Nothing Left To Lie About

[Rspaight]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 071603.DTL

Nothing Left To Lie About
With BushCo reaming the nation on just about every possible front, is implosion imminent?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the lies, the flagrant GOP bitch slappings of the American public, the maniacal jabs straight in eye of truth with the icepick of utter BS, have just reached some sort of critical mass, some sort of saturation point of absurdity and pain and ridiculousness and you just have to stand up and applaud.

Really. It's almost as if you should cheer the invidiousness, it is so spectacular, unprecedented, the tower of lies reaching the point where you, Jaded and Benumbed American Citizen, are forced to either recoil and ignore and deny, succumb and scream and laugh, or, like Bush himself, just sort of stand there, wide eyed, dumfounded, blinking hard, looking more blank and confused than ever, as the unified BushCo front begins to gloriously unravel.

This much we now know, as compiled by the CIA and the U.N. and U.S. military leaders and Bush's own teams of experts and scientists and lackeys and pretty much anyone with any sort of common sense or astute observation as yet unclouded and unmisled by the raging masturbatory pro-war gropings of, say, Fox News. A brief summary:

Saddam was all over 9/11. Funny how U.S. intelligence never found a single connection. Funny how BushCo knowingly led the nation on to believe there was one. Funny how the only role Saddamn actually played in 9/11 was to watch it unfold on CNN and exclaim, "Holy Allah with a case of Cuban cigars, Hashim, a million dinars says BushCo uses that as an excuse to come swipe our oil and pump up Halliburton and build a Starbucks in downtown Baghdad! Prepare the escape pod!"

Iraq was al Qaeda's bitch. See above. Fact is, U.S. intelligence found no proven link between Iraq and any recent terrorism threats against the U.S. Fact is, bin Laden hated Saddam and denounced his socialist Baath party as "infidels.". Fact is, BushCo worked extremely hard to manipulate the media to make you think the two were so close they might as well have been gay lovers. Curiously, this sinister obfuscation is still not clear to millions of Americans most of whom tend to live in Texas and/or anywhere near major military manufacturing plants. Go figure.

Those 9/11 terrorists? Buncha snarling Iraqis. Well, no. Most were, in fact, Saudi. There were no Iraqis at all. Saudi Arabia remains a desperately important American ally, one that provides billions in U.S. investment and hence BushCo loves them and kisses their rings and doesn't say a peep about the millions they also give to terrorist cells -- like, say, those of al Qaeda -- to protect their oil fields. Shhh.

Saddam has millions of drumfuls of scary chemicals ready at a moment's notice to poison the entire world and most of EuroDisney. Not even close. Huge chunks of "proof" of Iraq's purported chemical-weapons and nuclear-weapons programs have already been dismissed by U.N. inspectors and weapons experts. Saddam did, however, possess large quantities of bootlegged Britney Spears posters, which, if dropped on Israel, would have certainly caused pandemonium if not outright giggling and many heavy longing sighs.

Saddam scored uranium from Niger to make nukes. This is so cutely wrong it's painful. The document stating this was forged and bogus and BushCo knew it and referenced it anyway in the State of the Union address to help justify the war, and now he's all flustered and denying everything and the CIA director is bumbling in as the fall guy, and oh my freaking God do they ever think you are stupid.

The war on Iraq will be as easy as lancing a boil on Dick Cheney's forehead. Yes! Instant and painless and easy it will be, and it will inflict minimal casualties and we'd be all done in a week and America will be back home and happily watching "The Bachelorette" and the world would love us and see how glorious and righteous we are and everyone will convert to Christianity and join Promise Keepers and the 700 Club and never have sex and we will ban all icky gay people to Canada. Whee!
Or not. Never you mind that thousands of soldiers are to be stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq "indefinitely," for years to come. Or that more than half of the U.S. Army's entire combat force is bogged down in Iraq right now. Or that U.S. soldiers are still dying in Iraq every day, more than 80 so far (33 in hostile fire), with more to come, endless guerrilla warfare possibly requiring even more U.S. troops, months after BushCo declared the war essentially over. Whoops. Gosh. Sorry.

