It angers me Hillary's in and Big John is out. The war recommendations made by John Kerry in 2004 (phased withdrawal, regional diplomacy, involvement by other nations) are now conventional wisdom -- except in the White House. Hillary is still bobbing and weaving.
Oh...and enough already about Skull and freakin' Bones. Americans adore the idea that secret societies run the world. Trouble is, no good evidence supports the thesis. Don't dare presume to think you can take me to school on this point; I doubt very much that you've read anything relevant to this question that I have not. We're all stocked up on crazy here; try selling it to Alex Jones.
Diebold: Brad Friedman has a really interesting story up. You know those office keys which open up all the Diebold machines? Turns out Diebold publishes big, juicy close-ups of 'em. Someone actually managed to grind working copies of those keys using those photos as a guide!
Cheney: If you like shock value, you'll love the new Wolf Blitzer interview. Highlights:
(Re: Saddam) "He was not being contained. He was not being contained, Wolf."
"...and he had, in fact, produced and used weapons of mass destruction previously, and he retained the capability to produce that kind of stuff in the future." In other words, we'll bomb the crap out of you if you're capable of doing something we don't like.
"He kicked out all the inspectors." Then why were they in Iraq just before the war?
"He'd started two wars. He had violated 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions." Bush took fewer years to match that "wars started" record -- and how many resolutions has Israel sneered at?
On the war:Q: But there is a terrible situation.It just gets better and better after that.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, there is not. There is not. There's problems, ongoing problems...
4 comments:
Interesting to see that "pre-emptive attack" is a policy not limited to the current executive.
Oh, come on, give us a long column.
I agree about Kerry and I'm disappointed about his leaving the race.
Good interview with Wolf. Though I feel more like an ambulance chaser now. I think Cheney's going to crack soon. He semi-cracked at the SOTU by laughing behind Bush's back during the part about oil, etc.
Miss P.
sofla said...
I've liked Kerry well enough in the past to contribute money to various Senate races he ran, and also to consider him my favorite prior to the '04 race (as well as contributing to that effort).
But his performance in that race as the 'safe' establishment alternative to alleged firebrand/wild man (read: populist) Howard Dean has given me pause. Either Kerry wasn't the man I thought, or he was subject to considerable blackmail or death threats, or just maybe that Russell Trust issue is a live one.
I suppose it can be denied that secret societies are important actors in world history, if you simply define some of them as not that secret?
However, even some of the fairly well known organizations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), have played impossibly important roles in world history, without the general public's awareness whatsoever.
Historians Shoup and Mintner (whose work appears in 'Trilateralism,' ed. by Holly Sklar) researched the archives of the CFR, and found that CFR taskforces had acted as a virtual shadow State Department: their pre- and post-WW II recommendations were adopted wholesale as official US policy by FDR, both creating the war and creating the entire edifice of the post-war international world order.
Bold claims, but consider the list of such policies they promulgated which were adopted-- the Lend/Lease policy, the Destroyers for Bases policy, the escalating sanctions on Japan up to trying to shut off their supply of oil (which they frankly admitted in their recommendation would likely lead to war with Japan), and etc. In the post-war period, their recommendations prompted the founding of the International Monetary Fund (the IMF), the World Bank, the World Court, the United Nations, and etc.
This is actually even less influence for but this one group than alleged by Carroll Quigley, who was a professor at Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Georgetown (where Bill Clinton said he was one of his most important influences). Quigley had been asked to review the CFR records, and in them, he found similar evidence of their widespread influence in this country, as well as their connection with the British based Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), and their so-called Roundtable organizations (of which the CFR is but one).
When large percentages of the relevant national or world leadership show up for private confabs, and then achieve airtight security and secrecy to the point that the world hardly knows they are meeting or who is meeting, it is not smart to presume nothing is going on but hobnobbing, backslapping, and social/sexual shenanigans. Maybe that might be true in limited cases, like the Bohemian Grove, but not generally. Not for the Trilateral Commission boys, the Bildeburgers (so-called), the Propaganda Due (P-2) Masonic Lodge in Italy, or the Founding Fathers' Freemason majority.
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