TEFLON IS ONE THING, BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS

Can we beat Bush? The media and the pundits, along with unindicted co-conspirators New Democrats, are declaring the front-runner Dean as unelectable.

They were saying this about Kucinich until recently. Well, they still are, but now with Dean they have a juicier victim. Kucinich was presented with this shibboleth at the recent Iowa debate, when a panelist told him that many Democrats don't think he's electable. He responded, with a chuckle, "Well, you know, I'm electable if you vote for me."

Anything can happen, but with Kerry continuing to self-destruct, and Clark still polling in at best 2nd place in most places, it sure looks like Dean will win the nomination.

So the savagery against Dean intensifies. He's too angry. He's naive. He changes his mind (the old flip-flop attack). Kerry and the other candidates continue to provide great sound bites that Karl Rove can use later on against Dean--and no doubt will.

It's all so depressingly familiar.

News of late has provided hope that Bush will finally get the same treatment from the press--and thereby the public, who seem to be programmed more than ever to believe everything the talking heads tell them--that the Democratic candidates have been getting. That is, consistent diminution of their integrity and credibility, and savage attacks on their competency, especially in foreign affairs and national security.

Bush's attacks on the environment, to benefit corporate interests, are the most blatant, the most severe, and the most successful of any president--ever. While I can't quite see how allowing skimobiles in Yellowstone benefits corporate America, there must be a constituency he needs and thus is pandering to in this regard. The recent blocking of the rescinding of that restriction by a federal judge is one small victory against many losses.

I intend to write a piece about the whole environmental devastation soon, but for now, if you can, check out the Sept 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, an article titled Sale Of The Wild. Here's the intro blurb: "Dept of the Interior employees are horrified by how Secretary Gale Norton and her powerfull deputy, J.Steven Griles, have allowed industry to exploit America's wilderness. Probing stealthy bureaucratic maneuvers and Grile's ties to coal, oil, and gas, the author finds a massive, irreversible (emphasis supplied) landgrab." This long and well-researched article is ultimately horrifying.

But none of this sticks to Bush. Like Reagan and Iran-Contra (among other impeachable and corrupt actions of that administration) the Teflon effect is in full force.

That news I mentioned? It's a multi-part story. First, it's the Paul O'Neil story. The fired former Bush Treasury Secretary revealed in a recent book by Ron Suskind, and detailed in a 60 Minutes interview Sunday, that Bush and team had begun planning for the invasion of Iraq days after the election. That Bush, in that now-famous quote going around the world, in cabinet meetings was "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people." By now you all know this and more. The BBC today did a longer story on this affair than NPR. The world is chomping at the bit for ways to nail this administration. We're with 'em.

Not surprisingly, some American pundits immediately tried to dismiss these volatile criticisms as sour grapes. O'Neil was fired, so he's angry, and this is his revenge. He was fired, basically for speaking up about his opposition to the tax cuts.

He reveals in the interview that Bush was initially against the 2nd round of cuts. Bush actually was concerned that they had already given too many cuts to the wealthy--Bush's words, not mine. This was a clear acknowledgement that the administration knew the bulk of the cuts were going to the rich, unlike their then-and-now insistence of the opposite. More lies exposed. But Rove insisted they "stick to principle" and so Bush acceded to another round of manna for the rich.

O'Neil thought this was bad policy, and said so publicly. Goodbye, O'Neil.

So now the media appears to be doing the administration's dirty work by dismissing O'Neil's reports and claims as sour grapes.

Well I say hooray for sour grapes. While I don't believe for a minute that O'Neil's motivation is what is being ascribed to him,if it were, who could blame him? And if it were, that doesn't for a second negate the veracity or integrity of his claims. If we aren't allowed to act out of anger at injustice, we are silenced.

The tactic may or may not work against Dean and O'Neil, but that won't stop the Rovians from trying. Of course, now they want to investigate O'Neil for exposing classified material. That isn't the case, as is obvious, but the administration's response to questions about whether this investigation will be seen as vindictive is,"well, we don't see it that way." Hold on, there's a pig flying outside my window.

By the way, I think this news about the clear acknowledgment that the tax cuts benefited the rich are far more important than the news of the pre-9/11 Iraq invasion plans, or that Bush was disengaged at meetings.

For one, we all know he's the tool of the puppetmasters Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld et. al. It is too simplistic to say he merely does what he's told, but we all know who's running things.

