Bush Cuts Vacation Short (For Once)

So President Bush has called off his vacation two days early due to Hurricane Katrina. There’s nothing wrong with this on the surface, but it does make for an interesting comparison between his 2005 summer vacation and his 2001 summer vacation.

There has been criticism out there for some time that Bush was on vacation for an entire month in the weeks prior to 9/11, and that since he was on vacation he wasn’t doing all he could in response to the threat of al Qaeda. This is made to seem much worse on his part since he received a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States” during his vacation on Aug 6, 2001.

The defense of Bush has been that he wasn’t really on vacation, that the president is never really on vacation, and that he is still working while in Crawford, TX. As he said himself, “You don’t have to be in Washington to work.” This is a straw man defense because no reasonable person was really accusing Bush of doing no work for the entire month as if he was on a real vacation that an ordinary person would take. Everyone knows that as president he is still either surrounded by or in contact with his advisors and that he’s having meetings and is being briefed on important issues.

The criticism always was (or should have been) that when he is on vacation for an entire month he can’t be as on top of important situations as he could be if he was in Washington. And, this is something that has just been confirmed by President Bush himself when he cut this year’s vacation short to get back to Washington to oversee the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina - which is proving to be a catastrophic disaster worse than anticipated.

It just seems plainly obvious that you can’t get as much work done in Crawford, TX as you can in Washington, DC. That seems to be true as pertaining to planning a response to a natural disaster, and it seems to be true pertaining to planning a national defense against a terrorist enemy whom is “determined to attack inside the United States.”

Also, it is a ridiculous defense for the average person to say that none of us really knew that 9/11 was possible, so therefore it’s not fair to blame the administration. Of course we didn’t expect it as ordinary citizens, but we are not given access to classified government intelligence, the Bush administration was. We are not given briefings with titles about terrorists being determined to attack us. We are not told by informants in May 2001 that al Qaeda operatives are inside the United States planning attacks with explosives, the Bush administration was given that information. We don’t have terrorist czars warning us and requesting meetings with us to discuss the threat of terrorism, the Bush administration had one of these people, Richard Clarke, and they ignored him. The Clinton administration’s national security team didn’t brief every American citizen that al Qaeda was the biggest threat facing America - that was private information delivered only to the incoming Bush administration. As private citizens we were not told to stop flying commercial aircrafts in July 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft was told this and he did stop flying commercial prior to 9/11 because of a threat assessment made by the FBI.

This is not to suggest that Bush definitely could have or would have prevented 9/11 if he wasn’t in Crawford in August 2001, but he obviously was not putting in a full day's work on the issue. He did not view that threat as being serious enough to interrupt his month long vacation. However, the warnings listed above clearly show that there were many things that the president could've been spending more time on in August 2001.

Rethinking Conspiracy Theories

I've never been one to buy too heavily into conspiracy theories, though I do think there's something more to the JFK assassination than a lone gunmen. However, other conspiracies I always considered too far fetched including recent ones that our government either knew about in advance or perhaps planned 9/11. For the record, I don't think they did, but I can no longer say it's inconceivable.

Here is a link to a site that lays out U.S. govt. conspiracies in the 1960's to provoke a war with Cuba. From what I can tell this seems to be very legitimate. Once you goto the site you can find links to the actual declassified Department of Defense documents, and this story is also backed up by an ABC News website which details this conspiracy and how the documents came to be released.

What this information does accomplish is that it puts to rest the simple minded Republican mantra that we went to war to help the Iraqi people (or whatever their feel good reason of the moment is now that WMD is no longer a reason). At the least, this information shows what our government is capable of. This is what happens behind the scenes - we treat military action and war as a tool to further our own selfish strategic objectives. Likewise, this should also show how the exaggeration of evidence is regularly used as a propoganda tool by our govt to justify their desired military actions, e.g. our exaggerated WMD claims.

Facts About Terrorism

Some facts about the Republican's history of dealing with terrorism:

In 1983 terrorists bombed a marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon which killed 241 marines. That terrorist organization was Hezbollah which was based in Lebanon and also had ties to Iran. President Reagan's response was to pull U.S. troops out of Lebanon, i.e. he appeased the terrorists.

In the mid 1980's the Reagan administration was involved in the Iran-Contra Scandal. Members of the administration secretly sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages in Lebanon. For the second time we once again negotiated with and appeased terrorists, and this time we actually supplied weapons to an Iranian regime that the U.S. had recently called an instigator of international terrorism, and whom were culpable in the 1983 Beirut bombing.

