by

Allisone Heartsong

© 2004 In God We Trust

In his televised press conference on 13 April 2004, George Bush has emerged as a polished public relations performer. The smirk is gone, and stumbling is a thing of the past.

He appears to the world as a handsome, intelligent man who is capable of thinking on his feet and responding to the challenging questions of reporters with impressive skill, confidence, and sincerity.

What is more, he seems to have convinced himself that he is doing the right thing and is fully qualified to lead the American people as President of the United States.

There is just one problem: the stark contrast between what the Bush Administration has actually been doing and the carefully contrived cosmetic picture which he presents to the world is as different as night and day.

If it were not for the cold, hard facts, who would ever guess that the political agenda of this suave PR performer is rapidly undoing the United States of America while wreaking havoc throughout the world?

The PR formula that has been used to manufacture the emperor’s clothes is readily apparent and easy to discern for those who have eyes to see. And the naked truth which has now been concealed beneath the emperor’s clothing is equally obvious to all those who have ears to hear.

On 18 December 2000, shortly after being appointed President by the Supreme Court, George the Second confided to members of the press: "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator."

However, it was his father, George the First who really let the cat out of the bag when he confided to journalist Sarah McClendon in 1992: "If the American people ever knew what we have done, we would be chased down the street and lynched."

Suffice it to say that the Amerika of George Bush I and George Bush II is not to be confused with the America of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.

Simply stated, the essence of the PR formula on which the Bush Dynasty is based consists in the ruthless sacrifice and blatant desecration of truth for the sake of political power, the fundamental premise being that "might makes right," which translates into the amoral ethic that "the end justifies the means."

Viewed from this perspective, politics is simply the art of deception, and economics is nothing more than the science of deception.

The aim of this formula is to produce a political psychopath who is adept at lying for the purpose of taking control and maintaining control of the political high ground.

In other words, the goal is to always look good, to never look bad, to always be right, to never be wrong, and consequently to never admit a mistake or an error.

Although he may in fact be a puppet whose strings are pulled by invisible controllers operating from behind the scenes, such a political leader must pretend to be the ultimate decision-maker.

On the premise that a strong offense is the best defense, he must also play the role of the "good guy" who successfully challenges carefully selected "bad guys" who can be set up to play the role of villains on the public stage so that he can then emerge from the conflict as the victorious hero. And from this it follows that he must be perceived by the public as a fearless warrior engaged in perpetual war against evil-doers for the purpose of protecting the people, even if he has to enslave them in the process.

After four years of intensive training based on this PR formula, George Bush II has emerged as a seasoned word warrior who may appear to be nothing more than a jovial jousting champion but who is actually a master of verbal deception.

Masquerading as a "compassionate conservative" and supported by a Republican coalition of corporate executives and right-wing religious leaders, as well as by the international bankers who constitute the core of the global elite, George the Second is now seeking a second term of office which will enable him to complete the agenda for what his father, George the First, referred to as "the New World Order", namely the enslavement of humanity by a totalitarian world government such as was clearly foreseen by George Orwell in his book, 1984.

At this juncture, it appears that the political alternative will be John Kerry, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, who, like George Bush, went to Yale, where he was inducted into Skull and Bones, the secret society which serves as a primary training ground for the carefully selected and groomed insiders of the global elite.

It is now a well-established fact that the United States government was subverted in 1913 by passage of the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act and then declared bankrupt by passage of the unconstitutional Emergency Banking Act in 1933. It remains to be seen how much longer the American people will continue to give their sovereign power away by paying illegitimate income taxes to an illegitimate government that seeks to enslave them in the guise of protecting them.

ADDENDUM: 6 September 2004

BUSH ON THE COUCH, by Justin Frank, M.D., constitutes a red alert that we simply cannot afford to ignore.

Reading Dr. Frank’s professionally competent exposé of the psychopathic personality which clearly underlies the fraudulent words and oppressive deeds of George W. Bush is the urgent, top-priority responsibility of every American citizen who wishes to be informed.

ADDENDUM 2004

"Our enemies . . . never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

                    George W. Bush

ADDENDUM 2 February 2005:

The State of the Union message delivered by George W. Bush on 2 February 2005 is a masterpiece of disinformation and propaganda which demonstrates the extraordinary sophistication that the psychopathic global elite have now achieved in their use of brainwashing and mind-control techniques to deceive, mislead, and subjugate the American people.

The key purpose of Bush's State of the Union address on 2 February 2005 was to shift the rationale for his unconstitutional invasion of Iraq from "War on Terror" to "War on Tyranny."

In his inaugural speech on 20 January 2005, Bush prepared the way for this shift by declaring: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

ADDENDUM 30 April 2005

When asked in a recent interview how he thinks he will be viewed by history, George W. Bush answered: "It doesn't really matter.  There won't be any history.  The world will be over."

ADDENDUM 18 July 2005

Opinion: George W. Bush is a Victim of Mind Control
by HERMES
(Posted here by Wes Penre, July 17, 2005)

Having at one point had the unique opportunity of living with deprogramming a victim of US government mind control and Satanic Ritual Abuse, I can only come to one conclusion regarding our current President. George W. Bush is "suffering" from what the DSM-IV calls "Structured Dissociative Identity Disorder (SDID)", or mind control. This is not to be confused with regular Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder which is the minds natural reaction to severe childhood trauma.

Among other things, this would explain why no one in the administration or military will comment on what Bush was doing, or even where he was, during his missing months of service. In my opinion he was being programmed.

Most of the time, as everyone knows, Bush can barely complete a sentence without an "ummm - uh - er," or stammer. However, in all his major Speeches, ie. State of the Union, Post 9-11 and Pre War speeches I have only found ONE stutter and NONE of his usual "ummm's - uhh's and er's". In a rather unscientific experiment, using the software ACID, I have compared various speeches by several great speakers including: Churchill, Martin Luther King, and Bill Clinton, (ok, he was not THAT great but speeches were readily available on the internet), and none of them speak with the metronomic consistency (of 105 Beats Per Minute) of George W. Bush, when his "Great Speech Giving "GSG" personality has been activated. It is barely human, but very hypnotic. On the flip side when his "GSG" personality is NOT activated he cannot speak at a consistent pace for more than 10 or 20 seconds in a row.

