Six months after his case swung opinion toward attacking Iraq, his intelligence file looks thin.

By: Charles J. Hanley  

One evening in February, in a stifling Baghdad conference room, Iraqi bureaucrats, European envoys, and foreign reporters crowded before television screens to hear the reading of an indictment.

Half a world away, in the hushed U.N. Security Council chamber in New York, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was unleashing an avalanche of allegations, speaking of "the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world".

By: Robert Scheer  

How can the President tell us with a straight face that we taxpayers have a patriotic duty to cough up $87 billion more to enable him to sink us deeper into the Iraq quagmire of his making? That's a lot of money on top of the $79 billion already appropriated by Congress in April - enough to bail out California and every other state experiencing a budget crisis because of economic problems this President has only exacerbated. Shouldn't those who warned against Bush's folly at least qualify for another one of his signature tax rebates?

Once again, Bush is using the Big Lie technique, continuing to slyly conflate those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, despite there being no evidence of such a relationship. It is an insult to those who died on that day of infamy to exploit them to defend a failed policy of preemptive war designed by a bunch of think tank neoconservatives as part of a cockamamie plan to remake the Middle East.

It is apparently too much to ask that the President acknowledge his errors, so costly in American and Iraqi lives, and show some humility for this mess he has created with his "my way or the highway" approach. He could also apologize to "Old Europe", which warned him that the invasion of Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror.

By: Jim Hightower  

Sometimes, political posturing reaches a level that makes me go from merely gritting my teeth... to wanting to puke.

That's precisely how I feel as I see the White House engaged in a vile, disgusting betrayal of America's military veterans. Yes, the very Bushites who constantly exhort you and me to "support our troops" and who crassly pose George W in front of the troops for his political gain - these duplicitous game-players are going all out to kill legislation that would give a simple measure of fairness to some 700,000 disabled and desperate veterans.

These are front-line, career soldiers who were injured in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and other wars. Yet, under an old law, these aging veterans are having their retirement pay docked for every dollar they get in disability benefits. In short, they are forced to pay for their own disabilities, which they incurred in military service to their country.

Editorial from:  

...His judgment about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq appears to have been wrong - and, worse, hyped. But over all, it was a bad guess that was shared by intelligence experts from the Clinton administration and many allies.

Other wrong turns, however, were chosen because of a fundamental flaw in the character of this White House. Despite his tough talk, Mr. Bush seems incapable of choosing a genuinely tough path, of risking his political popularity with the same aggression that he risks the country's economic stability and international credibility. For all the trauma the United States has gone through during his administration, Mr. Bush has never asked the American people to respond to new challenges by making genuine sacrifices.

He committed the military to war, but he told civilians they deserved big tax cuts. He seems determined to remake the Middle East without doing anything serious about reducing our dependence on Middle East oil. His energy policy is a grab bag of giveaways to domestic oil and gas lobbyists. He refuses to ask for even the smallest compromise when it comes to fuel-efficient cars.

By: Bill Gallagher  

...we hear again the most important reason for the war was fighting international terrorism. No longer will Saddam Hussein and his gang be able to work with Osama bin Laden and his murderous operatives in al-Qaeda. The fact that they never did in the first place doesn't matter. What the Bush administration sells is the rhetoric of fighting terror. The reality is another thing.

In every public utterance President Bush has made on the subject over the past two years, his scriptwriters have included the words, Iraq, Saddam, terror, al-Qaeda, and references to the Sept. 11 attacks.

While it is a colossal lie to say Saddam had anything to do with the attacks, the deceitful rhetoric has worked extremely well. A new Washington Post poll shows 70% of the American people believe Saddam Hussein had a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration successfully sold that big lie with the help of the compliant, corporate media machine that allowed the rhetoric to be repeated countless times with hardly a challenge.

"If you voted for Bush you can't take a dump here. Your asshole is in Washington."