The Jessica Lynch "rescue" was all-American heroism at its finest. So cute. The "rescue" was actually all-American Pentagon PR bulls** at its finest, a rather embarrassingly staged hoax so full of overblown stunts and dumb machismo and awkward twists that not even Fox News would touch the story after a while, and they'll run anything. No wonder the Pentagon has refused to release the unedited video footage of the "rescue."

Iraq's oil money will go straight to "liberated" Iraqi people. Seriously now. Did anyone really ever believe this, even in their most drunken and heavily Xanaxed state? The money, of course, is going straight into U.S. and U.K. coffers as "payment" for the Gulf War, with only a fraction going for "rebuilding." But the bottom line is, we control the oil. We control Iraq's billions. We do not care who knows it. Special note from Donny "Beady Eyes" Rumsfeld to all you people who somehow genuinely believed we bombed Iraq for the betterment of the Iraqi people: Tthhppbbbhhhppbb.

Oh my God look just look at all those scary WMDs. There are no WMDs. There are no WMDs. There are no WMDs. And there never were. Two little words from BushCo, straight to you: Ha-ha, suckers.

The list goes on. This list is nearly endless. The list is growing and expanding and now threatens to split and explode and spread like some sort of giant viscous blob and invade small towns and kill plants and induce women to slap their hands to their faces and scream while it slowly steamrolls innocent children as they innocently stand there in the street playing innocent Frisbee, innocently.

And there are others. There are flagrant lies and cover-ups and misprisions not even related to the war, more about increasingly nauseating domestic issues, major budget crises and unabashed pro-corporate decisions and anti-gay anti-women anti-sex fun for the whole terrified white Christian family.

There is, for example, the recent hacking to death of the EPA's major greenhouse-gas/air-quality study. There was the (failed) attempt to kill the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that tracked factory closings in the U.S. There is the secret $135 mil in budget moneys set aside to cram invidious sexless Christian "abstinence only until marriage" programs down the throats of jaded American teens and desperate budget-reamed schools.

There was, as Slate so effortlessly delineates, the regular and rather sneering deep-sixing of serious economic data and fiscal forecasting -- much of it generated by Bush's own teams -- because it didn't match the GOP's makeshift rosy scenarios.

There is massive unemployment. There is the largest budget deficit in history, now a staggering $455 billion, over $50 billion more than the administration predicted just five months ago.

There are state and local governments broke to the point of having to cut back essential services like police and fire departments, hospitals, public schools, road maintenance and sewers. There is Lynne Cheney. 'Nuff said.

There appears to be no end. There appears to be a limitless supply of lies and half-truths and misinformations BushCo can invent on the spot, and is now a good time to recall how Clinton was savaged and vilified and attacked and nearly impeached because he lied about having big dumb sex with a rather unappealing intern?

And yet here is BushCo, openly and shamelessly lying about leading this nation into a vile and petroleum-drunk war, massacring tens of thousands, killing hundreds of U.S. soldiers (and counting), gutting the budget, favoring the rich with useless tax cuts, hiding and prevaricating and dodging and treated the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution the way a crusty abusive Catholic priest treats an altar boy.

This is where you have to laugh. This is where you applaud. Stand up and cheer, for it has been a masterful performance, a rather unprecedented series of major cover-ups and well-orchestrated PR maneuvers and outright fabrications unmatched in recent history. Hell, the epic scale of BushCo's atrocities make Clinton's little oral-sex fixation seem like a jaywalking violation.

Is now the time? Is this is where we start to notice how it is all coming unraveled, Bush's snide web of lies just too flagrant and too insulting for too long, CIA directors and intelligence experts and military leaders and scientists and the like all coming forward now to refute any number of false BushCo claims, the chinks in the armor now becoming cracks and fissures and flubs and stumbles and ultimate raging implosions?

