The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that
would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA
officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war
prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the
amendments...
Bush regime panic was triggered by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v.
Rumsfeld, which ruled that the Bush regime's existing military
tribunals for Guantánamo detainees violated both U.S. military law and parts
of the Geneva Conventions.
The Bush Regime's reaction to that ruling was on par with General Saito's reaction
to the Conventions in The Bridge on the River Kwai
Since it was pretty clear Republicans were widely expected to get their asses kicked in the 2006 midterms and lose control of one or both houses of Congress (sound familiar?) with Republicans facing the likely end of four years of unified control of Washington. Before that happened the Bush regime hurry-up-quick rammed through the Military Commissions Act.
Remember: it authorized new military tribunals, drastically narrowed the definition of punishable war crimes under U.S. law, gave the president broader authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions, and attempted to block detainees from challenging their detention through habeas corpus petitions in federal court.
There was little debate or somber reflection of what this might mean.
Instead it flew through the Republican-controlled Senate on September 28, 2006. The vote was, Republicans: 53 despicably predictable yesses, 1 no, 1 absent, Democrats: 12 shameful yesses, 32 no, and Independent: 0 yes, 1 no.
Then it flew through the Republican-controlled House the very next day, September 29, 2006. The vote was, Republicans: 218 despicably predictable yesses, 7 no, 5 not voting, Democrats: 32 shameful yesses, 162 no, 7 not voting, Independent: 0 yes, 1 no
Then George W. Bush signed it into law on October 17, 2006. But in 2008, the Supreme Court (No kidding! Guess you had to be there!) ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that the law’s attempt to strip detainees of habeas corpus rights was unconstitutional. The court was split 5-4, and it will surprise absolutely no one that the four Republican-appointed dissenters were John Roberts, Nino Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
You see kids, the depraved values and trajectory of the Republican party were there for anyone to see who cared to look with honest eyes. A Republican president and his blood-thirsty regent who believed the president should be able to rule as an emperor (as long as he was a Republican.) A Republican Congress eager to let the president do it (as long as he was a Republican.) And a slim Republicans minority on the court -- two appointed by Dubya, one appointed by Dubya's daddy, and one appointed by Dubya's daddy's boss -- willing to bless that unholy Republican aspiration.
I keep 20 or 30 of these examples in my back pocket for when our Never Trump
supervisors figuratively put their feet up on our coffee table, swill our good
beer and begin to wax nostalgic about the "good old days" of the GOP before
Trump.
I usually get through three or four examples before they block me and stomp
away. Which is weird, 'cause didn't you want to talk about the past?
Halliburton and Cheney: War Profiteers in Chief Fight to Keep Their
Wallets Fat
Halliburton's stock has risen 200% since the invasion of Iraq three and a
half years ago. David Lesar, its CEO, made over $40,000,000 in 2004 alone.
Until very recently, there has been relatively little penetration into
the popular psyche of the role played by Halliburton in particular and
other private military contractors in general.
The reason is simple: the Bush Administration and its Congressional
foot soldiers ranging from George Allen and John Warner of Virginia to
Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania have refused at every turn to allow for
any oversight at all, even though Democratic Senators have asked for
such bi-partisan review for years.
Deferring to Trump, G.O.P. Lawmakers Resist a Public Accounting on
Iran
Nearly three weeks into a war that polls show is unpopular, top
Republicans have yet to call administration officials to testify about
it, arguing that hearings would put divisions on display.
More than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two years, according to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity. Those companies donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush—a little over $500,000—than to any other politician over the last dozen years, the Center found.
Kellogg, Brown & Root, the subsidiary of Halliburton—which Vice President Dick Cheney led prior to being chosen as Bush’s running mate in August 2000—was the top recipient of federal contracts for the two countries, with more than $2.3 billion awarded to the company. Bechtel Group, a major government contractor with similarly high-ranking ties, was second at around $1.03 billion.
However, dozens of lower-profile, but well-connected, companies shared in the reconstruction bounty. Their tasks ranged from rebuilding Iraq’s government, police, military and media to providing translators for use in interrogations and psychological operations. There are even contractors to evaluate the contractors.