During the 1980's the Reagan and Bush administrations supplied Iraq with funding and weapons including chemical weapons. We've all seen the infamous photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Sadaam Hussein in Baghdad.







Coincidentally, these Republican administrations also funded and trained Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan because at this time he was fighting the Soviet Union. The people who developed and carried out this strategy lacked any foresight to see that their new ally would soon become their #1 enemy.

Also during the 1980's, during the terms of Reagan and Bush Sr., there were multiple airline hijackings and bombings of airliners all done by various Islamic terrorists. There are literally too many incidents to list here. The response of the U.S. government to these acts: The only significant response was one mission to bomb Libya and try to kill Khadafi. We missed. We did kill his adopted daughter, but he survived.

The above record of dealing with terrorism and Middle East foreign policy is downright awful. Today the Republicans try to sell themselves as the party that is strong on terrorism and national defense. However, their record shows they've been not only clueless about how to handle terrorism or how to deal with the Middle East, but their policies have been extremely dangerous to the security of the United States. Not one of these decisions turned out to be the right thing to do, and many of the people involved in these decisions are the same people that are part of the current Bush administration which tells the public that the Democrats can’t be trusted to handle our national security. The hypocrisy of this idea is laughable.

Imagine If Bill Clinton or John Kerry had been involved in funding or training Osama Bin Laden... the Republicans would be calling them incompetent traitors who are responsible for 9/11. If they had funded and supplied Sadaam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction they would be accused of reckless disregard for national security and of making the world a more dangerous place. If they had walked away from Middle Eastern terrorists who just killed 241 marines they would be called weak, cowardly liberals who believe in giving in to terrorism.

John Kerry was photographed over 30 years ago at an anti-war protest in the same crowd as Jane Fonda. That picture found its way in to TV ads put out by right wing groups that called him a traitor. Imagine if a Democratic president's Secretary of Defense was photographed shaking hands with Sadaam Hussein in Baghdad. The right wing smear machine would’ve had this image plastered all over billboards, commercials, and FoxNews stories.

All the above listed incidents are facts that anyone can look up. It is important that we know the history of this crowd and compare those facts to their short and simple slogans. If we continue to turn over our national security to a party that's been consistently wrong in dealing with the Middle East then the consequences in years to come may be too drastic to realize.

National Geographic’s 9/11 Documentary

I watched the first part of National Geographic’s two part documentary on 9/11 last night (the second part will air tonight at 9pm), and it was a very thorough and objective look at the hijackers and events that led to 9/11, and I highly recommend watching tonight’s conclusion.

The filmmakers genuinely seemed to try to be as objective as possible. The majority of the content dealt with the history and creation of al Qaeda and their motives and movements in the years leading up to 9/11. For the most part, the documentary doesn’t have a political agenda, but since it does relay unbiased facts, there are political conclusions that can be drawn. And, the more and more one understands the facts of the case then the more and more it becomes painfully obvious how the Bush administration’s post 9/11 policies are wrong.

The first part of the documentary doesn’t hold Bush responsible for 9/11 nor does it delve too deeply into the post 9/11 American foreign policy that was launched by the Bush administration. I assume they’ll get into the post 9/11 aftermath, however, in part II. But, in its realistic reporting on Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda the viewer must recognize that Bush’s policies are playing right into al Qaeda’s hands.

The most important things I took away from the documentary are first the ingeniousness, brains and efficiency of al Qaeda (without any connotation that they’re good or evil) and the undeniable difference between the Bush administration’s rhetoric compared to the real facts of the case. In short, our govt. - and both the Clinton and Bush administrations are guilty of this - completely underestimated and failed to understand the threat posed by Bin Laden and al Qaeda. And, after 9/11 the Bush administration continued to get things wrong. Either they still failed to understand the true nature of them or they flat out denied their true nature and then lied to the American people about it.

I can understand why the average American was duped. They don’t have access to the top intelligence and top specialists on these subjects, nor do they understand all the history and complexities involved in American foreign policy, and to top it off their leaders just don’t tell them the truth. However, none of these are reasons for the administration to not understand the threat or the strategy of al Qaeda, so there is no excuse for their incompetence. The top Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda experts realize that his true goal on 9/11 was to provoke America into a middle east conflict. He knew he could not wage a war against America on our turf, so he set it up so we would fight him on his turf, and he predicted a defeat for America under those circumstances. Something that seems more and more likely as time goes on.