I have seen exactly how these people are triggered and how personalities can be switched with nothing more complex than a handshake, gesture or phrase, (I believe Dick Cheney, who has been accused by several mind control victims of being a handler, rapist and cocaine addicted murderer among other things, triggers him either by a phrase or handshake right before taking the podium for speeches such as the State of the Union. If you closely watch his entrance to these speeches he's usually very relaxed but, as soon as he shakes Big Dicks hand you can see his expression become much more subdued and serious. I believe his wife is another one of his handlers. She whispers directly into his ear after many of his speeches and you can actually see his facial muscles relax and he begins to smile. It's very subtle but look for it next time you see her do this after a speech. Either she is saying, "Nice speech honey, when we get home we're gonna' have some FUN!" OR, she is bringing back his regular personality with a phrase such as, "There's no place like home, George, there's no place like home." (I have dubbed the original personality he was born with, the "Goofy Texan").

This theory would explain the almost total disconnect between his words and actions and it would also explain all of the lies and flip- flops. Here's a perfect example, he repeatedly stated, in "GSG" mode, "we will win the War on Terror!", and then, just once, he slipped and said "I don't think the war on terror can be won...". The next day it was right back to "we will win the war on terror!" Anyone with half a brain knows that you can't win a war on terror as violence simply causes more violence. The day he slipped up he honestly spoke what his "Goofy Texan" personality believes and anyone with an IQ of more than 70 knows (I do not think he is a total idiot, just a victim). One thing I have learned first hand about mind control victims is that MOST of their personalities will believe, and are totally incapable of disagreeing with, anything and everything that they are told by their handlers. If Dick Cheney told the "GSG"
personality that by blowing up the World Trade Center the world would be a better place and that it would save the lives of millions in the future, the "GSG" personality would not even know how to disagree with him. I, however, do not think Bush knew. On 9-11 after Andy Card told him what happened I think the look on his face is first an attempt to hide from the children the combination of shock, revulsion and confusion he must have felt at that moment but then you can almost see his face saying, "Oh my God! That's why they sent me to read to these school kids today!" I think at that moment I think HE realized that the attack what was most likely orchestrated by Cheney and Rumsfeld and he was asking himself "What the hell am I gonna' do?" (Side question to readers: Has anyone bothered to find out how many times in his political career G. W. Bush has read to school children? Does he do that a lot or was that the first time?)

I think normally the press and public only get to see and hear one or two of the PROGRAMMED personalities, but every so often we get to see the real him, the "Goofy Texan", and that is when the contradictions occur, when we hear what HE actually thinks rather than what he has been programmed to believe and say. If he is a victim he would not even be aware of contradicting himself which is why he is able to say, "I never said that," even after you repeatedly show him a video tape of him saying "that". (Many, if not all victims of Project Monarch for example are programmed to watch the "Wizard of Oz"
several times a year which reinforces their programming, this is one reason it is run over and over again on television during the month of October. They will watch the entire film front to back repeatedly that month but if you ask them how the movie ends they will tell you sadly, "Dorothy Dies." They never register the fact that in the end, Dorothy exposes Oz for the small, pathetic, insecure power hungry little twerp that he really is.)

Can someone come up with a better explanation for Bush's hypocrisy, other than that he simply is a liar? Why else would a Fundamentalist Christian sign the death warrants for thousands of Americans and more than a hundred thousand Iraqis without so much as an "I'm sorry..."? (One woman victim I know of had Christian, Wiccan, Jewish, Satanic and Atheistic personalities. The Christian and Jew greatly valued life and would do almost anything to save it, the Wiccan sacrificed animals but not people, the Satanist would sacrifice anything including newborn children and drink their blood and the Atheist would kill only if ordered to do so or in self defense, however they would NOT defend themselves if attacked by their handlers.)

Why else would a supposed closet homosexual want to ban gay marriage? Even if he's not a homosexual why would he say before he was "elected" in 2000 that he did not feel that it was necessary to create legislation banning same sex marriage. (One male victim know of had a gay, straight and even a lesbian personality that truly believed that he was a woman, despite the lack of female sex organs!)

There is one real dead give away to me that George Bush is a mind control victim, the eyes. It is said that "the eyes are the windows to the soul". Does anyone see anything more in Bush's eyes than a tiny sign saying "Vacant"? These are the eyes of victims of both mind control and Satanic Ritual Abuse. After more than a decade of research into these disturbing subjects and talking with therapists who specialize in treating mind control and SRA, I can maybe shed a little light on why this is. It is very simple. MOST humans, do have an immortal soul (a conscious energy), that joins with their body for their life here on Earth. Immortal souls don't like to be controlled, they generally will rebel against any attempts at mind control programming. Therefore before the majority of the programming can be implemented the soul must first either be banished from the body or imprisoned within it through rituals. (Yes I am talking here about Black Magic and yes the military used it for mind control purposes, at least until they had developed the technology to do "electronic rituals" using various forms of ELF and microwave technology). Think of solar energy as your soul, think of a solar cell as the ritual, and the battery connected to the cell as the prison for the soul.
 
The solar energy (soul) can be released at a later date if one simply knows how connect a light bulb to the battery and turn it on until the battery is drained (the soul is completely released). I once was allowed to witness a ritual to free an imprisoned soul (actually I have witnesses two but one did not work). Before the ritual this individual had the eyes of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney (D. Cheney is not a mind control victim but I do believe he was born without a soul). After the ritual they had the bright, sparkling, lively eyes of someone like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King or maybe Robin Williams or Sarah Jessica Parker.

In my opinion George W. Bush is one of two things. He is either one of the greatest liars to ever stand before a podium, or he is victim of US Government Mind Control with an imprisoned soul.

I could determine for sure which one he is given five minutes alone with him, however I doubt I will ever get that opportunity.