Is this why impeachment proceedings have yet to begin in earnest against BushCo? Because we're just too stunned, too frozen in disbelief at the mounting mountains of evidence that we have been duped and misled and lied to on a scale we can't really begin to assimilate? Could very well be.

Because the tower of lies, oh how it teeters, how it quivers, how it feels oh so ready to fall.

[mikenycLI]

What did he do to deserve impeachment ?

There is no information, mentioned in the article, that rises to an impeachable offense, that I know of, yet. He is performing, well within, our general expectations of a president of the United States.

What appears to be not telling the truth, isn't enough.

[Rspaight]

Under the USA Patriot Act, disseminating false information regarding terrorist threats is a felony.

Ryan

[mikenycLI]

Ryan,

Who is going to propose the article of impeachment ?

[Rspaight]

Ah, now that's the question. I can't imagine anyone having the guts to do that at the moment. A few more months of guerilla war in Iraq, a few more debunked pre-war claims (they're out there, just not widely publicized -- the Niger forgery was known for a *long* time but only hit the mainstream in the last week or two) and sliding opinion polls might change that, thought I tend to doubt it.

Not enough people are angry about this for anything like impeachment. (Yet.)

Ryan

[Ron]

Not enough people are angry about this for anything like impeachment. (Yet.)

Richard Nixon was impeached for far less. Clinton was considered a candidate for impeachment for far, *far* less. My feeling is that until high-ranking Republicans [not to mention a majority of American citizens] jump on the bandwagon [as happened re: Watergate] nothing will come of this. So far, I'm happy that Bush's duplicity has finally become front-page news.

[mikenycLI]

Ron,

As to what Nixon and Clinton were impeached for, I don't think so.

Here are a couple of links to refresh your memory....

nixon at .... http://www.chron.com/content/interactiv ... index.html

clinton at...
http://www.mrdata.net/Impeach/articles.htm

No one, still, has articulated, what Bush has done wrong here.

[Rspaight]

Richard Nixon was impeached for far less. Clinton was considered a candidate for impeachment for far, *far* less.

Actually, Nixon wasn't impeached -- he saw the writing on the wall and resigned before an impeachment vote took place. Clinton *was* impeached by the House but not convicted in the Senate.

No one, still, has articulated, what Bush has done wrong here.

In a nutshell, the case is that he knowingly used fabricated and/or misleading information concerning an imminent terrorist threat from Iraq to convince Congress and the American public to go to war. As I pointed out above, this is a felony.

Can it be proven? Maybe. Is anyone going to try? Probably not.

Point is, Clinton was impeached for lying about his sex life in a deposition. (All the articles of impeachment are essentially different ways of saying that Clinton tried to cover up his relationship with Lewinsky in the context of the Paula Jones case.) Bush arguably lied about matters of national security in a State Of The Union address and other official speeches (and instructed his officials to repeat those lies to the media, congressional inquiries, and the United Nations), resulting in the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans (and the spending of untold hundreds of billions at a time of record deficits).

Ryan

[lukpac]

resulting in the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans

Something people all too quickly forget or ignore.

Last I checked, Clinton's blow jobs didn't kill anyone.

[Ron]

Here are the last three paragraphs from a John Dean piece on CNN.com:

Is lying about the reason for a war an impeachable offense?

By John W. Dean
FindLaw Columnist
Special to CNN.com

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case.


Here's the full [very long] piece: http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/06/findlaw.analysis.dean.wmd/

[mikenycLI]

Tenet already took the "fall". So, in a sense, it's over.

The only ones keeping it alive, are the news channels, and NOT for reasons of getting at the truth.

Where is the first politician in this country who will take it to the floor of Congress ?

[Rspaight]

Yeah, Tenet took the fall, but CNN is reporting today that he didn't even read the final draft of the SOTU speech. So he's turning out to be a flimsy fall guy.

A better scapegoat would be Rice (the conduit between the CIA and BushCo) or Cheney (who requested and then ignored an investigation into the Niger document in 2002). But they're too close to the Oval Office for comfort.