Our invasion of Iraq was a dream come true to al Qaeda. George Bush couldn’t have helped Bin Laden more if he tried. These are not the opinions of partisan Democrats bent on tearing down George Bush. These are the opinions of the experts in the intelligence community who know the nature of Bin Laden and al Qaeda. How do they know this: because it is what Osama Bin Laden told people prior to 9/11. And, considering the nature of the man, and what has happened since 9/11, there is no reason to doubt this. It actually makes perfect sense and it is a smart strategy on his part considering what he is after.

But, from an American perspective it should be inexcusable that we have so played into his hands and that we may be giving him the victory that he desires. And, this victory is probably greater than he could’ve anticipated because he could never have planned on Bush bungling America’s post 9/11 strategy so greatly. Bin Laden was hoping for America to use our military against the Middle East in some way, but in his wildest dreams he couldn’t have planned for America to get caught lying to the whole world about Iraq’s WMD’s, and then for us to preemptively invade a sovereign nation without a true coalition. He couldn’t have assumed that Bush would effectively turn most of the world against America and waste the post 9/11 sympathy that was pouring into us. He couldn’t have imagined how badly we bungled the military strategies in Iraq, and he couldn’t have counted on Donald Rumsfeld - on these last points he just got lucky.

The Hypocrisy of The Republican Party

As the anti-war movement gains steam the Republicans continue to make the most outrageous and hypocritical statements. Their favorite tactic is to smear anyone who opposes Bush and his war of choice. They consistently try to label any dissenters as unpatriotic traitors that blame America first, embolden the enemy, weaken our national security, and destroy the morale of our troops. Below you can see a litany of quotes from many of these same Republicans from just a few years ago when they were speaking out against President Clinton and the war in Kosovo.

That war, by the way, was a huge success(if war can be considered a success) compared with the debacle of Iraq. So, not only are these Republicans unpatriotic traitors by their own standards, but they're also amazingly wrong on almost all issues of national security. They thought Kosovo would be a disaster with no exit strategy and they thought Iraq would be easy.

Here is the Republican party in their own words:

"President Clinton is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"No goal, no objective, not until we have those things and a compelling case is made, then I say, back out of it, because innocent people are going to die for nothing. That's why I'm against it."
-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/5/99

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
-Karen Hughes

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning... I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"You think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo."
-Tony Snow, Fox News 3/24/99

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years"
-Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"I'm on the Senate Intelligence Committee, so you can trust me and believe me when I say we're running out of cruise missles. I can't tell you exactly how many we have left, for security reasons, but we're almost out of cruise missles."
-Senator Inhofe (R-OK )

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our overextended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

"I don't know that Milosevic will ever raise a white flag"
-Senator Don Nickles (R-OK)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

"This is President Clinton's war, and when he falls flat on his face, that's his problem."
-Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN)

"The two powers that have ICBMs that can reach the United States are Russia and China. Here we go in. We're taking on not just Milosevic. We can't just say, 'that little guy, we can whip him.' We have these two other powers that have missiles that can reach us, and we have zero defense thanks to this president."
-Senator James Inhofe (R-OK)

"You can support the troops but not the president"
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

"My job as majority leader is be supportive of our troops, try to have input as decisions are made and to look at those decisions after they're made ... not to march in lock step with everything the president decides to do."
-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"For us to call this a victory and to commend the President of the United States as the Commander in Chief showing great leadership in Operation Allied Force is a farce"
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly."
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Once the bombing commenced, I think then Milosevic unleashed his forces, and then that's when the slaughtering and the massive ethnic cleansing really started"
-Senator Don Nickles (R-OK)

"Clinton's bombing campaign has caused all of these problems to explode"
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

"These international war criminals were led by Gen. Wesley Clark ...who clicked his shiny heels for the commander-in-grief, Bill Clinton."
-Michael Savage

"This has been an unmitigated disaster ... Ask the Chinese embassy. Ask all the people in Belgrade that we've killed. Ask the refugees that we've killed. Ask the people in nursing homes. Ask the people in hospitals."
-Representative Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"It is a remarkable spectacle to see the Clinton Administration and NATO taking over from the Soviet Union the role of sponsoring "wars of national liberation."
-Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-ID)

"By the order to launch air strikes against Serbia, NATO and President Clinton have entered uncharted territory in mankind's history. Not even Hitler's grab of the Sudetenland in the 1930s, which eventually led to WW II, ranks as a comparable travesty. For, there are no American interests whatsoever that the NATO bombing willeither help, or protect; only needless risks to which it exposes the American soldiers and assets, not to mention the victims on the ground in Serbia."
-Bob Djurdjevic, founder of Truth in Media

A Must Read

Here's a link to a perfectly made argument by Cenk Uygur on The Huffington Post. Most of the post is a reprint of a speech by Howard Dean before the Iraq war. Dean's points seem brilliant at this time. Also, Cenk's critique of the media is dead on. The so-called liberal media in this country is a joke, and the fact that the right wingers have succeeded in labeling it the "liberal media" might be one of the most ingenious examples of propoganda in recent history.