Nearly 60 percent of the companies had employees or board members who either served in or had close ties to the executive branch for Republican and Democratic administrations, for members of Congress of both parties, or at the highest levels of the military.
The results of the Center’s six-month investigation provide the most comprehensive list to date of American contractors in the two nations that were attacked in Washington’s war on terror. Based on the findings, it did not appear that any one government agency knew the total number of contractors or what they were doing. Congressional sources said they hoped such a full picture would emerge from the General Accounting Office, which has begun investigating the postwar contracting process amid allegations of fraud and cronyism.
The Center’s investigation focused on the three agencies that awarded most of the Iraq and Afghanistan contracts in 2002 and 2003—the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. It found that nearly every one of the 10 largest contracts awarded for Iraq and Afghanistan went to companies employing former high-ranking government officials or individuals with close ties to those agencies or Congress.
In addition, those top 10 contractors were established political donors, contributing nearly $11 million to national political parties, candidates and political action committees since 1990, according to an analysis of campaign finance records.
Indeed, most of the companies that won contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan were political players. According to the Center’s analysis, the companies, their political action committees and their employees contributed a total of nearly $49 million to national political campaigns and parties since 1990. Donations to Republican Party committees—the Republican National Committee, the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee—outpaced those to Democratic committees, $12.7 million to $7.1 million. Among individual candidates, President George Bush received more money from these companies than any other, a little over $500,000.
Firm That Planned Trump’s Jan. 6 Rally Received No-Bid Contracts
This administration has given the company, staffed by the president’s allies, multimillion-dollar contracts it was guaranteed to win.
The Trump administration has bypassed regular procedures to award more than $13 million in contracts to the company that helped organize President Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021, repeatedly creating hidden business opportunities that only one firm could win.
Those contracts have transformed Event Strategies Inc., staffed by veterans of Mr. Trump’s campaigns and first White House, from a minor federal contractor into the government’s highest-paid event planner. The firm has arranged celebrations of the Navy’s 250th birthday and a Treasury Department event to tout new savings accounts for children, called “Trump accounts.”
By law, federal agencies are generally supposed to seek competing bids before awarding contracts, to get the best value for taxpayers. Event Strategies won contracts that were particularly lucrative, the kind that other companies say they would have liked to win.
In at least five cases, other firms never got the chance.
Instead, the agencies invoked legal loopholes meant for special situations — instances of urgent need, or cases where only one specialized vendor could do a job — and gave the contracts to Event Strategies.
A pair of senior Democratic lawmakers on Thursday demanded answers from the White House about efforts by Jared Kushner to raise billions of dollars from Middle East governments for his private-equity fund while also serving as an envoy in the region for the Trump administration.
Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the most senior member of his party on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a pair of letters to the White House and to Mr. Kushner’s firm that they had “serious concerns about whether the White House is letting Mr. Kushner use his influence for personal financial gain.”
It is time once again for a feature you will only find on OG Liberal blogs
that dare to dig back into the Before Time to notice how much of the deranged,
disastrous Trump policies are not an aberration but a continuation of
the trajectory the Republican party has been on for decades.
Now we could spend this post talking about Republican hypocrisy around debts
and deficits, their reliance on demonizing relatively powerless groups to win
elections, or their obsession with stripping women of their bodily
autonomy. But since today's headlines are all about a ruinous Republican
war-of-choice in the Middle East, let's talk about that. And let's begin
by reminding ourselves that next week will mark the 22nd anniversary of this
moment from the 2004 White House Correspondents' Association
Dinner.
You know, back in the Good Old Days! Back when Republicans took America
to war soberly and seriously, with careful preparation and on the basis of
unimpeachable intelligence!
Yes, that was the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, cracking wise
about not finding WMD in Iraq. Which, you might remember, was the
entire predicate for that disaster. And right
therewith him, applauding and laughing their asses off, were Washington's
political elite, the cream of the Washington press corps and their celebrity
guests. Because Bush making light of not being able to find the WMD was
just so damn funny!
