Olbermann Kicks Ass - Again!!!

Special Comment from 12/06/2007



Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the President's cataclysmic deception about Iran.

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There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr.. Bush has left us with tonight.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole -- or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked -- at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so -- whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.

After Ms Perino's announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.

In August the President was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what "everybody thought" about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president Ahmadinejad:

"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon."

And as he said that, Mr.. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?

Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used, to scare us about Iraq?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.

Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.

The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.

And the mind reels at the thought of a Vice President fully briefed on the revised Intel as long as two weeks ago -- briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago -- who never bothered to mention it to his boss.

It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan's presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller.

Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president's evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is.

What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation -- or a criminal one?

Mr. Bush -- if you can still hear us -- if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you're Remington Steele -- you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the Intel is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.

The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you -- and your country -- blind.

Not merely in monetary terms, Mr.. Bush, but more importantly of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: Honesty, Law, Moral Force.

Mr.. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your Administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860's and 1870's and 1880's -- the ones that abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland...

Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr.. Bush.

Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them -- the opponents whom history proved right.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland... Bush.

Would that we could let this President off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.

But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian, snake-oil salesman.

The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post's website.

It is staggering.

March 31st: "Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon..."

June 5th: Iran's "pursuit of nuclear weapons..."

June 19th: "consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon..."

July 12th: "the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons..."

August 6th: "this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon..."

Notice a pattern?

Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the President, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror -- but there may not even be a tree there...

McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.

August 9th: "They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program..."

August 28th: "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons..."

October 4th: "you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon..."

October 17th: "until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have the **capacity**, the **knowledge**, in order to make a nuclear weapon."

Before August 9th, it's: Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

After August 9th, it's: Desire, pursuit, want...knowledge technology know-how to enrich uranium.

And we are to believe, Mr.. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003...

And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th...

And that's just a coincidence?

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And we are to believe, Mr.. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?

Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true -- something like "what the definition of is is -- but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.

Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial... but ethically, it is a lie.

It is indefensible.

You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.

You, Mr.. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.

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And more over, you have just revealed that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.

We are to believe that the Intel Community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?

And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?

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You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August...

But you also knew... it was... accurate.

And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent...

You merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside...

While you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of -- as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote "nuclear holocaust" -- and, as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: "World War Three."

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My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase "George Bush has no business being president."

Well, guess what?

Tonight: hanged by your own words... convicted by your own deliberate lies...

You, sir, have no business... being president.

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Good night, and good luck.

Bush Uses Constitution to wipe his ass!!!

From the UK Times:

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.

From USA Today:

Lakhdar Boumediene is an Algerian who emigrated to Bosnia in the 1990s and became a citizen. After the 9/11 attacks, Bosnian police picked up Boumediene and five other Algerians when U.S. authorities charged that the six had been plotting to attack the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.

When a three-month probe found no evidence to support the charges, Bosnia's top court set the suspects free. At U.S. insistence and in defiance of the court, however, Bosnian police scooped them up again and they ended up in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They've been there ever since.

Is Boumediene a murderous terrorist? An innocent victim? Something in between? Who knows? More than six years after the 9/11 attacks, Boumediene and more than 300 other detainees still sit at Guantanamo, all but a few with no formal charges and the functional equivalent of a life sentence.


The Bush administration says these detainees are the worst of the worst, which is meant to sound like a good reason to lock them up and lose the key. But that's what former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said before hundreds were let go, many when authorities apparently concluded there was little or no evidence against them.

More important, locking people away indefinitely without charges, even if they are not U.S. citizens, violates one of this nation's bedrock principles. The doctrine of habeas corpus guarantees the right of the accused to challenge their detention before an impartial judge. It's one of the sacred rights that for centuries has distinguished the United States from dictatorships.

Regrettably, the Bush administration has an abysmal record of using the war on terror to justify brushing aside this and other safeguards. The U.S. Supreme Court has slapped down the White House and a too-compliant Congress three times already, ruling that imprisoning detainees on Cuban soil to keep them out of U.S. courts is a ruse, that even suspected terrorists have rights, and that the courts have a role in reviewing these cases.

Indeed

Couldn't have said it better myself!!!

Truthdig:

“Watch What You Say”: The Post-9/11 Dixie Chicked:

* Like truth, comedian Bill Maher was an early casualty of war. Discussing 9/11’s skyjackers on the Sept. 17, 2001, episode of “Politically Incorrect,” Maher stated: “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly. Stupid maybe, but not cowardly.” Maher’s remarks prompted Bush’s then-spokesman Ari Fleischer to warn: “Watch what you say.” The Disney-owned ABC network canceled Maher’s show in June 2002.

* At a September 2003 fundraiser for presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, actor Ed Begley Jr. said: “There’s a boycott list on the Internet for all the people who spoke out against the war, to write letters to studios telling them you don’t want to see shows featuring Jamie Cromwell, [myself], Ed Asner, Tim Robbins. ... Janeane Garofalo [took] a big hit. They’ve suffered financially, can’t get work now. They’ve been blackballed. People don’t want to hire them. ... Janeane gets so much hate mail. ... I didn’t work from when that boycott list happened until just a few weeks ago. ... I’ve never only worked three days in nine months since ... 1967.” Reactionary Web sites, including celiberal.com and boycott-hollywood.net, urged boycotts of activist actors.

Does Size really matter here???

Terror watch list almost 800,000 names... Does the size of the list matter or should the QUALITY of the list matter more??? Who is on the list any way - the dregs of humanity or people the Bush Crime Family doesn't like???