Either way until George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of these so called Neo-Cons are removed from office and until we as a race learn to identify the people who are capable of these crimes and STOP LETTING THEM ACHIEVE POSITIONS OF POWER, there will be NO PEACE ON EARTH...

Until then, spread as much love as you can and do not be scared, the "worst" thing that can happen is physical death and that, for most of us, will be the "best" most enlightening moment of our lives and our first true taste of spiritual freedom.

LOVE AND PEACE TO ALL
HERMES

ADDENDUM 2005 by Greg Szymanski

Cindy Sheehan has already had her heart ripped into a million pieces by the illegal Iraqi war, losing the son she loved more than life itself only five days after he arrived in Baghdad in April 2004...

So when Sheehan received an invitation to meet privately with President Bush at the White House two months after her son died, the least she could have expected was a bit of compassion or a kind word coming from the heart.

But what she encountered was an arrogant man with eyes lacking the slightest bit of compassion, a President totally detached from humanity and a man who didn’t even bother to remember her son’s name when they were first introduced.

Instead of a kind gesture or a warm handshake, Sheehan said she immediately got a taste of bush arrogance when he entered the room and in a condescending tone with a disgusting loud Texas accent said: “Who we’all honorin’ here today?”

“His mouth kept moving, but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells, and he was acting like I should be proud to just be in his presence, when it was my son who died in his illegal war! It was one of the most disgusting experiences I ever had.”

A Message from Cindy Sheehan Saturday 03 September 2005

LIMITED COPYRIGHT 2005
THIS ARTICLE MAY BE REPRINTED REPUBLISHED OR REPOSTED IN PARTIAL OR IN FULL BY ANYONE OR BY ANY ORGANIZATION ON THE STRICT CONDITION THAT SAID INDIVIDUAL OR ORGANIZATION IS NOT SUPPORTIVE OF ANY GOVERNMENT THAT IS ENGAGED IN ANY ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST ANYONE, ANYWHERE!

George Bush has been an incompetent failure his entire life. Fortunately for humanity, he was just partying his way through school, running companies into the ground, and being an alcoholic and cocaine abuser for most of that time - and his incompetence was limited to hurting the people who worked for him and his own family. The people in his life who were hurt by his incompetence probably have been able to "get on" with their lives. Now, though, his incompetence affects the world and is responsible for so many deaths and so much destruction. How many of us did not foresee the mess he would make of the world when he was selected the first time? We saw what he had done to Texas. How many of us marveled and were so discouraged and amazed when he was "re-elected" the second time? We saw what he had done to the world. Dangerous incompetence should never be rewarded, let alone be rewarded so handsomely as in George's case.

        There it is.

    I think we should finish the tour so we can talk about what an abject failure this administration is. The unnecessary tragedy in New Orleans is directly related to the unnecessary tragedy in Iraq: Unnecessary being the operative word.

      I really believe that George and his band of incompetent and dangerous thugs need to resign. It would be the only honorable and competent thing to do. But wait....

ADDENDUM December 2005

"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face.  It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"

                    George W. Bush

ADDENDUM 19 January 2006

 Are You Ready to Be Bugged and Tortured by George W. Bush?
    By Harvey Wasserman
    The Free Press

    Thursday 19 January 2006

    It's not really terrorists George W. Bush wants to bug and torture. It's YOU.

    It's not really terrorism he wants to fight. It's opposition from people he can't control.

    It's not really US security he wants to protect. It's the power of his regime.

    The Constitutional debate about whether these executive privileges are allowable in war is a smoke screen.

    This isn't about war: It's about dictatorship. It's about making power permanent by using private information against you, and by terrifying you with torture.

    Team Bush believes it rules by Divine right. It has already re-defined "terrorist" to mean anyone who questions its power. It will use "anti-terrorist" wiretapping as a tool against anyone who dares oppose it.

    All serious indicators show that "information" extracted by torture is virtually worthless in fighting terrorism. So is the information taken from wiretapping huge numbers of people, which Bush has been doing since before 9/11.

    So ask yourself: if granted the power to torture, do you trust the Bush Administration--or any regime- to refrain from torturing its political opponents? If granted the power to record private phone conversations, do you trust Karl Rove to not use this material against his political opponents?

    Who will Bush go after first? Al Queda or the Quakers? Bin Laden or Cindy Sheehan?

    If Bush gets away with this, then it's simple: if you are too outspoken in opposing this regime's destruction of social security, or the natural environment, or the economy, you will sooner or later be subject to torture.

    If Bush's phone buggers pick up information or statements taken out of context that can incriminate or make you look bad, Rove will not hesitate to leak them to FOX and use them for partisan purposes.

    The Constitution of the United States is absolutely clear about banning these abuses. The patriotic Americans who demanded the Bill of Rights knew these powers must be outlawed to retain any hope of preserving our freedom and democracy. That's why they did so, clearly and explicitly.

    Those who support giving Bush these powers are undoubtedly ready and willing to be tortured and bugged themselves.

    As for the rest of us, there can be no compromise with tyranny.

ADDENDUM January 20 2006

Global Eye

Chain of Fools

By Chris Floyd
Published: January 20, 2006

Things are looking a bit grim for the Bush faction these days. Their chief bagman, Jack Abramoff, is in the clink, naming names. Their top congressional enforcer, Tom DeLay, is in the dock, sinking fast. Their "war of choice" in Iraq has stalled in murderous quagmire. Their poll numbers are plummeting as scandal after scandal turn the American people against them. What, then, will be the fate of these brutal, bungling, bloodstained goons when they face the voters in the coming elections?

Why, victory, of course!

In fact, this year's congressional races and the presidential contest in 2008 are already over, and the Bushists have won. It's true that some of the candidates have not yet been chosen -- including whatever frontman the goon squad picks to replace the kill-crazy klutz from Crawford -- but the vast machinery of electoral malfeasance that propelled this extremist faction to power over the wishes of the electorate in both 2000 and, yes, 2004, is not only still in place, it's growing stronger all the time.
 