You will also remember that, three years later, as the Bush administration was
imploding and the war in Iraq was now indisputably a catastrophe – after
Hurricane Katrina, after Terri Schiavo, after Republicans were crushed in the
midterms and Bush’s poll numbers had cratered – we find Bush's Brain, Karl
Rove, doing this at the 2007 WHCD:
And who's that right behind Rove? One of his backup dancers on that
infamous evening?
Yes it's David Gregory. Four years after the Iraq invasion, three years
after Bush’s WMD joke video, during a period when the Bush administration was
under heavy criticism over the war and the Valerie Plame scandal, there’s
Dancin' David Gregory happily going along with the bit.
A year later Gregory would be promoted to the Big Chair on Meet the Press,
where he would spend the next six years destroying whatever shreds of
credibility that show still had. In 2018 he would be replaced by Chuck
Todd, who was just as terrible as Gregory in exactly the same way.
Todd would go on being an embarrassment to his profession for
nine long years, until 2023, when they replaced him with Kristen Welker,
who is just as terrible as Gregory and Todd in exactly the same way.
So pardon me if I'm not shedding too many tears over what Bezos is doing to
The Washington Post or Ellison is doing to CBS News. Yes, it's terrible,
but the legacy media was doing quite an efficient job of immolating themselves
in a bonfire of cloistered arrogance long before Trump's billionaire
button men
showed up.
Now that we've covered Bush making jokes about WMD at the White House
Correspondent’s dinner during a time which our Never Trump friends desperately
want us to remember as the Good Old Days of serious, cautious Republican
leadership, don't forget that our Never Trump friends also would like us to
remember that time as a period of Republican transparency. None of this
"hiding critical wartime information from the American public" nonsense.
And, of course, we are to believe that Republicans during this time were
always respectful, never attacking or slandering their critics. All of
that is Trump stuff!
Rice Agrees to Meet 9/11 Commission But Only in Private
After coming under intense criticism, the White House offered Thursday to
have National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice meet again with the 9/11
Commission. But White House officials said she would appear only in
private and not under oath.
Rice was the center of criticism during the recent 9/11 hearings for
refusing to appear. Former Senator Bob Kerrey said “My gosh, I think she
was on every single network the day the commission opened its hearing this
week, attacking our witnesses.”
The New York Times also reports–almost in passing — that Rice is planning
to leave her job at the end of the year.
Meanwhile the White House continued to attack former counterterrorism
chief Richard Clarke who is accusing the Bush administration of not
heeding warnings before Sept. 11.
Senator Tom Daschle said “I have a simple request for the president today:
Please ask the people around you to stop the character attacks they are
waging against Richard Clarke. Ask them to stop their attempts to conceal
information and confuse facts. Ask them to stop the long effort that has
made the 9/11 commission’s work more difficult than it should
be.”
And of course you remember this.
So let’s compare Bush’s Iraq debacle with Trump’s Iran debacle. The Good
Old Days when Republicans were awesome, and the Bad New Days when Republicans
are terrible.
Lying us into war? Check.
Claiming that we had no choice because the threat was imminent and
terrifying? Check.
Making up excuses after the fact? Check.
Radically downplaying the downsides? Overpromising and
underdelivering? Check and check.
Complete failure to prepare the public for what this war would really
mean? Check.
Keeping critical information from the public? Check.
With Threats and Claims of ‘Treason,’ Trump Pressures Media on the War
The Trump administration has unleashed a multifaceted pressure campaign
against news organizations as it increasingly bristles at media coverage
of a Middle East military operation that many Americans oppose.
Official Pentagon briefings now include attacks on outlets like CNN, with
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nit-picking headlines. President Trump is
turning to his bully pulpit on Truth Social to accuse “Highly Unpatriotic
‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES” about the war and musing about
“Charges for TREASON.”
The goal seems to be pressuring journalists to back off critical coverage
of the war effort, or to at least encourage the public to second-guess
reporting that runs counter to the administration’s preferred narrative.
And the effort has gone well beyond words.
Mr. Trump’s top media regulator, Brendan Carr of the Federal
Communications Commission, issued an explicit warning to broadcast
television networks on social media, writing that “hoaxes and news
distortions” could lead to the revocation of licenses for local stations,
a threat that Mr. Trump said he was “so thrilled to see.”