- on the Men's restroom wall, in the Outback Steakhouse, Tacoma, WA

By: Paul Krugman  

In his Sunday speech President Bush made a call for unity: "We cannot let past differences interfere with present duties." He also spoke, in a way he hasn't before, about "sacrifice". Yet, as always, what he means by unity is that he should receive a blank check, and it turns out that what he means by sacrifice is sacrifice by other people.

It's now clear that the Iraq war was the mother of all bait-and-switch operations. Mr. Bush and his officials portrayed the invasion of Iraq as an urgent response to an imminent threat, and used war fever to win the midterm election. Then they insisted that the costs of occupation and reconstruction would be minimal, and used the initial glow of battlefield victory to push through yet another round of irresponsible tax cuts.

By: Kristen Breitweiser  

The film DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, which premiered Sunday night on Showtime, is a mind-numbingly boring, revisionist, two-hour-long wish list of how 9/11 might have gone if we had real leaders in the current administration. This film is rated half of a fighter jet - since that is about what we got for our nation's defense on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite the title, the film only budgets approximately 10 minutes to the actual morning of 9/11. Most of the movie is spent cataloging the myriad Cabinet-level debates as to whether to declare "war" against terrorism and how to effectively sell that to the American people.

It is understandable that so little time is actually devoted to the President's true actions on the morning of 9/11. Because to show the entire 23 minutes from 9:03 to 9:25 am, when President Bush, in reality, remained seated and listening to "second grade story-hour" while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers, would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision.

By: Jay Bookman  

Last February, with invasion just weeks away, sources in the Bush administration told Newsweek that they were expecting a postwar occupation of Iraq of 30 to 90 days.

"Every day you get past three months, you've got to expect peacekeepers to have a bull's-eye on their head", the sources explained.

Even at the time, a spokesman for Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith suggested that three months might be too optimistic. It was probably wiser to think five or six months on the outside, Lt. Col. Michael Humm said.

By: C.L. Halverson  

According to Mr. Bush's speech tonight his administration has 3 overall goals in Iraq:

1. Destroy the terrorists in Iraq
2. Receive help from other countries/the U.N.
3. Bestow democracy upon the Iraqi people

This sounds great, but let's look at the Bush government's record thus far...

"The invasion of Iraq might have been avoided if Bush had remained a drinker. Sober, he's a dangerous man."

- Carlos Fuentes, Mexican writer and diplomat

By: Richard Reeves  

It could be argued now that President George W. Bush cannot be re-elected - not after screwing up most everything he touches.

If you doubt that, look at the record. The poor guy is a disaster. I'll just list the first 10 reasons GWB looks like a lame duck - or a dead duck...

By: Marianne Means  

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George Bush told a television interviewer: "I'm not quick in my mind in math." If we had only realized how slow his arithmetic skills really are, we might have avoided the dangerous economic morass into which he has led the federal government.

There were other warning signs, too. He couldn't adequately make his own tax policies add up. He kept talking about cutting federal spending but offered no specifics. He promised that he could simultaneously cut taxes, balance the budget, pay down the national debt, increase spending on defense, save Social Security, and boost spending on education.

"He retreated to the same rhetoric about progress and peace that do not match the reality occurring every day in Iraq. It is a country consumed with chaos, not a shining example of progress in the war against terrorism."

- Sen. John Edwards (D-NC)

"Tonight, the President offered glowing rhetoric but few specifics on how we will erase the mismanagement of this administration in Iraq."

- Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)

"It is nothing short of outrageous that the President spent 15 minutes trying to make up for 15 months of mismanagement. [Bush is] clutching at straws of misinformation."

- former Vermont Governor Howard Dean

From:  

Welcome once again to another spectacular edition of the Top Ten Conservative Idiots. Well, maybe not spectacular. It's pretty good though. This week we have the Bush Adminstration in the top spot - nothing like a spot of flip-flopping and groveling to make one's leaders look like a bunch of asses. Meanwhile it's finally been confirmed that the White House (2) really did fly Osama bin Laden's family out of the country just after September 11, muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger (3) has still got nuthin', and the Environmental "Protection" Agency (4) just plain sucks. Elsewhere, Trent Lott (5) is writing a book (yawn), George W. Bush (8) is leaving children behind (again), and Bristol-Myers Squibb (10) is going to get away with something they shouldn't. Enjoy.