No one has laid bare the malodorous innards of this democracy-devouring monster better than Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book, "Fooled Again," takes us back to the dastardy of Election Day 2004 and the hydra-headed campaign of vote-rigging that preceded it. This second heist of the White House is one of the great untold stories of our time -- even though it was largely carried out in plain sight. Miller performs the simple but increasingly rare act of journalism and gathers a mountain of overwhelming evidence from publicly available material. This is no "conspiracy theory" stitched together from anonymous sources, strained inferences and dark innuendo, but a solid case based on official records, sworn testimony, eyewitness accounts, news reports and the Bushists' own words.

The game was actually given away long before the balloting, when one of the faction's congressional waterboys, Representative Peter King, was captured -- on film -- boasting that the fix was in. At a White House chow-down in summer 2003, King was asked who he thought would win in 2004. "It's already over," King said. "The election's over. We won. ... It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."

Indeed they did. As often noted here, tens of millions of votes are now counted using paperless, easily hackable electronic voting machines programmed -- and often administered -- by a handful of corporations whose officers are unabashed Bush backers. Two of these, the notorious Diebold and lesser-known but equally shadowy ES&S, were kickstarted by right-wing tycoon Harold Ahmanson, once the major backer of the Christian Reconstruction movement -- which advocates total theocratic rule of state and society by Christian mullahs, with death for homosexuals, disenfranchisement for unbelievers and slavery for debtors, among other delights.

With these corporations at the helm, the 2004 vote was the most shambolic in U.S. history, plagued by an epidemic of machine breakdowns and shortages (almost entirely in key Democratic precincts) and by a rash of "glitches" that "inexplicably" switched the voter's intended choice to a different candidate, or added hundreds or even thousands of "ghost" votes to a candidate's total. In every single recorded case of such "accidents," the beneficiary of these unearned votes was President George W. Bush. Meanwhile, as in 2000, strange voting patterns emerged in pockets across the country, where unknown fringe candidates unaccountably received thousands of votes -- at the expense of the Democratic candidate.

Of course, gaming the electronic voting grid was only part of the operation. Voter suppression techniques first unlimbered in 2000 were polished to a high sheen in 2004. These included purges of deliberately misidentified "felons" from the rolls; mass intimidation campaigns in poverty-ridden districts (e.g., "official" notices that anyone owing back rent, child support, unpaid traffic tickets, etc. would be arrested if they tried to vote); reducing the number of polling stations in Democratic-leaning precincts and stocking them with old, derelict machines; and a sophisticated, nationwide scam of deceitfully "registering" Democratic voters -- who then discovered they were not on the books when they showed up to vote. The Republican National Committee paid millions to the man behind this flim-flam, the theocrat and Bush insider Nathan Sproul.

The 2004 vote also saw a repeat of the exit poll debacles of 2002 and 2000, with the final results in each case defying the poll data to a remarkable degree. For decades, exit polls have proven so consistently reliable that they are used by many institutions -- including the U.S. State Department -- to gauge the fairness of elections around the world. Yet only in the United States, and only in the last three elections involving the Bush faction, have they failed utterly to jibe with the official tally.

Miller's book also includes insightful analysis to help us understand how this gaggle of militarists, millenarists and money-grubbers have managed to seize and keep power in a decayed, sclerotic republic whose institutions have proven too weak to withstand the gang's fanaticism -- and too corrupt to resist the bribery, legal and otherwise, that the Bushists dole out from public and private coffers.

Despite the scandals, the indictments, the mounting death toll in Iraq and the ever-deepening unpopularity of Bush and his minions, the faction's tools for "manufacturing consent" -- so ably exposed by Miller -- are greased and ready, unchallenged by the clueless, spineless Democrats and the dollar-dazzled media. So look for more "astonishing upsets" and poll-confounding "surprises" in the coming national elections, as brute power rapes reality once again.

ADDENDUM 25 January 2006

ADDENDUM 27 January 2006

ADDENDUM 9 March 2006

Bush: A Deaf Man Spouting
    By Sidney Blumenthal
    The Guardian UK

    Thursday 09 March 2006

A videotape of Bush's briefing before Hurricane Katrina exposes him as out of touch with reality.

    On the eve of George Bush's presidential campaign in 2000, the neoconservative Kenneth Adelman cast him as Prince Hal, who "puts the indiscretions of his youth behind him" and "redeems his father's reign." After September 11, Bush was wreathed with regal laurels as Henry V by a clerisy of pundits. From Ground Zero to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln ("Mission Accomplished") the president struck bold poses, but his choreographed gestures have especially illuminated his hollow crown in the darkened breach of New Orleans.

    For the first time, last week, the public has seen the spontaneous Bush behind closed doors, in a leaked videotape that recorded his briefing the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. Teleconferenced in from his Crawford ranch, Texas, Bush listens to disaster officials inform him that the storm will be unprecedented in its severity and consequences. "This is, to put it mildly, the big one," says Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Centre, warns: "This hurricane is much larger than Hurricane Andrew ever was." Bush asks not a single question, says, "We are fully prepared," and departs.

    The Katrina videotape is defining for Bush's presidency. It exposes a deaf man spouting talking points. After the hurricane hit, he stayed on vacation, went to a birthday party, strummed a guitar with a country and western singer, and on September 1 said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." On his flight back to Washington, four days after landfall, his aides gave him a DVD of television news reports of the hurricane's impact about which he had done nothing to learn on his own.

    As the catastrophe of the foreshadowed aftermath unfolded, he clapped Brown on the back: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." But soon the administration settled on Brownie as the scapegoat, prevented him from defending himself and forced him to resign. He was expected to fall on his sword.

    Suddenly, last week, the sacrificial Brown stormed back, the betrayed turning on his betrayers. He proclaimed on every media outlet that he would no longer play the fall guy, detailed the warnings he had given, and named malefactors running up the chain of command.

    In New Orleans, a sad Mardi Gras has come and gone, while crews from the morgue continue searching for bodies - still finding them. The city has lost more than half its population, most of the refugees are African-Americans, and their neighbourhoods remain scenes of devastation. Having rejected a plan for rebuilding, Bush travelled to New Orleans for another photo-opportunity this week to announce a programme that would supposedly give money to the homeless but absurdly will not permit destroyed housing to be replaced by new. Not one penny so far has been spent on new homes. Six months after the tempest, New Orleans, one of the glories of American life and culture, lies in ruins, and Bush visits to pose as visionary.

