Bush is Osama's love puppy: Five years after Bush vowed vengeance against Osama Bin Laden and any nation which harbored him, Pakistan has announced (according to ABC News) that the leader of Al Qaeda "will not face capture in Pakistan if he agrees to lead a 'peaceful life.'" Pakistan also harbors A.Q. Khan, nuke-seller to terrorists.Yet Bush continues to treat Pakistan as an ally, and even gives that nation aid!
And ABC is airing a deceit-filled docudrama which accuses Bill Clinton of being soft on Bin Laden!
And progressive writers have yet to notice this astounding story! Can you imagine how the right-wing media would react if such a thing happened on a Democrat's watch?
The past is never dead: One of the big surprises of the war in Lebanon was Hezbollah's ability to fend off Israeli mechanized units. Very few people have noticed this footnote to Max Rodenbeck's NYRB piece on the conflict:
Ironically, however, some anti-tank gadgetry is likely to have been 1980s vintage and American-made. The Reagan administration plied Iran with TOW wire-guided missiles as part of the Iran-contra boondoggle, a scandal which, incidentally, implicated the current administration's leading Hezbollah hawk, Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council's Middle East policy chief. Iran may have shipped these goods to Hezbollah.(Emphasis added.) Do you realize that we have a whole new generation of conservatives who do not know that Reagan illegally sold arms to Iran? Not only are they ignorant of this history, they will never allow themselves to be taught. Yet these same red-staters consider the Democrats soft on Iran...
Kathy and Clint: Looks like Katherine Harris, despite running the most disastrous campaign in memory, will be the Republican senatorial candidate in Florida. Wags are saying that she got the nod based on pure name recognition. Hell, if that's the sole criterion for electoral success, Pablo Escobar and Charlie Manson should've run...
Meanwhile, Clint Curtis -- the voter-fraud whistleblower -- looks poised for a victory over his primary opponent.
In case you don't know, Curtis hopes to modify our current mania for free trade with a return to policies designed to protect American workers (the policies in effect during this nation's most prosperous years). He would also like use import tarrifs to pay for health care for American citizens -- a damned fine idea, if ya asks me.
Go, Clint, go!
Cheney vs. Plame: David Corn doesn't come out and say it -- and may not even think it -- but his latest piece raises the possibility that it was Cheney himself who learned of Plame's covert status during his trips to CIA in 2002. That proposition, in turn, buttresses the long-held suspicion that Cheney masterminded the retaliatory strikes against her and her husband.
About that ABC 9/11 shlockudrama: The script blames the Washington Post for an alleged "security breach" which, in fact, was committed by the far-right, Moonie-owned Washington Times. "Mistakes" of this sort don't happen by accident. Once again, right-wing truthiness triumphs over fact.
They're giving away land in California: Jerry Lewis is the California Republican congressman whose name cropped up in the Cunningham scandal. He also stands at the center of the scandal involving lobbyist Bill Lowery.
Lewis owns a nice little chunk of California property, which is abutted by a 41-acre spread which belonged -- until recently -- to two supporters, Jack and Laura Dangermond. Turns out the Dangermonds also own a company -- Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. -- which received $55.4 million in suspicious earmarks.
In a surprising act of generosity, those nice Dangermonds donated their 41 acres to the city of Redlands.
Why would anyone give away property worth more than $2 million? Seems that the Dangermonds' donation carried one striking privso: The land could not be developed. They insisted on that codicil in order to keep the value of surrounding property high.
As noted earlier, Congressman Jerry Lewis owns a chunk of surrounding property.
Shame on you if you think that this act of generosity had anything to do with the millions that went to the Dangermonds' firm. There was no quid pro quo -- as Bush the elder once said of Iran-contra.
6 comments:
wow; dont know whether to curse my slow life or joe for making it impossible to keep up with him without speeding up!
yup; scooped again. but this time, not completely. with regard to the david corn piece, what was most fascinating about it in my mind was not so much the implications of cheney's role in pressuring the agents for favorable data, but that valerie plame was in charge of the group that was investigating iraq's wmd's!
we've heard through rawstory and msnbc before the plame was involved in iran's wmd status, but this is the first indication of her role - which was managerial and pivotal - in iraq.
i've expressed several times previously my suspicions that plame's role was far more wrapped up in the admin's agenda than was being discussed. and of course, she could never discuss it publicly.
but there it is; not only was wilson pursued for calling out the prez for misleading the congress and the public on iraq's wmd's, but the method of punishing him also got rid of an agent in charge of all that fact-finding they hate so much.
the excuse they used to out her - that she set up her husband's boondoggle - always seemed terribly lame to me. though corn doesn't insinuate this in his article, i've always been suspicious that cheney just nearly had the big one thinking about getting rid of these two problems with one stone.
the other issue involved the lead story on this post, namely that pakistan just cut a sweet laissez faire deal with al-qaeda. (intense visual, by the by.)
in point of fact, keith olbermann ran this as his lead story tonight, it is THE headline on buzzflash, and rawstory has it posted in bold red headlines.
have not canvassed the blogs, but it's bound to get coverage, and then some.
by the by, keith delivered another of his amazing smackdowns tonight, directly at bush. ended it with the great question of another era of terror:
have you no shred of decency left, sir?
quite gratifying.
i'll keep the fable of the tortoise and the hare in mind as i continue plodding through to complete my thoughts on john dean's new book, now delayed by the amazing book salon exchange over at fdl. could not justify posting without including references to that fun stiff.
thanks for all this, joe; so glad you're doing all this for us!
Nice art.
And about the "name recognition = electability boost" crap--if Katherin Harris' name translates to electability now, even O.J. Simpson has a shot.
Re: IranContra. Reagan and Bush should have both been impeached, and Oliver North and his buddies executed for treason. We'd be living in a much better world now.
Joe, can you do us a small favor and break your topics up into separate posts? It's harder to comment when you cover three or four subjects in a single post. When you're on tear like this it's hard to keep up!
Re: Pakistan. Does anyone else here have a growing apprehension about this little corner of the Mideast meltdown?
Sure do, uni.
Clint Curtis is, of course, the computer programmer who was asked by
a Florida legislator to write software that would allow the switching of votes on electronic machines. That legislator is the Republican incumbent in the seat Curtis seeks. Later Curtis was involved in an investigation of corruption in the FL DOT. He has a hair-raising story about the suspicious suicide of Raymond Lemme of the FL Inspector General's office.
Another FL primary winner was Dr.
Robert Bowman, Lt. Col. USAF, (ret.) a veteran of 101 combat missions in
Vietnam, and the former head of the "Star Wars" program before it was "Star Wars" (he resigned when he realized its potential as an offensive weapon). Three years ago Dr. Bowman gave a speech "Some Dare Call it Treason."
http://www.rmbowman.com/ssn/rally031025.htm
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