We also all know about the Iraq plans. That "news" has been all over the progressive media for over a year. In fact, we know that Perle and Wolfowitz proposed this neo-con strategy back in the Bush Pere administration, but Poppy vetoed it as too volatile--and offensive. When Bush Jr. won his coup, they immediately renewed this long-time scenario. 9/11 gave them the creds (according to them) to proceed. This is not news! It's incredible that mainstream media would try to pretend it is.

The next bit of hopeful news is the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace's report that the administration 'systematically misrepresented the threat posed Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs." Julian Borger, writing in the Guardian, suggests that the report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the Endowment, "is likely to re-ignite calls for a commission to look into the government's pre-war intelligence claims."

Finally, an Army War College study reports that the Iraq invasion was "an unnecessary preventive war of choice" that has robbed resources and attention from the more critical fight against Al Qaeda in a hopeless US quest for absolute security. The whole story, as reported by Will Dunham of Reuters, is at the end of this post. I'm reprinting it because it has so far received little or no national coverage

And then there's the Valerie Plame incident, the investigation of which Asscroft has finally recused himself from.

While it may come to pass that any of these reports, or the aggregate of all of them, or the seeping out of the news of totality of the environmental destruction, and no doubt more exposes to come, will finally result in positive action against this administration's continued disregard for the truth, the constitution and the will of the people (and the O'Neil story still has legs), I admit to pessimism.

There are impeachable offenses here. Ultimately Clinton was impeached because he lied. The lies of this administration continue unabated, and continue to be exposed, yet so far there is no sense of national outrage among the body politic, no indication that the administration will be held accountable for its calumnies, and not a heck of a lot of diminishment of Bush's standing in the polls.

A while back the pundits we're saying that Congress had no stomach for impeachment, after the Clinton debacle, since many congresspeople, while they went along with it, did not support it (wha?) and felt the whole think was, well, icky.

A lot has happened since then. It's time to renew the calls for impeachment of this damnable president.

THE AMERICAN WAR COLLEGE REPORT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Iraq invasion was "an unnecessary preventive war of choice" that has robbed resources and attention from the more critical fight against al Qaeda in a hopeless U.S. quest for absolute security, according to a study recently published by the U.S. Army War College.

The 56-page document written by Jeffrey Record, a veteran defense expert who serves as a visiting research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, represents a blistering assessment of what President Bush calls the U.S. global war on terrorism.

Pentagon officials on Monday said Record was entitled to his opinion, but reiterated Bush's view that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terrorism.

Record urged U.S. leaders to refocus Bush's broad war to target Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, and its allies. Record said the Iraq war was a detour from real anti-terrorism efforts.

Record criticized the Bush administration for lumping together al Qaeda and President Saddam Hussein's Iraq "as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat."

"This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action," Record wrote.

"The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al Qaeda," Record wrote.

Faculty at the Army War College, an academic institute run by the Army since 1901, produce analyzes of military and national security issues, with scholars encouraged to take a critical look a existing policies.

Lawrence Di Rita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said, "There's no question he's entitled to his views."

"People are publishing stuff all the time. That's the value of kind of having people throw analysis out there. You learn even from analysis you don't agree with. I don't even want to characterize it as something I don't agree with because I just haven't read it," said Di Rita, adding that he does not know if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plans to read the document.

Record faulted the administration for fusing disparate enemies such as rogue states, terrorist groups and weapons of mass destruction proliferators into a monolithic threat.

In doing so, he said, the administration "may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States."

Record said the administration's declared goals "are unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security," as well as being fiscally, politically and militarily unsustainable.

These goals include destroying al Qaeda and other such transnational groups, making Iraq a stable democracy, bringing democracy to the rest of the autocratic Middle East, ending terrorism as a means of irregular warfare, and stopping proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to real and potential enemies, Record said.

In an interview, Record took issue with the very concept of a war on terrorism.

"Terrorism is a common noun. It's a technique. How do you make war on terrorism as opposed to specific terrorist organizations?" Record asked.

"I don't think that it is within America's power to rid the world of terrorism. ... The idea that you're going to be able to expunge this form of warfare from the world, I think, is really stretching it."

Douglas Lovelace, head of the Strategic Studies Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Record works, said the report "should enter into the debate or at least be considered by those who are formulating strategy and policy."