    In a recently published hagiography on the theme of Bush-as-Prince-Hal, Rebel-in-Chief, written by the rightwing pundit Fred Barnes, Bush explained to him that his job is to "stay out of minutiae, keep the big picture in mind." To illustrate his self-conception, he "called my attention to the rug" in the Oval Office. Bush said that he wanted the rug to express that an "optimistic person comes here." He delegated the task to his wife, Laura, who designed a rug featuring bright yellow rays of the sun. In his Oval Office, Prince Hal imagines himself grown into a Sun King.

Addendum 21 April 2006

ADDENDUM 24 October 2006

 Advertising Terrorism
    By Keith Olbermann
    MSNBC Countdown

    Monday 23 October 2006

The key to terrorism is not the act - but the fear of the act.

    Tonight, a special comment on the advertising of terrorism - the commercial you have already seen.

    It is a distillation of everything this administration and the party in power have tried to do these last five years and six weeks.

    It is from the Republican National Committee;

    It shows images of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri;

    It offers quotes from them - all as a clock ticks ominously in the background.

    It concludes with what Zawahiri may or may not have said to a Pakistani journalist as long ago as 2001: His dubious claim that he had purchased "suitcase bombs."

    The quotation is followed (by sheer coincidence no doubt) by an image of a massive explosion.

    "These are the stakes," appears on the screen, quoting exactly from Lyndon Johnson's infamous nuclear scare commercial from 1964.

    "Vote - November 7th."

    There is a cheap "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" quality to the whole thing, and it also serves to immediately call to mind the occasions when President Bush dismissed Osama bin Laden as somebody he didn't think about - except, obviously, when elections were near.

    Frankly, a lot of people seeing that commercial for the first time, have laughed out loud.

    But - not everyone.

    And therein lies the true threat to this country.

    The dictionary definition of the word "terrorize" is simple and not open to misinterpretation:

    "To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear."

    Note please, that the words "violence" and "death" are missing from that definition.

    The key to terror, the key to terrorism, is not the act - but the fear of the act.

    That is why bin Laden and his deputies and his imitators are forever putting together videotaped statements and releasing virtual infomercials with dire threats and heart-stopping warnings.

    But why is the Republican Party imitating them?

    Bin Laden puts out what amounts to a commercial of fear; The Republicans put out what is unmistakable as a commercial of fear.

    The Republicans are paying to have the messages of bin Laden and the others broadcast into your home.

    Only the Republicans have a bigger bank roll.

    When, last week, the CNN network ran video of an insurgent in Iraq, evidently stalking and killing an American soldier, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mr. Hunter, Republican of California, branded that channel, quote, "the publicist for an enemy propaganda film" and that CNN used it "to sell commercials."

    Another California Republican, Rep. Brian Bilbray, called the video "nothing short of a terrorist snuff film."

    If so, Mr. Bilbray, then what in the hell is your Party's new advertisement?

    And Mr. Hunter, CNN using the video to "sell commercials"?

    Commercials!

    You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee!

    "To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear."

    By this definition, the people who put these videos together - first the terrorists and then the administration - whose shared goal is to scare you into panicking instead of thinking - they are the ones terrorizing you.

    By this definition, the leading terrorist group in this world right now is al Qaida.

    But the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party.

    Eleven Presidents ago, a chief executive reassured us that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself."

    His distant successor has wasted his administration insisting that there is nothing we can have but fear itself.

    The vice president, as recently as this month, was caught campaigning with the phrase "mass death in the United States."

    Four years ago it was the now-Secretary of State, Dr. Rice, rationalizing Iraq with "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

    Days later Mr. Bush himself told an audience that "we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

    And now we have this cheesy commercial - complete with images of a faked mushroom cloud, and implications of "mass death in America."

    This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizing the very people it claims to be protecting from terror.

    It may be the oldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing they are in danger and that only you can save them.

    Lyndon Johnson used it to bury Barry Goldwater.

    Joe McCarthy leaped from obscurity on its back.

    And now the legacy has come to President George Bush.

    Of course, the gruel of fear is getting thinner and thinner, is it not, Mr. President?

    And thus more and more of it needs to be made out of less and less actual terror.

    After last week's embarrassing Internet hoax about ‘dirty bombs' at football stadiums, the one your Department of Homeland Security immediately disseminated to the public, a self-described "former CIA operative" named Wayne Simmons, cited the fiasco as "the, and I mean the, perfect example of the President's Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program - how vital they are."

    Frank Gaffney, once a respected assistant secretary of defense and now the president of something called the Center for Security Policy, added, "one of the things that I hope Americans take away from this, is not only that they're gunning for us not just in a place like Iraq - but truly, worldwide."

    Of course, the "they" to which Mr. Gaffney referred, turned out to be a lone 20-year-old grocery bagger from Wisconsin named Jake - a kid, trying to one-up some other loser in an Internet game of chicken.

    His "threat," referenced seven football stadiums at which dirty bombs were to be exploded yesterday. It began with the one in New York City - even though there isn't one in New York City. And though the attacks were supposed to be simultaneous, four of the games were scheduled to start at 1 p.m. ET and the others at 4 p.m. ET.

    More over, the kid said he'd posted the identical message on 40 websites since September.

    We caught him in "merely" about six weeks, even though the only way he could have been less subtle, less stealthy, and less of a threat was if he'd bought an advertisement on the Super Bowl broadcast.

    Mr. Bush, this is the - what? - 100th plot your people have revealed, that turned out to be some nonsensical misunderstanding, or the fabrications of somebody hoping to talk his way off a water board in Eastern Europe?

    If, Mr. President, this is the kind of crack work that your new ad implies that only you and not the Democrats can do, you, sir, need to pull over and ask for directions.

    The real question of course, Mr. Bush, is why did your Department of Homeland Security even release this information in the first place?

