Iran to the UN
Security Council last week. So itchy is the Pentagon to use nukes
against non-nuke countries, they wrote the "policy" in their "Doctrine
for Joint Nuclear Operations"
(pdf doc).

"Senator Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, [said] Mr. Bush is expected to be
faced by the decision [to criminally bomb Iran] within two years." More
balderdash---the United States plans to bomb Iran next month, or soon
thereafter. It wants Iran wasted sooner before later. Last week Vladimir
Zhirinovsky,
leader of the Liberal Democrats in Russia, told the Ekho Moskvy radio
station "that the Muslim [cartoon] riots were orchestrated by the US to
garner European backing for the military strike" and the "war is
inevitable because the Americans want this war. Any country claiming a
leading position in the world will need to wage wars. Otherwise it will
simply not be able to retain its leading position," as well spelled out
by the PNAC maniacs who have captured the flag in Washington.

Sometimes the people who still fervently support George W. Bush seem just plain stupid, and other times it seems they must be dishonest and even malevolent, harboring a hatred for their country that allows them to support misguided ideas and private agendas over the public good.

In more reasonable moods, I want to believe that the Bush supporters are just like me in simply wanting what is best for the country safety, security, fairness and a commitment to a government that observes the principles upon which our nation was founded.

When I'm thinking that way, I assume we don't disagree on goals and objectives, just on the most effective way to achieve those goals and objectives.

It's hard to keep that thought, though, when the lies keep piling up higher and deeper, and when so much of the energy of Bush supporters goes into evading reality.

Is it really possible for there to be an honest difference of opinion about the calamitous Bush decision to invade Iraq?

No weapons of mass destruction there, as we were told there were.

No link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, as we were told there was, and as we continue to be urged to believe by deceptive administration rhetoric.

Almost no likelihood that a stable democracy will be possible in an Iraq rent by ethnic feuds and anti-democratic traditions.

Billions upon billions of dollars squandered in Iraq, and billions more stolen by corrupt U.S. contractors.

Meanwhile, the Homeland Security entity Bush created has shown itself to be yet another huge government boondoggle, and utterly witless in responding to a national emergency.

Beyond that, we have the shameful spectacle of Americans who call themselves patriots urging a forfeiture of our rights and liberties as U.S. citizens the rights to due process and the protections devised by the founding fathers to guard against abuses of power.

And beyond that, we have breaches of national security in the outing of a CIA agent for no better reason than spite.

We have the staffing of all kinds of highly paid and important government jobs with incompetent administration cronies and partners in crime.

We have repeated and massive failures of imagination.

No one could have imagined a) people flying planes into U.S. skyscrapers, b) a storm of the magnitude of Katrina, or c) a Palestinian militant group like Hamas winning elections in Palestine these being just a few of the things Condoleezza Rice has said the administration couldn't imagine.

Beyond all of that, we have the growing gap between rich and poor, the exportation of American jobs by the hundreds of thousands, the wasteful and exploitive health care system that continues to bankrupt American industries, the packing of the Supreme Court with judges confirmed despite their stonewalling before the congressional oversight committees charged with vetting them before they assumed lifetime appointments.

We have been unable or unwilling to secure our borders.

We have seen corruption on an unprecedented scale and massive neglect of dozens of urgent national needs.

Science has been disregarded whenever it runs afoul of the profit motive, and we have a foreign policy no one, least of all the people in charge of it, seems to understand.

Our actions in Iraq have fueled the most extreme anti-Western views throughout the Islamic world, and the entire Middle East is less stable than it was when the Bush bunch took office.

Meanwhile, we build for our children and grandchildren a legacy of international hatred, plus a huge debt burden as the Bush administration spends and spends as though there is no tomorrow.

We've squandered our good name and our moral authority in the world as we've watched Rumsfeld and Cheney and other spokesmen for our nation argue to justify torture in the interest of our safety.

At a time when it was absolutely essential that the world know unequivocally just who the good guys were, Bush and Co. have sullied the image of America all over the globe, drawing a portrait of a nation that behaves with arrogance, defies world opinion, ignores planetary environmental concerns, and treats other nations with disdain.

All of this harm has come to our nation and to its image, and still a cluster of supporters insist on tarring anyone who might question this ruinous administration.

One of the ignorant nimrods who regularly write to this paper to call me a Marxist argues that those who disagree with the president are delighted to see America fail, that people like me take pleasure in anything that gives comfort to our enemies.

He argues that people who question the reckless use of the military are "pacifist military haters."

There is no truth to such baseless and childish nonsense, but he seems to think it sounds persuasive, or perhaps he thinks it's a kind of logical argument.

That's one of the reasons it's difficult not to think some of these Bush supporters are just willfully stupid.

These people grow more tiresome as they have less and less with which to argue.

Their recourse, it seems, is to tag people they disagree with by calling them "leftists" and "liberals," as if those words cancel out all arguments.

These people exploit the nation's soldiers to bolster their arguments.

They claim to support the troops, but you never hear a peep from them about cuts to the Veterans Affairs budget or the shameful number of avoidable deaths and injuries suffered by our soldiers because the Bush administration still has not provided frontline troops with the kind of armored vehicles that could have saved them from many of those deaths and injuries.

But to people who are either stupid or malevolent, hatred of those they would label as "liberals" trumps love of country every time and blinds them to the harm being done to our security, our heritage and our well-being.

By Jaime O'Neill