Surely there was no Bush administration equivalent of these attacks on the
free press during the Before Time, right?
Throughout the Iraq war, the Bush administration has complained about the
tenor of media coverage in Iraq. Paul Bremer did so during the first year
of the American presence there, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as
well as Vice President Dick Cheney make the point repeatedly. The
complaint that we see only the bad news, not the good, has become
increasingly prevalent within the U.S. armed forces as well.
…the broad argument by the American media’s critics is often badly
overstated. While the overall image of Iraq conveyed by the mainstream
media may be somewhat more negative than reality, it is not far off. If we
lose in Iraq, it will most likely be because of events on the ground
there, not a prematurely wavering political support here.
In fact, one can make a reasonable argument that the American public’s
view on Iraq is just about where it should be given the facts. The public
is enormously impressed by our troops, but depressed about the general
lack of major progress on the ground and upset with the Bush
administration for overpromising and underpreparing in regard to the
war.
And then there is the filthy business of war profiteering.
Halliburton and Cheney: War Profiteers in Chief Fight to Keep Their
Wallets Fat
Halliburton's stock has risen 200% since the invasion of Iraq three and a
half years ago. David Lesar, its CEO, made over $40,000,000 in 2004 alone.
We all by now know that Dick Cheney retired from the Pentagon in 1993 to
accede to the throne of Halliburton, an oil field services company based
in Houston. After Mr. Cheney left Halliburton with tens of millions of
dollars in his pocket largely earned because of his connections to Middle
East dictators, Halliburton had to cough up $2.3 billion in cash, about
$1.2 billion in stock and another $55 million in IOUs to help pay off the
tens of thousands of people in this country who had suffered and/or died
of asbestos poisoning at the hand of Dresser, which Mr. Cheney had
acquired and for which Mr. Cheney was (and apparently still is) handsomely
compensated. If this sounds a bit like Mr. Cheney's due diligence with
respect to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it should. He never
bothered to look at what Dresser had before he bought it for Halliburton
and he never bothered to look at what Iraq had before he broke it for the
U.S...
Until very recently, there has been relatively little penetration into the
popular psyche of the role played by Halliburton in particular and other
private military contractors in general.
The reason is simple: the Bush Administration and its Congressional foot
soldiers ranging from George Allen and John Warner of Virginia to Rick
Santorum of Pennsylvania have refused at every turn to allow for any
oversight at all, even though Democratic Senators have asked for such
bi-partisan review for years.
Of course, it’s still early days in Trump’s Iran Fiasco, but does anyone doubt
with so much money sloshing around and so little oversight, that Trump and his
mob of looters and plunderers will soon be stuffing their pockets as fast as
possible?
The Oil Tankers Trump Seized Are Costing the U.S. Millions of
Dollars
Although President Trump said seizing tankers would be a financial boon,
the cost of maintaining just one aging ship has already reached $47
million.
The seizures have put the U.S. government in a financial bind. The ships
are highly expensive to maintain. And the Trump administration cannot
legally sell the oil in these tankers without a judge’s permission.
Maintaining the seized tankers has already cost the United States tens of
millions of dollars — in one case, $47 million in only three months — and
complicates Mr. Trump’s claims of swift financial victories from his
military operations targeting Venezuela and Iran.
'It Takes Money to Kill Bad Guys': Trump's Iran War Set to Boost Profits
For These Defense Contractors
Administration officials have signaled that Trump will soon request
Congress approve tens of billions of dollars in supplemental funding to
replenish U.S. weaponry supplies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed
on Thursday that the Pentagon had sent the White House a request $200
billion in additional funds, though he stressed that the figure "could
move."
"It takes money to kill bad guys," Hegseth told reporters. "So we’re going
back to Congress to ensure we’re properly funded, for what’s been done,
what we may have to do in the future." He added that the money was needed
to ensure that the country's stockpile of ammunition is "not just
refilled, but above and beyond.”
Then there is this depraved Trump-era innovation. From
The Atlantic,
March 18, 2026:
Maybe Turning War Into a Casino Was a Bad Idea?