    It was never a serious threat. Even the first news accounts quoted a Homeland spokesman as admitting "strong skepticism" - the kind of strong skepticism which most government agencies address before telling the public, not afterwards.

    So that leaves two options, Mr. President.

    The first option: you and your department of Homeland Security don't have the slightest idea what you're doing. Thus, contrary to your flip-flopping between saying "we're safe" and saying "but we're not safe enough," and contrary to the vice president's swaggering pronouncements about the lack of another attack since 9/11, the last five years has been just an accident.

    Or there's the second option: your political operatives leaked this nonsense for the same reason your political operatives put out that commercial - to scare the gullible.

    Obviously the correct answer, Mr. Bush, is all of the above.

    There are some of us who could forgive you for trying to run your candidates on the coattails of the Grim Reaper, for reducing your party's existence to "Death and Attacks Us."

    It's cynical and barbaric.

    But, after all, it may be merely the natural extension of the gutter politics to which you have subscribed since you sidled over from baseball, and the business world of other people's money.

    But to forgive you for terrorizing us, we would have to believe you somehow competent in keeping others from doing so.

    Yet, last week, construction workers repairing a subway line in New York City, were cleaning out an abandoned manhole on the edge of the World Trade Center site, when they stumbled on to the impossible: human remains from 9/11.

    Bones and fragments.

    Eighty of them.

    Some as much as a foot long.

    The victims had been lying, literally in the gutter, for five years and five weeks.

    The families and friends of each of the 2,749 dead - who had been grimly told in May of 2002 that there were no more remains to be found - were struck anew as if the terrorism of that day had just happened again.

    And over the weekend they've found still more remains.

    And now this week will be spent looking in places that should have already been looked at a thousand times five years ago.

    For all the victims in New York, Mr. Bush - the living and the dead - it's a touch of 9/11 all over again.

    And the mayor of this city, who called off the search four-and-a-half years ago is a Republican.

    The governor of this state with whom he conferred is a Republican.

    The House of Representatives, Republican.

    The Senate, Republican.

    The President, Republican.

    And yet you can actually claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?

    You can't even recover our dead from the battlefield - the battlefield in an American city - when we've given you five years and unlimited funds to do so!

    While signing a Military Commissions Act so monstrous that it has been criticized by even the John Birch Society, you told us, Mr. Bush, "there is nothing we can do to bring back the men and women lost on September 11th, 2001. Yet we'll always honor their memory, and we will never forget the way they were taken from us."

    Except, of course, for the ones who've been lying under a manhole cover for five years.

    Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing else for those five years but pat yourselves on the back about terror, while waging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq, and waging war on the cherished freedoms in America;

    Just on this subject of counter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government, in time of crisis, in this country's history!

    "These are the stakes," indeed, Mr. President.

    You do not know what you are doing.

    And the commercial - the one about which Zawahiri might say "hey, pretty good - we love your choice of font style"?

    All that need further be said is to add three words to Shakespeare.

    Mr. President, you, and that advertisement of terror, are full of sound and fury - signifying (and competent at) nothing.

Addendum 25 October 06

George W. Bush v. The US Constitution
    By Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.)
    In These Times

    Tuesday 24 October 2006

In July 2005, 122 members of Congress, along with more than 500,000 Americans, sent a letter to President George W. Bush, asking him to verify whether the assertions set forth in the so-called "Downing Street Minutes" were accurate. The president never responded.

 

That lack of response prompted Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, to commission his staff to write a report examining the administration's manipulation and deception during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. When the New York Times reported in December 2005 that President Bush had approved widespread warrantless domestic surveillance of innocent Americans, (later corroborated in May 2006 by USA Today), Conyers asked his staff to document those abuses as well. The final report, "The Constitution In Crisis," released in August with little attention from the mainstream media, is a compelling indictment of the Bush administration.

 

Academy Chicago Publishers recently published the report as a book, titled George W. Bush versus the U.S. Constitution. Below, In These Times has excerpted the book's foreword by Rep. Conyers, who explains the dangers to the Constitution posed by the Bush administration's assertion of a "unitary executive."

    Scandals such as Watergate and Iran-Contra are widely considered to be constitutional crises, in the sense that the executive branch was acting in violation of the law and in tension with the majority party in the Congress. But the system of checks and balances put in place by the Founding Fathers worked, the abuses were investigated, and actions were taken-even if presidential pardons ultimately prevented a full measure of justice.

    The situation we find ourselves in today under the administration of George W. Bush is systemically different. The alleged acts of wrongdoing my staff has documented-which include making misleading statements about the decision to go to war; manipulating intelligence; facilitating and countenancing torture; using classified information to out a CIA agent; and violating federal surveillance and privacy laws-are quite serious. However, the current majority party has shown little inclination to engage in basic oversight, let alone question the administration directly. The media, though showing some signs of aggressiveness, is increasingly concentrated and all too often unwilling to risk the enmity or legal challenge from the party in charge. At the same time, unlike previous threats to civil liberties posed by the Civil War (suspension of habeas corpus and eviction of Jews from portions of the Southern States); World War I (anti-immigrant "Palmer Raids"); World War II (internment of Japanese-Americans); and the Vietnam War (COINTELPRO); the risks to our citizens' rights today are potentially more grave, as the war on terror has no specific end point.

    Although on occasion the courts are able to serve as a partial check on the unilateral overreaching of the executive branch-as they did in the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision invalidating the president's military tribunal rules-the unfortunate reality remains that we are a long way from being out of the constitutional woods under the dangerous combination of an imperial Bush presidency and a compliant GOP Congress. I say this for several reasons. The Hamdan decision itself was approved by only five justices (three justices dissented, and Chief Justice Roberts recused himself because he had previously ruled in favor of the administration) and was written by 86-year old Justice Stevens. In the event of his retirement in the next two years, the Court's balance would probably be tipped as he would undoubtedly be replaced by another justice in the Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito mode, favoring an all-powerful "unitary" executive. In the very first hearing held on the decision, the administration witness testified that "the president is always right," and severely criticized the Court's decision. The Republican majority also appears poised to use the decision to score political points rather than to reassert congressional prerogatives: that House Majority Leader Boehner disingenuously declared the case "offers a clear choice between Capitol Hill Democrats who celebrate offering special privileges to violent terrorists, and Republicans who want the president to have the necessary tools to prosecute and achieve victory in the Global War on Terror."