Ryan

PS: Reports now are indicating that the Niger document was taken out of Bush's 2002 Cincinnati speech on Iraq because they knew it was suspect. So why did it go back in for the 2003 SOTU?

[mikenycLI]

Maybe, what "really happened", is that Karl Rowe or Richard Cheney, who is notoriously "hawkish" these days, wanted it in, thinking they could "fudge" about it afterward, if the information was bad. You don't think Rowe or Cheney would take the "fall", do you?

It does seem, that it's getting closer to an I.D. of just who wanted it in the speech.

See this, courtesy of the washingtonpost.com...

Durbin Says W.House Pushed for Disputed Iraq Charge

Reuters

Thursday, July 17, 2003; 11:11 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Democratic senator charged on Thursday CIA Director George Tenet told members of Congress a White House official insisted on including a disputed allegation about Saddam Hussein's push for a nuclear weapon in a presidential speech.

The allegation by Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin was quickly denounced by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who called it "nonsense" in the latest exchange on the issue between the Republican White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Durbin told ABC's "Good Morning America" program that Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door session on Wednesday that a White House official pushed for including a line about Iraq's attempt to get uranium from Africa in President Bush's State of the Union speech last January.

"He certainly told us who the person was who was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from Africa. And there was this negotiation between the White House and the CIA about just how far you could go and be close to the truth," Durbin said.

McClellan responded: "I think that characterization is nonsense. It's not surprising coming from someone who is in a rather small minority in Congress that did not support the action that we took."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jul17.html

According to drudgereport.com this morning, "the Bush administration" is bringing in Mary Matlin to flak for this problem. This tells you the person(s) who did this is someone REALLY BIG, if they're trying to "hide" them this bad, with Matlin's help ! She will be the, proverbial, clean up person assigned to this specific problem, when it blows !

It's interesting that the White House is telegraphing their guilt, in such a visable manner. Talk about a Freudian slip !

[Rspaight]

http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jht ... ID=3112225

Democrat Eyes Potential Grounds for Bush Impeachment
Thu July 17, 2003 07:07 PM ET
By John Milne

CONCORD, N.H. (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham said on Thursday there were grounds to impeach President Bush if he was found to have led America to war under false pretenses.

While Graham did not call for Bush's impeachment, he said if the president lied about the reasons for going to war with Iraq it would be "more serious" than former President Bill Clinton's lie under oath about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

"If in fact we went to war under false pretenses that is a very serious charge," Graham, the senior U.S. senator from Florida, told reporters in New Hampshire.

"If the standard of impeachment is the one the House Republicans used against Bill Clinton, this clearly comes within that standard," he said.

Democrats and some Republicans have raised questions about the unsubstantiated claim Bush made in his January State of the Union speech that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

Graham's comments came as reporters followed up on his remarks earlier this week that any deception by Bush over Iraq might rise to the standard of an impeachable offense -- as defined by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives when it voted to impeach Clinton.

Clinton was ultimately cleared by the U.S. Senate after being impeached by the House.

After his appearance in New Hampshire, Graham issued a statement saying he was not calling for Bush's impeachment and saw the issue as a largely academic one, adding that if Bush had misled the American public he would pay the price for it in the 2004 presidential election.

In Washington on Thursday, Bush told a news conference that the speech reference was based on "sound intelligence" and he was certain that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program.

"We won't be proven wrong," he said with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side.

The flap over Iraq upstaged Graham's economic proposals. He said his plan would balance the federal budget within five years while providing middle-class tax relief and creating 3 million new jobs.

His plan would repeal most of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. It would reinstate a 38.6 percent tax bracket for wealthy individuals and create a new "millionaires tax bracket" at 40 percent. Graham also proposed cracking down on individuals and companies who transfer assets offshore or renounce U.S. citizenship to escape taxation.

[mikenycLI]

If he wasn't calling for Bush's impeachment, what, exactly, was he asking for then ?

Either say it and stick by it, or keep quiet...sheeeeeeeze !

Who will be the first one to do It ?