A disturbing new low in the Polymarket era
On March 10, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported on a missile that had
been launched from Iran. The warhead hit an open area outside Jerusalem,
which Fabian confirmed by speaking with rescue services and reviewing
footage of the explosion. He wrote a short post on The Times of Israel’s
live blog and moved on.
Meanwhile, gamblers had wagered millions on the unfolding events of the
conflict. Fabian’s post became the subject of a major dispute on
Polymarket, a popular prediction market where people can bet on the
outcome of almost anything. The site had allowed users to guess when Iran
would initiate “a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel’s soil”: More
than $14 million was riding on whether such an attack had happened March
10.
People started reaching out asking Fabian to change his article. Some
argued that Israel Defense Forces had not officially mentioned such an
attack occurring on that day, and others said that the explosion he had
reported was the result of a missile being intercepted, which according to
Polymarket’s terms wouldn’t count as a strike “on Israel’s soil.”
Confident in his reporting, Fabian did not amend the text.
And just to button it up, let's go back to the promises these two Republican
presidents made to the American people when they were candidates.
During the October 11, 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore, Republican
candidate George W. Bush said this:
“If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation,
but strong, they'll welcome us… Our nation stands alone right now in terms
of power, and that's why we've got to be humble.”
And this:
"I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world
and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.'"
24 years later, here is Republican candidate Donald Trump running for president:
You see kids, Trump was not a break with the Republican past, he was a
continuation of it: the end-state of a trajectory the GOP has been on for half
a century.
Of course the parallels aren’t exact, but if you put all of the malignant,
corrupt, arrogant elements of the Bush administration's war with Iraq into a
compression machine that would make it all bigger, faster, dumber, much louder
and more reckless and with a giant, billionaire-backed hammer coming down on
the media… you’d have Trump’s Iran War.
All three of them were lying. Reagan was lying after the fact. Bush was lying before the invasion, laying the fraudulent predicate for it. And
Trump was lying in medias res, so to speak.
But they're all liars. Republican liars.
The difference is that Trump didn't have speechwriters like Landon Parvin
(Reagan) and Michael Gerson (Bush) bending the language around to tailor those lies for general public consumption.
Neocon David Brooks 23 years ago dismissing legitimate, reality-based criticism of Dubya's colossal Iraq war
fuckup as antisemitism (dead link because The Weekly Standard no longer exists):
It's Back
The socialism of fools has returned to vogue not just in the Middle
East and France, but in the American left and Washington.
...
AFTER JOE LIEBERMAN completed his unsuccessful campaign for the
vice-presidency, I pretty much concluded that anti-Semitism was no
longer a major feature of American life. I went around making the case
that the Anti-Defamation League should close up shop, since the evil
they were organized to combat had shrunk to insignificance.
Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my
voicemail, and in my mailbox. It transpired that I couldn’t have been
more wrong. Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its
epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite right, but on the
peace-movement left...
I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do
admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and
an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on
most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the
focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred,
which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some
people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated...
Most of you are no doubt familiar with Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on this"
moment on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show in May of 2003.
But but don't sleep on Rose leading Friedman off by
confidently asserting, "Now that the war is over...":
At the time, this was the received wisdom of the Beltway Sages. For
example, here is David Brooks writing for Bill Kristol's
Weekly Standard in 2003, practically endzone dancing with delight
because now that Bush had been proven unequivocally right about everything,
boy howdy were those dirty hippies gonna finally get what's coming to them.
The Collapse of the Dream Palaces
Mass destruction of mistaken ideas.
APR 28, 2003
... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people
around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of
recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream
palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of
reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate
and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little
regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the
past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are...
Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this
dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over
for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush
and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do
about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a
hypocrite.
In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs
stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its
oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream
palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around
dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace,
the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue
to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long
for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican
villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.
My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as
their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their
anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his
corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this
hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their
rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics.
They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party,
perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will
seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally
Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant
public emotion.
In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the
dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of
mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a
winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies
of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right."
They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future.
Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will
lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will
claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they
rejected only months ago.
The magic of this piece of persiflage -- and all such super-patriot Salacious
B. Crumb caterwauling...
...by all your favorite Neocon pundits back in the day -- is not merely that
it got everything wrong, but that it got everything perfectly
backwards.