    Thus, notwithstanding the relevance of the Hamdan decision, I believe our Constitution remains in crisis. We cannot count on a single judicial decision to reclaim the rule of law or resurrect the system of checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Rather, we need to restore a vigilant Congress, an independent judiciary, a law-abiding president, and a vigorous free press that has served our nation so well throughout our history.

    I believe it is essential that we come together as a nation to confront religious extremism and despicable regimes abroad as well as terrorist tactics at home. However, as a veteran, I recognize that we do no service to our brave armed forces by asking them to engage in military conflict under false pretenses and without adequate resources. Nor do we advance the cause of fighting terrorism if our government takes constitutionally dubious short cuts with little law enforcement value, that alienate the very groups in this country whose cooperation is central to fighting this seminal battle.

    Many of us remember a time when the powers of our government were horribly abused. Those of us who lived through the Vietnam conflict know the damage that can result when our government misleads its citizens about war. As one who was included on President Nixon's "enemies list," I am all too familiar with the specter of unlawful government intrusion. In the face of these lessons, I believe it is imperative that we never lose our voice of dissent, regardless of political pressure. As Martin Luther King said, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal." None of us should be bullied or intimidated when the executive branch charges that those who criticize their actions are "aiding the terrorists" and "giving ammunition to America's enemies," or when the executive warns that "Americans need to watch what they say," as this administration has done.

    It is tragic that our nation has invaded another sovereign nation because "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," and that millions of innocent Americans have been subject to government surveillance outside proper legal process. It is unforgivable that Congress has been unwilling to examine these matters or take actions to prevent these circumstances from occurring again. Since the majority party is unwilling to fulfill their oversight responsibilities, it is incumbent on individual members of Congress, as well as the American public, to act to protect our constitutional form of government.

    It should be noted that without the assistance of the "blogosphere" and other Internet-based media, it would have been impossible for my staff to assemble all of the information, sources and other materials that they did, and I would like to offer them my heartfelt thanks. Whereas the so-called "mainstream media" have frequently been willing to look past the abuses of the Bush administration, the blogosophere has proven to be a new and important bulwark of our nation's First Amendment freedoms.

Addendum  19 November 2006

Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush
    By Peter Baker
    The Washington Post

    Sunday 19 November 2006

    The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.

    Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling- out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."

    Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

    A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.

    "There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation... . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."

    The sense of Bush abandonment accelerated during the final weeks of the campaign with the publication of a former aide's book accusing the White House of moral hypocrisy and with Vanity Fair quoting Adelman, Richard N. Perle and other neoconservatives assailing White House leadership of the war.

    Since the Nov. 7 elections, Republicans have pinned their woes on the president.

    "People expect a level of performance they are not getting," former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech. Many were livid that Bush waited until after the elections to oust Rumsfeld.

    "If Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said on television. "I'd still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee."

    And so, in what some saw as a rebuke, Senate Republicans restored Trent Lott (Miss.) to their leadership four years after the White House helped orchestrate his ouster, with some saying they could no longer place their faith entirely in Bush.

    Some insiders said the White House invited the backlash. "Anytime anyone holds themselves up as holy, they're judged by a different standard," said David Kuo, a former deputy director of the Bush White House's faith-based initiatives who wrote "Tempting Faith," a book that accused the White House of pandering to Christian conservatives. "And at the end of the day, this was a White House that held itself up as holy."

    Richard N. Haass, a former top Bush State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. "The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq - all of these are departures from the traditional approach," he said, "so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction."

    The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House. Some of those who did have more personal relationships with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld came to feel the sense of disappointment more acutely because they believed so strongly in the goals the president laid out for his administration.

    The arc of Bush's second term has shown that the most powerful criticism originates from the inside. The pragmatist crowd around Colin L. Powell began speaking out nearly two years ago after he was eased out as secretary of state. Powell lieutenants such as Haass, Richard L. Armitage, Carl W. Ford Jr. and Lawrence B. Wilkerson took public the policy debates they lost on the inside. Many who worked in Iraq returned deeply upset and wrote books such as "Squandered Victory" (Larry Diamond) and "Losing Iraq" (David L. Phillips). Military and CIA officials unloaded after leaving government, culminating in the "generals' revolt" last spring when retired flag officers called for Rumsfeld's dismissal.

    On the domestic side, Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.

    Most striking lately, though, has been the criticism from neoconservatives who provided the intellectual framework for Bush's presidency. Perle, Adelman and others advocated a robust use of U.S. power to advance the ideals of democracy and freedom, targeting Hussein's Iraq as a threat that could be turned into an opportunity.

    In an interview last week, Perle said the administration's big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. "If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. "It was a foolish thing to do."

    Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called "the architect of the Iraq war," because "my view was different from the administration's view from the very beginning" about how to conduct it. "I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before," he said. "I've said it more publicly."

    White House officials tend to brush off each criticism by claiming it was over-interpreted or misguided. "I just fundamentally disagree," Cheney said of the comments by Perle, Adelman and other neoconservatives before the midterm elections. Others close to the White House said the neoconservatives are dealing with their own sense of guilt over how events have turned out and are eager to blame Bush to avoid their own culpability.

    Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, said he is distressed "to see neocons turning on Bush" but said he believes they should admit mistakes and openly discuss what went wrong. "All of us who supported the war have to share some of the blame for that," he said. "There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that."

    It may also be, he said, that the mistake was the idea itself - that Iraq could serve as a democratic beacon for the Middle East. "That part of our plan is down the drain," Muravchik said, "and we have to think about what we can do about keeping alive the idea of democracy."