By: Edwin Chen  

President Bush spoke publicly for the first time Tuesday (5-21-02) about his fears for himself and his family in the hours after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling a German television reporter he was "trying to get out of harm's way" before returning to the White House.

In an interview with ARD German Television, Bush said that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, "I was concerned about things like, is my wife safe? You know, I was worried about that. I was worried about things such as my parents. I was worried about my [twin] girls."

The 9/11 attacks gave the U.S. an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination.

By: Michael Meacher  

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the U.S. went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the U.S. and U.K. governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now Vice-President), Donald Rumsfeld (Defence Secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother), and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

By: Maureen Dowd  

On one channel tonight, we can watch the iconic side of the Bush presidency. In the risibly revisionist Showtime movie DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, George W. Bush is Vin Diesel-tough as he battles terrorists. "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come get me", the fictional President fictionally snaps on Air Force One after the 9/ll attacks. "I'll just be waiting for the bastard."

On network channels at the same time - W. is pre-empting himself! - we can watch the ironic side of the Bush presidency. Even though Bush the Younger has done everything in his power not to replicate the fate of his dad, he is replicating the fate of his dad. Only months after swaggering out of a successful war with Iraq, he is struggling with the economy. His numbers have fallen so fast, Top Gun is now tap dancing. He will address the nation to try to underscore the imaginary line that links the budget-busting pit of Iraq to the heartbreaking pit of 9/11.

Just as the father failed to finish off Saddam, so the son has failed to finish off Saddam. Just as the conservatives once carped that the father did not go far enough in Iraq, now the "cakewalk" crowd carps that the son does not go far enough.

By: Sean Gonsalves  

Break out the champagne on Wall Street! A new report is out called Labor Market Left Behind, co-authored by Economic Policy Institute senior economist Jared Bernstein and the Institute's president, Lawrence Mishel. "Unemployment has continued to trend upward, from 5.6% in November 2001 to 6.2% in July 2003... [There are] three unemployed people for every job opening... Unemployment has risen 0.6 percentage points overall and 1.3 points among African Americans", according to Bernstein and Mishel.

And get this: "Employment opportunities have declined more for college graduates than for high school dropouts. Underemployed workers - those working fewer hours than they want to or in a job for which they are overqualified - reached double digits (10.2%) in July 2003." And that doesn't include the 2 million workers who've stopped looking for work in this abysmal job market.

Fortunately for the Bush administration, the question: "Who would Jesus bomb?" is crowding other important inquiries, such as: "How do we end poverty as we know it?"

	What's the difference between a Hummer and a porcupine?
	The porcupine has its pricks on the outside!

Editorial from:  

The Bush administration seems to think being in power means never having to say you were wrong.

Recent days have brought a remarkable set of policy reversals from the White House, but no concomitant humility. Ever skilled at claiming credit whether or not it's due, the administration has rolled out a series of "180's" without the slightest hint of this obvious point: What they were doing before wasn't working.

To hear them tell it, all these about-faces just magically popped into Karl Rove's head one balmy summer morning. Rest assured that the Bush team will find a way to score political points off these initiatives as the campaign season cranks up.

"The watchdog that once spoke truth to power became the lapdog and now is the attack dog for power. The news media has shifted from afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted to the opposite: comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. The corporate/capitalist news media are hired hands - agents - of the powerful and agents of the institutions of wealth, power, and social regression. The news media have become little more than scops, scribblers, propagandists, press agents, hacks, liars, and misleaders for raw capital, power, and Dark Age mentality against Truth, Justice, and the American Way. We must watchdog the watchdog ourselves."

- Thom Prentice, Ph.D., in an article for BuzzFlash

By: Tom Shales  

Simultaneously dull and disgraceful, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a new Showtime movie, uses the tragic attack on America in 2001 as the basis for a reelection campaign movie on behalf of George W. Bush.