It's the GOP base/Tea Party/MAGA meatheads that grew more vociferous.
Even President Obama trying to clean up the ruin they left in their wake, and
asking nothing more than everyone help out and meet in the middle did not
dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of the Left (and
all the usual fascist scapegoats) is all that is left of Right.
And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their
MAGA rallies, their podcasts, their Hate Radio and their Fox News garbage.
They will still have a huge influence over the Republican party, perhaps even
determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly
unattractive to sane, normal humans who never really adopted outrage as their
dominant public emotion.
And there was never any magic "Aha!" moment that brought their Neocon
dream palaces down. None of them ever missed a meal. Most of the
got promotions and book deals. No matter how far Democrats extend themselves
and offer compromise after compromise to repair the damage the GOP has done to
this country, no day will come when Republican politicians, pundits and the
base of the party turn around and say, "We were wrong. The Left was right."
They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future.
Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The Right's lies and
conspiracy theories will get progressively stupider, as the ghouls and
grifters who spread them get progressively richer. And they will
backtrack, and reverse themselves again and again.
They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact...
...they rejected...
...only days before...
2011 video of Trump is going viral after Iran attack:
"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."pic.twitter.com/QR9v3h0hdo
Nobel prize committee please note that just as Trump's Epstein Filegate is
Stupid Watergate, so Trump's "Operation Blow Shit Up And Take The Oil" is just
Stupid Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Lie about the pretext, build up a huge military presence, start bombing (when
shit goes wrong and war crimes are committed, insist that it's all legal and/or blame underlings) ... (From Vox)
The twisted reason why Trump is bombing Venezuelan boats
For this administration, war crimes are a feature, not a bug.
In early September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the US military to “kill everybody” aboard a speedboat in the Caribbean.
A missile then shattered the vessel and set its fragments ablaze. When the smoke cleared, US surveillance drones showed two people clinging to the smoldering wreckage. An admiral then ordered a second strike against these flailing survivors — an act that violated a wide array of international and domestic laws.
Or at least, this is what a recent report in the Washington Post alleges.
The Trump administration publicly insists that the Post’s account is “fake news.” In closed-door briefings with lawmakers, Pentagon officials have reportedly claimed that the second strike was not intended to kill survivors, but rather, to sink the boat so as to clear a navigation hazard for other vessels. Yet, the administration has refused to provide either the public or members of Congress with unedited video footage of the bombings...
... then, when everything is in place, in brazen act of unprovoked conquest, roll in heavy and attempt to seize
the nation's oil reserves.
There is no concatenation of caveats, provisos, conditions, stipulations,
reservations, qualifications, and conditional phrases you can deploy to, ahem,
bulwark your editorial decision to give Butcher Bill Kristol a platform
from which to mouth off about war in the middle east. On that subject,
his mouth should have long ago been (metaphorically) filled with salt and sewn
shut forever.
And it all began back in 2014 when the then-barely-post-pubescent executive
producer of "This Week" , Jonathan Greenberger, took it upon himself to pluck
Kristol from the rubble of his many, many catastrophically bad public opinions
and rehabilitate his professional reputation.
[Fun fact: In 2024, Greenberger left ABC News to become... wait for
it...
Jonathan Greenberger To Depart As ABC News D.C. Bureau Chief For Role At
Politico
Jonathan Greenberger is departing ABC News, where he has been Washington,
D.C. bureau chief, for a new job as executive vice president of Politico.
Greenberger will start in his new position on April 22 [2024]
Given Kristol's very long and very public record of being pretty much wrong
about everything (from the WaPo) --
Bill Kristol knows his predictions have been bad but he’s going to keep
making them
... “With Kristol what I love are not so much the big, grand predictions that
are always wrong, but the smaller ones that really demonstrate how poor
his actual grasp of politics is,” says Alex Pareene, the editor of Gawker, one of Kristol’s regular tormentors. “He is sort of ideologically motivated to make certain ridiculous
claims — Iraq will be a huge success, Romney will win — and even his ‘peak
Trump’ predictions are based on the fact that he can’t abide the ongoing
rejection of his entire ethos by Republican voters. But it’s when he makes
claims that are just wrong but not motivated by the advancement of his
worldview . . . that we see just how bad he is at his ostensible job.”