    Few of the original promoters of the war have grown as disenchanted as Adelman. The chief of Reagan's arms control agency, Adelman has been close to Cheney and Rumsfeld for decades and even worked for Rumsfeld at one point. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he wrote in The Washington Post before the Iraq war that it would be "a cakewalk."

    But in interviews with Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and The Post, Adelman said he became unhappy about the conduct of the war soon after his ebullient night at Cheney's residence in 2003. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction disturbed him. He said he was disgusted by the failure to stop the looting that followed Hussein's fall and by Rumsfeld's casual dismissal of it with the phrase "stuff happens." The breaking point, he said, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to occupation chief L. Paul Bremer, Gen. Tommy R. Franks and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

    "The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the president can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq," Adelman said. All told, he said, the Bush national security team has proved to be "the most incompetent" of the past half- century. But, he added, "Obviously, the president is ultimately responsible."

    Adelman said he remained silent for so long out of loyalty. "I didn't want to bad-mouth the administration," he said. In private, though, he spoke out, resulting in a furious confrontation with Rumsfeld, who summoned him to the Pentagon in September and demanded his resignation from the defense board.

    "It seemed like nobody was getting it," Adelman said. "It seemed like everything was locked in. It seemed like everything was stuck." He agrees he bears blame as well. "I think that's fair. When you advocate a policy that turns bad, you do have some responsibility."

    Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals: "The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don't think is disproven by Iraq. But it's certainly discredited."

Addendum 21 November 2006

Speaking the Unvarnished Truth to Psychopathic Liars

Olbermann: Lessons from the Vietnam War
Keith Olbermann responds to Bush's comparison between Vietnam and Iraq
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
Updated: 7:55 p.m. CT Nov 20, 2006

[Zeppnote: the day after Olbermann delivered this, Kissinger unequivocably stated that the "war" in Iraq cannot be won.]

It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.

And it is pathetic to listen to a man talk unrealistically about Vietnam, who permitted the “Swift-Boating” of not one but two American heroes of that war, in consecutive presidential campaigns.

But most importantly — important beyond measure — his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans.

And that is indefensible and fatal.

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.

“One lesson is,” he said, “that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.”

“We’ll succeed,” the president concluded, “unless we quit.”

If that’s the lesson about Iraq that Mr. Bush sees in Vietnam, then he needs a tutor.

Or we need somebody else making the decisions about Iraq.

Mr. Bush, there are a dozen central, essential lessons to be derived from our nightmare in Vietnam, but “we’ll succeed unless we quit,” is not one of them.

The primary one — which should be as obvious to you as the latest opinion poll showing that only 31 percent of this country agrees with your tragic Iraq policy — is that if you try to pursue a war for which the nation has lost its stomach, you and it are finished. Ask Lyndon Johnson.

The second most important lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If you don’t have a stable local government to work with, you can keep sending in Americans until hell freezes over and it will not matter. Ask Vietnamese Presidents Diem or Thieu.

The third vital lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not. For decades we were warned that if we didn’t stop “communist aggression” in Vietnam, communist agitators would infiltrate and devour the small nations of the world, and make their insidious way, stealthily, to our doorstep.

The war machine of 1968 had this “domino theory.”

Your war machine of 2006 has this nonsense about Iraq as “the central front in the war on terror.”

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of “peace With honor” are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they’re probably just as wrong now, as they were then ... Dr. Kissinger.

And the fifth crucial lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush — which somebody should’ve told you about long before you plunged this country into Iraq — is that if you lie your country into a war, your war, your presidency will be consigned to the scrap heap of history.

Consider your fellow Texan, sir.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson held the country together after a national tragedy, not unlike you did. He had lofty goals and tried to reshape society for the better. And he is remembered for Vietnam, and for the lies he and his government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who needlessly died there.

As you will be remembered for Iraq, and for the lies you and your government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who have needlessly died there and who will needlessly die there tomorrow.

This president has his fictitious Iraqi WMD, and his lies — disguised as subtle hints — linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and his reason-of-the-week for keeping us there when all the evidence for at least three years has told us we need to get as many of our kids out as quickly as possible.

That president had his fictitious attacks on Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, and the next thing any of us knew, the Senate had voted 88-2 to approve the blank check with which Lyndon Johnson paid for our trip into hell.

And yet President Bush just saw the grim reminders of that trip into hell: the 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese killed; the 10,000 civilians who’ve been blown up by landmines since we pulled out; the genocide in the neighboring country of Cambodia, which we triggered.

Yet these parallels — and these lessons — eluded President Bush entirely.

And, in particular, the one over-arching lesson about Iraq that should’ve been written everywhere he looked in Vietnam went unseen.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit”?

Mr. Bush, we did quit in Vietnam!

A decade later than we should have, 58,000 dead later than we should have, but we finally came to our senses.

The stable, burgeoning, vivid country you just saw there, is there because we finally had the good sense to declare victory and get out!

The domino theory was nonsense, sir.

Our departure from Vietnam emboldened no one.

Communism did not spread like a contagion around the world.

And most importantly — as President Reagan’s assistant secretary of state, Lawrence Korb, said on this newscast Friday — we were only in a position to win the Cold War because we quit in Vietnam.

We went home. And instead it was the Russians who learned nothing from Vietnam, and who repeated every one of our mistakes when they went into Afghanistan. And alienated their own people, and killed their own children, and bankrupted their own economy and allowed us to win the Cold War.

We awakened so late, but we did awaken.

Finally, in Vietnam, we learned the lesson. We stopped endlessly squandering lives and treasure and the focus of a nation on an impossible and irrelevant dream, but you are still doing exactly that, tonight, in Iraq.

And these lessons from Vietnam, Mr. Bush, these priceless, transparent lessons, writ large as if across the very sky, are still a mystery to you.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

No, sir.

We will succeed against terrorism, for our country’s needs, toward binding up the nation’s wounds when you quit, quit the monumental lie that is our presence in Iraq.

And in the interim, Mr. Bush, an American kid will be killed there, probably tonight or tomorrow.

And here, sir, endeth the lesson.

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15821138/page/2/

Addendum 30 November 2006
 

Is President Bush Sane?
by Paul Craig Roberts