The Cindy Sheehan Story

The Cindy Sheehan story has been overblown by the anti-war/anti-Bush side, but despite that fact the story has still served a purpose. As an objective observer the Democratic pundits and bloggers have shown that their bias has clearly clouded their judgment in assessing the magnitude of the story. However, the Republicans have shown themselves to be in a whole other league with their hypocrisy. Now, we all know politicians are partisan, and therefore, by definition, they must be hypocritical in some instances. You can't expect a politician to just openly admit that they're party is wrong and the other is right. But, the level that the Republican Party has gone to is embarrassing, and it really shows their true mean-spirited and immoral nature and the difference between the two parties.

As stated, those who are too supportive of Cindy Sheehan are biased in their support. They either refuse to acknowledge or they diminish the importance of the fact that Bush did meet with Cindy Sheehan after her son died, and this fact overwhelmingly diminishes the credibility of their cause. This would've been a great story for their side if Bush never met with this woman. Imagine it: a grieving mother of a fallen soldier who only wants a chance to meet the president and make sense of her sacrifice and confront him on questions about the war that took her son's life. How could he refuse to grant this small request of this woman? If he only didn't meet with her a year ago - oh, what a story it would be; but the Democratic pundits aren't going to let that wrinkle mess up their cause. They are blindly reporting on the story as they wish it was, and we all know that they would not/could not treat the story the same if there were a Democratic president in the same situation. That's just human nature. Only the tried and true independent might have the ability to treat each circumstance the same regardless of which party was on a certain side of the issue.

This is an example of how the Democrats show their bias and their hypocrisy. But, what the Republicans have done is ten times worse and clearly shows the pathological lying they will go through to support their party and smear their opponents. Cindy Sheehan may be misguided and unrealistic in some of her views, but that's because of the incomprehensible pain that she's in after losing a child. And, considering the questionable nature of this war it is only understandable that this can only add to her pain. So, she is extremely emotional and therefore not making the most logical decisions. She should really just make her protest an anti-war protest and it would make more sense and have more legitimacy. Think of John Kerry leading an anti-war protest after the Vietnam War - he was a Vietnam Veteran fighting to end the war, but he didn't confuse or weaken his stance by demanding a meeting with the president - let alone a 2nd meeting. His cause stood on its own, and all the Cindy Sheehan supporters should recognize the difference.

In saying that, one must then turn to look at the Republicans. If they were merely being overly supportive of Bush and dismissive of Cindy Sheehan that would be analogous to the biased ness of the Democrats and it would after all be understandable from their point of view. Again, it's human nature, and this would be a natural reaction from someone who really believes in Bush and in the war (why one would do so is another subject). However, the Republicans aren't just leaning towards Bush as the Democrats would do if the roles were reversed. They are showing their true colors which they do time and time again. Many on the right are engaging in a ruthless smear campaign of Cindy Sheehan which is inexcusable. Pointing out that her views are inconsistent is one thing, but they paint her as a lying crackpot whose behavior is almost treasonous. There's no sensitivity to the fact that she's a grieving mother.

Now, compare this situation to the recent Terry Schiavo media circus. In that controversy the Democrats didn't smear the parents of Terry Schiavo who were similarly being unrealistic in their views because that was understandable to everyone. They were grieving parents after all and so no one expected them to be totally logical about the situation. Many people disagreed with their view, but there was no smear campaign against them. There was however a smear campaign against Michael Schiavo who was attacked and made to be the bad guy in that situation - it was said that he didn't love Terry, he was looking to make money, and there were even slight rumblings that he may have had something to do with her coma.

Do you see a pattern emerging here? The Democrats do not viciously smear their opponents with baseless and insensitive attacks and the Republicans do. The Democrats will of course be very harsh on Bush, as the Republicans were very harsh on Clinton. But, that's where the similarities stop. Only one side would viciously attack a grieving mother. Only one side would viciously attack a grieving husband. Both sides had the opportunity to do this, but only the Republicans engaged in these tactics. What does this say about them? How is it possible that this is the party that desperately tries to prop itself up as the "moral values" party? And, how down right scary is it that there are that many people out there that are blind enough to believe them simply because they mention Jesus more than the Democrats do?