-- at no point in the past 20 years have any of the many corporate media
drones who have chosen to hire him (and his idiot son-in-law, Matthew
Continetti) ever been vindicated in that decision (from Politico in 2014)
Bill Kristol joins ABC News
Bill Kristol, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, has joined
ABC News as a contributor, "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos
announced on Sunday. ... The agreement, one source said, includes regular appearances on the
Sunday show, as well as special events and other political-relaed events.
But there's also a window that allows him to do other shows on cable
television. ... Jonathan Greenberger, executive producer of "This Week," said in a
statement Kristol is "an original thinker" that will make their team
stronger: “Bill makes our outstanding team of contributors and analysts even
stronger. He’s an original thinker with a unique perspective on the
political and cultural landscape, and we look forward to hearing his voice
on the 'This Week' roundtable on a regular basis."
Furthermore, at no point in the last two decades has Kristol been exonerated of the years he spent strutting across the American media stage,
blood-drunk and smirking, confidently insisting that not only could
unleashing hell on Earth in Iraq “have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East” and that it would be a “two-month war, not an eight-year war” but that inflicting Kristol-brand democracy on Middle Eastern countries at
the point of an American sword was something we should be doing a lot
more.
So how, you may fairly ask, is Butcher's Bill Kristol still
abroad in the land?...
What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who
were this very loudly dead fucking wrong about everything got to keep their
place in elite media circles and get to go right on being courted for their
opinions on subjects about which they should shut their holes forever?
What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who
were actually right about everything continue to be treated as pariahs, and
told to sit down and shut up because it's rude and unproductive to, y'know,
remember stuff?
...is like bringing the
Sackler Family
in to consult on the opioid epidemic.
If there is one subject on which Bloody Bill should volunteer to shut his hole
until the end of time, it's this one.
And yet... from The New York Times:
Some of the same neoconservatives who pushed for the war in Iraq are now
pushing for war with Iran. “You’ve got to go to war with the president you
have,” said William Kristol, a Never Trumper and editor at large of The
Bulwark who was a prominent advocate of war with Iraq. “If you really think
that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the
job.”
Maybe Kristol thinks it's funny to deliberately echo Donald Rumsfeld from 21
years ago --
You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish
to have at a later time.
-- when he shrugged off the troops' concerns that the criminal incompetence of
the Bush administration meant that they had been sent into battle with the
wrong equipment and were now having to garbage-pick discarded ballistic glass
to up-armor their vehicles.
Because maybe Kristol really is the sociopath we always thought he
was.
And if your argument for not only letting him into our tent, but standing down
as he and other Never Trumpers colonized what little was left of the "Liberal"
media and elbowing actual Liberals out of the public discourse goes something
like this --
“You’ve got to go to political war with the sociopaths you have,”
"We know where [the WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."." -- Don Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003.
The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary
"sponsors" and real listeners like you!
... turned Both Siderism from a journalistic fetish into journalism's Trump-enabling State
Religion. And why Thomas Friedman is dead to me, now and forever.
Tom Friedman has well and truly surpassed himself.
Just when you think Captain Obvious could not possibly crawl any further up into his own puffy little butt, he manages to scramble up those last, few inches and burst through into an entirely new, “Being John Malkovich” kind of alternate Friedman-iverse, populated exclusively by LSD-scalded dolts stagger in tiny circle, jabbering incessantly about how amazing their hands look, and how amazing the air is, and have you ever noticed how amazing my shoes look as they go flippy-flop, flippy-flop ‘round and ‘round and ‘round.?
You meet these kinds of blown-out stoners wandering in the parks sometimes, or cadging transfers in the cool, dank stairwells of CTA stops. Pupils as big as manhole covers. Hair that’s become a free-range ecosystem for lice and roaches and ringworms.
What I usually do is give them some change and steer way the hell around them.
What I do not do is let them write for the New York Fucking Times.
