BushCo survived the illegal sanctioning of inhumane torture. They
survived a gay male prostitute acting as a journalist. They survived
Enron and Diebold and the rigging of the first election and they will
survive Downing Street simply because all the people who should be on
the attack about these atrocities all work for the guys who committed
them.
Wednesday 22 June 2005 By Mark Morford, San Francisco Gate Columnist
Downing Street Is For Liars
Why aren't the media screaming about the latest proofs of Bush's
war scams ? Don't you know ?
This is the white-hot question right now gushing forth from many
on the Left, from progressive blogs and liberal patriots and blue
staters and angry anti-Bushers alike, and it is like a plea, a
rallying call, an indignant stomp of deep frustration. It is this :
Why are major American media not swarming all over the Downing
Street Memos thing ? (1)
Why is the entire nation not just appalled and disgusted and aghast
at finding seemingly irrefutable proofs about what we all already
knew, which is that BushCo planned to invade Iraq long before 9/11
and needed to find a way to justify it ? (2)
And, we now know, he was even willing to go so far as to rig the
intelligence and "fix the facts" and screw the US economy and screw
any sort of exit strategy and screw the potential for lost lives
and let's just blindly stomp on in there and bomb the living crap
outta Saddam despite the undeniable pre-Iraq evidence that Saddam
had zero WMDs and that his nuclear program was "effectively frozen",
and despite how BushCo and the CIA and FBI and DOD and the Clinton
administration and your grandma all knew it ?
This is what the infamous Downing Street Memos allegedly contain,
more undeniable proofs in the form of meeting notes with higher-ups
in Britain and the US, talking about the supposedly "dire" threat
of WMDs and nailing Iraq well before Bush was handed the tragic
and morose political gift of 9/11 to leverage and ***** and turn
into his own personal Jesus.
And to be sure, the outcry from the Left is healthy and good and
appropriate and only now are a handful of newspapers and magazines
(you go, Newsweek - (3) - ) taking up the Downing Street Memo
debacle, asking slightly more inflamed questions of BushCo.
So then, why aren't US media roaring more angrily about this ?
Why aren't the major players up in arms and trumpeting banner
headlines and screaming for Bush to answer for his obvious and
plentiful crimes against the nation and the Earth and peace ?
Answer : Because it's not really news. Not anymore.
Because, to be honest, what the memos actually reveal is not quite
as much as the Left wishes they did, and while they certainly do
reveal that Bush is a noted liar and distorter of fact and that
we can easily deduce that his snarling war hawks torqued the Brits
into complicity and mangled the UN laws and misled the American
people into war perhaps more deviously and violently than any
administration in recent American history, well, there is not
a single thing in the words you just read that most of us did not
already know.
It's true. There is, unfortunately, nothing here that not already
been trumpeted to death by the Left, and therefore to try to trumpet
it all again as some sort of irrefutable revelation that should
change the face and temperament of the nation is sort of like
beating a dead horse we all knew was already dead but that is only
now taking on a new dimension of stink.
Look at it this way : The majority of the nation knows Bush lied
like a dog to drive us into an unwinnable (but, for his cronies,
incredibly profitable) war. The rest either refuse to believe it,
or they claim, with equal parts ignorance and blind jingoism,
that the ends (ousting a pip-squeak dictator who was no real
threat to anyone and who had been successfully contained for
20 years) justify the means ($200 billion, 1,700 dead Americans
(9), over 10,000 wounded and disabled US soldiers, countless
tens of thousands of dead innocent Iraqis, staggering economic
debt, the open disrespect -- if not outright contempt -- of the
entire international community).
Here is the American cynic's view : It is almost too late
to care about the lies. It is almost pointless to scream
and rant and point fingers of blame. We all know who is
to blame, and it ain't Saddam, and it ain't Osama, and
it ain't "terror," and it ain't our "freedoms".
Bush has driven us so deep into the Iraq hellhole it serves
almost no purpose to whine about the obvious deceptions and
blatant whorelike pre-9/11 machinations that got us here.
We are now, instead, focused on endurance. On gritting teeth
and getting through and getting the hell out of this new Vietnam
Bush has imbecilically driven us into, all while surviving 3.5
more years of one of the most abusive, secretive cadres of
warmongering leadership in American history.
Oh, and rest assured, Iraq is indeed a new Vietnam (4).
The parallels are undeniable and mounting (5) -- all the elements
are in place : staggering civilian death tolls, inmate abuse and
torture, international embarrassment, economic pillaging, executive
impudence, a vicious drive toward empire and power, a false sense
of "victory" and the overpowering sense we are so deeply entrenched
in this violent, chaotic quagmire, it will take many more years and
many thousands of more US dead and countless more billions before
we are anywhere near stabilization.
But oh, you might cry (and this column might regularly wail),
shouldn't Bush be held accountable ? Shouldn't he be made
to answer for these lies, these obvious abuses of power ?
Answer : You're ***** right he should. He should also be strapped
to an incredibly uncomfortable chair and made to look at the smoking
bones of ten thousand dead Iraqi children. But that's just me.
The lies that led us into this war are indeed staggering, appalling,
make Clinton's lies about his stupid little affair sound like, well,
a stupid little affair. As Dubya's tanking poll ratings prove (6),
even many moderate Republicans are backing away from calling Iraq
a success, or even a necessary action. And Dems have recently begun
demanding that BushCo develop some kind of exit strategy to begin
pulling out US troops within a year (7).
Let's just say it outright : Of course Bush deserves to be impeached (8).
But of course Bush will not be impeached, because impeachment requires
a massive federal investigation and an act of Congress and the support
of countless senators and representatives, and right now the GOP controls
Congress with a little iron penis, and therefore any sort of uprising
or scandal or suggestion of punishment gets immediately slammed down
or scoffed away or buried under an avalanche of shrugs and yawns and
neoconservative smugness. Isn't that right, Mr. Gannon ? Mr. DeLay ?
Abu Ghraib ? Gitmo ? Saddam ? Et al.
BushCo survived the illegal sanctioning of inhumane torture. They
survived a gay male prostitute acting as a journalist. They survived
Enron and Diebold and the rigging of the first election and they will
survive Downing Street simply because all the people who should be on
the attack about these atrocities all work for the guys who committed
them.
So then, the question is not merely when will the stack of lies,
of abuses become so high, so unstable, so inexcusable that the
entire nation finally takes notice ...................
More :
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/06/22/notes062
205.DTL&nl=fix
1) http://www.downingstreetmemo.com
2) Downing Street Memo a Growing Problem for Bush
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0617-03.htm
3) New leaked memos are raising further questions about whether
the Bush administration 'fixed' its intel to justify the Iraq war.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8234762/site/newsweek
4) Iraq In The Name Of Freedom : Democracy Hypocrisy
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9174.htm
5) The Unreported Vietnam-Iraq Parallel
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0501-32.htm
6) Bush's triumphalism only makes things worse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1512334,00.html
and : http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/061705Y.shtml
7) 'Exit Strategy' Is More Than a Whisper in Washington
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/061605D.shtml
8) Democrats Call for Inquiry into 'Downing Street Memo'
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/061705Z.shtml
9) US Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or
en route to German hospitals are not counted.
They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005.
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a1390.htm
--
Money doesn't just talk, it swears.
.
|