The film is an insult to those who perished in the attacks and, really, an insult to America generally, but it's so insanely boring that people aren't likely to become very outraged over it. Written by conservative Republican Lionel Chetwynd, who admits to a bias in Bush's favor, the film - premiering on Showtime tomorrow night at 8 - is primitive propaganda that portrays Bush as the noblest hero since Mighty Mouse.

Nothing in historical record suggests Bush acted particularly heroically Sept. 11, 2001, but Chetwynd's script has him all but saddling up a horse and riding over to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban man-to-man...

By: Jonathan Schell  

...The main mistake of American policy in Iraq was waging the war at all. That is not a conclusion that anyone should have to labor to arrive at.

Something like the whole world, including most of its governments and tens of millions of demonstrators, plus the U.N. Security Council, Representative Dennis Kucinich, Governor Howard Dean, made the point most vocally before the fact. They variously pointed out that the Iraqi regime gave no support to al-Qaeda, predicted that the United States would be unable to establish democracy in Iraq by force (and that therefore no such democracy could serve as a splendid model for the rest of the Middle East), warned that "regime change" for purposes of disarmament was likely to encourage other countries to build weapons of mass destruction, and argued that the allegations that Iraq already had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them at any moment (within forty-five minutes after the order was delivered, it was said) were unproven.

All these justifications for the war are now in history's ash heap, never to be retrieved - adding a few largish piles to the mountains of ideological claptrap (of the left, the right, and what have you) that were the habitual accompaniment of the assorted horrors of the Twentieth Century.

By: Mike Allen and Jonathan Weisman  

Economists at Goldman Sachs dubbed this go-round the "job-loss recovery". The economy has grown each quarter at rates of between 1.3 and 5% since the recession officially ended in November 2001, but payrolls have fallen, by an average of 0.4% every three months, the New York Fed found.

That is not what Bush anticipated when he was stumping for his third tax cut in as many years. Not only did the President frame the tax cut as a jobs program, but also his Council of Economic Advisers left a paper trail. The council predicted that passage of the tax cut would produce 510,000 new jobs in 2003 and 891,000 in 2004.

Since the tax cut was signed in late May, employers have shed 225,000 jobs.

"Some get spiritual 'cause they see the light... and some 'cause they feel the heat."

- Ray Willie Hubbard, Conversation With the Devil

By: Paul E. Almeida  

This Tuesday, September 9, 2003, the U.S. Senate will vote on whether to stop what could be the biggest pay cut in U.S. history.

On March 31, 2003, the Bush Department of Labor (DOL) issued proposed regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). The FLSA established the norm of a 40-hour work week. If you work more than 40 hours a week, you should receive pay at time-and-a-half for the extra hours.

Congress passed the FLSA to urge employers to spread work around and not to exploit the workers they have. But it did not extend the right to overtime pay to professionals, executives, and administrators, on the theory they can take care of themselves.

The proposed DOL regulations would enlarge the exceptions to swallow the rule...

"A word of advice: never take water for granted. Every time you wash your hands in cold, clean, clear water - say a prayer of thanks to whatever deity you revere. Every time you drink fresh, odorless water - say the same prayer. Never throw out the clean water remaining in your glass - water a plant, give it to the cat, throw it out into the garden... whatever. Never take it for granted."

- 'riverbend', a "Girl Blog from Iraq", Baghdad Burning

By: Thomas E. Ricks  

A former U.S. commander for the Middle East who still consults for the State Department yesterday blasted the Bush administration's handling of postwar Iraq, saying it lacked a coherent strategy, a serious plan, and sufficient resources.

"There is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together", said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, and so, he said, "we're in danger of failing".

In an impassioned speech to several hundred Marine and Navy officers and others, Zinni invoked the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960's and 70's. "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice", said Zinni, who was severely wounded while serving as an infantry officer in that conflict. "I ask you, is it happening again?"

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