Friedman has already been righteously and rightfully beaten down as the leading-edge of the execrable Apologist Wedge by Atrios, Gilliard, and god knows who all else, so I will keep this short. Ok, short-ish.
Here’s a tiny sip of the rancid stew:
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 15, 2005
Ever since Iraq's remarkable election, the country has been descending deeper and deeper into violence. But no one in Washington wants to talk about it. Conservatives don't want to talk about it because, with a few exceptions, they think their job is just to applaud whatever the Bush team does. Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.
First, Captain Obvious has again renewed his wretched subscription to the despicable and now, really, outright treasonable world-view that
A) No one is talking about Iraq. Which is such an nakedly demented lie that one must wonder if Tommy-boy has, at last, just lost his mind. As I sat at Wrigley field last week, in a park packed to capacity with highly-focused and well-informed Cubs and BoSox fans, at no point did I ever feel compelled to lean over to my fiends and remark -- shouting over the noise – that it was sure a pity the no one wanted to talk about baseball.
Had I done so, my friends (being my friends) would have, have cut off my beer, gotten me out of the hot sun and into an ER immediately. We’ll immediate…after the ninth inning, but they would have been very concerned.
What they wouldn’t have done is give me a column in the New York Fucking Times.
B) The Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.
It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.
It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.
It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.
However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.
And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!
What a lazy pint of watery poo he is, and if that were all he is, that would be bad enough, but with his second absurd “indictment -- "Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed.” – he definitively crosses the line into outright treachery.
So you want to know how this Liberal views Iraq?
Take a look at the sickening image that came roaring out of our collective unconscious and onto our televisions on 9/11: a human being confronted with two choices too terrible to contemplate -- leap into oblivion or be roasted alive.
And once in the air, whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs this poor bastard might have had became irrelevant. Flapping their arms didn’t matter. Prayer didn’t matter.
Once in the air, the Cold Equations were all that mattered. Once in the air, my fellow human being became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.
That, you despicable little stooge, is EXACTLY how Iraq looks to me.
On the heels of our greatest modern national trauma, the President and his minions shrieked and bellowed, roared and raged that there was a conflagration at our backs. That we were all in immediate, lethal danger from a massive, murderous attack by Saddam Hussein and that if we didn't act right now we were fucked.
Mushroom-cloud fucked.
And that the ONLY alternative was to jump. He was advised by wise men of the costs of jumping, of the dangers, of the number of troops necessary, of the extremely complex situation into which he would be dropping. He was warned that beating Iraq militarily would be easy…but that securing the Peace would be hard.
He told us that the fall would be simple. That we would alight in a land where we would be greeted as Liberators. The costs would be negligible. The gains would be high. Virtually painless.
But MOST of all, that the fire was nipping at our heels. It was so urgent, so imperative. that if we didn’t want to see our children perish, we had to jump right now.
So we did.
Convinced by Bush that it was the only option left to us -–and that he had planned carefully for the consequences -- we leaped out of window and into the sky.
We jumped, because we were told we had to.
And in jumping, we committed our troops, our nation and our good name to the brutal calculus of war; to factors beyond our control, and now we are plunging down and down and down into tragedy.
And as we fall we find that the building was not on fire at all.
That the people that pushed us into space had lied to us.
That the parachute of carefully planning that they were supposed to have prepared to save us from ruin had been packed with nothing but empty slogans and ideology-drunk fantasies.
Now we are falling, out of control.
And pointing out that we are falling because of the lies and delusions of the Administration has nothing to do with whether or not I "want the Bush team to succeed” you contemptible little weed. We are watching the country we passionately love plummet into darkness along the exact trajectory we warned you about, and you think that there is any joy in being right? Any pleasure in seeing your beloved wasted and playing in traffic?
Sorry, Friedman, but no.
Now whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs we might have had have become irrelevant. Flapping our arms doesn’t matter. Prayer doesn’t matter.
Once in the air, the Cold Equations are all that matter.
Once in the air, my nation became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.
And if you had bothered to pull your head out of your ass long enough to actually look, you would see that these are what the faces of Liberals look like…
…as we are forced to watch the fall, and as we are forced to listen to preening rodents hector us for not paying the right kind of attention.
