at-Largely

Bush "manifesting the Zionist vision"

Posted By Cernig

Yesterday, I wrote that while a by-blow of Bush's Knesset speech may well have been to attack Obama and other Democratic rivals, the main purpose was to give a "wink and a nod" to Israeli hardliners that in the closing days of his presidency they can do no wrong - including attack Iran, should Israel wish to, or scuppering any chance of a Palestinian peace process.

Reports in the Israeli media say that Israel got Bush's message, loud and clear.

"We are on the same page. We both see the threat ... And we both understand that tangible action is required to prevent the Iranians from moving forward on a nuclear weapon," Olmert spokesman Mark Regev said.

Regev described diplomatic efforts so far to exert pressure on Iran as "positive", but added: "It is clearly not sufficient and it's clear that additional steps will have to be taken".

Asked about the option of using military force, Regev said: "Leaders of many countries have talked about many options being on the table and, of course, Israel agrees with that."

Senior officials in Jerusalem said Thursday that Israel is fully satisfied with the results of Bush's visit, including policy on Iran's nuclear program.

"In talks with the president of the United States during his visit it was made clear that Bush's statements on the subject of Iran's nuclear program are fully backed in practice," a senior official said.

One Zionist member of the Knesset even suggested Bush's next job should be to replace Olmert as Israeli PM.

As a former Knesset speaker, MK Reuven Rivlin, put it Thursday, "I wish our leaders would make speeches like this." Rivlin described Bush as "manifesting the Zionist vision."

Contrary to the applause Bush received for his address, the speech by Prime Minister Olmert was less popular and stirred considerable controversy.

Olmert promised that when there is a peace agreement it "will be approved by a large majority in the Knesset and it will be supported by the vast majority of the Israeli public."

Two MKs from the National Union, Zvi Hendel and Uri Ariel, left the plenum in protest, complaining that the event was "used to promote a political agenda that is opposed by most of the Israeli public."
Hendel issued a statement calling on Olmert "to learn from the president of the United States what Zionism is."

MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union) called out during Olmert's speech, "in your dreams."

He later proposed that Bush should replace Olmert.

Olmert mainly drew criticism for parts of his speech concerning the Palestinian peace process, saying that "we will bring before the Knesset an agreement that is based on the vision of two states for two peoples. This agreement will be approved by a large majority in the Knesset and the entire nation." That's when Hendel and Ariel walked out.

Perhaps they should have been more patient. Today Olmert made it clear he wanted no peace process at all, as he denied to Palestinians what Israeli Jews have held themselves had all these years - a right of return.

Six months into negotiations sponsored by Bush in the hope of a deal before he leaves the White House, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman used some of the toughest Israeli language yet to insist that President Mahmoud Abbas abandon 60-year-old refugee claims if he wants to establish a Palestinian state.

"This demand, which does not exist under international law, for right of return, is the ultimate deal breaker. You cannot have peace and this demand at the same time," Mark Regev said.

Some 700,000 people, half the Arab population of Palestine in May 1948, fled or were driven from their homes when Israel was created. Letting them and their families live in Israel now would undermine its nature as a Jewish state, Israel argues.

It also disputes the legal basis of the right of the return first set out in a United Nations resolution of December 1948.

There's no doubt in my mind that Bush's speech - which described Israel "the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham, Moses, and David - a homeland for the chosen people in Eretz Yisrael," has given Olmert all the political cover he needs to torpedo the Bush administration's own hopes for a deal. Needless to say, Palestinians are not happy.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters: "He should have told the Israelis that, 1 mile from where he was speaking, there is a nation that has lived in disaster for 60 years. He should have told the Israelis no one can be free at the expense of others. He missed this opportunity and we are disappointed."

...In the Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam, columnist Samih Shabib wrote: "Bush is blind to the right of return.

"The U.S. administration's attitude towards Israel inherently promotes hostility and deepens hatred towards the United States and its policy. Is this hostility, and its consequences, in America's interest? I don't think so."

You can see why Bush likes to think that diplomacy and negotiation are weak and "appeasing" - he's so bloody bad at them. He's much better at bringing violence and war through tough talk and ill-judged adventures.

Conyers: We're Closing In On Rove" - ‘Someone’s got to kick His ass...or go & have him arrested’

Posted by Kathy

Hello all. I bring gifts:

Just off the House floor today, the Crypt overheard House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers tell two other people: “We’re closing in on Rove. Someone’s got to kick his ass.”

Asked a few minutes later for a more official explanation, Conyers told us that Rove has a week to appear before his committee. If he doesn’t, said Conyers, “We’ll do what any self-respecting committee would do. We’d hold him in contempt. Either that or go and have him arrested.”

Conyers said the committee wants Rove to testify about his role in the imprisonment of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, among other things.

“We want him for so many things, it’s hard to keep track,” Conyers said.

Also see Think Progress.

All the President's Nazis (real and imagined): An Open Letter to Bush

(cross-posted at Huffington Post)

Dear Mr. Bush,

Your speech on the Knesset floor today was not only a disgrace; it was nothing short of treachery. Worse still, your exploitation of the Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs from your own is unforgivable and unpardonable. Let me remind you, Mr. Bush, of your words today:

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said at Israel's 60th anniversary celebration in Jerusalem.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to Israel's parliament, the Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Well Mr. Bush, the only thing this comment lacked was a mirror and some historical facts. You want to discuss the crimes of Nazis against my family and millions of other families in Europe during World War II? Let me revive a favorite phrase of yours: Bring. It. On!

The All-American Nazi

Your family's fortune is built on the bones of the very people butchered by the Nazis, my family and the families of those in the Knesset who applauded you today:

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler's rise to power, government documents show.

Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp. (search), a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Fritz Thyssen was an early financial supporter of Hitler, whose Nazi party Thyssen believed was preferable to communism.

--snip--

Both Harrimans and Bush were partners in the New York investment firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co., which handled the financial transactions of the bank as well as other financial dealings with several other companies linked to Bank voor Handel that were confiscated by the U.S. government during World War II.

Union Banking was seized by the government in October 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

A Wink And A Nod

Posted By Cernig

Today I read Bush's speech at the Knesset and thought "Aye, there's yet another another 'wink and a nod' to Israel for an attack, if they want it."

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

...America stands with you in breaking up terrorist networks and denying the extremists sanctuary. And America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Most American pundits want to see Bush's remarks as an attack on Barrack Obama but folks - it's not always about your country and your political races. For one thing, as Brian Katulis adroitly notes, if negotiating is appeasement then the Bush administration has done an awful lot of appeasement itself over the last seven years. And Brian doesn't even mention working with Sunni Awakening members in Iraq who not too long ago were terrorists attacking US forces! For another, if Bush's remarks were really intended to help John McCain, the latter wouldn't go shooting himself in the foot like this:

“Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,'’ Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus after a speech in Columbus, Ohio. “I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.'’

Need I say that "Iran-Contra" and "appeasement" really do belong in the same sentence together?

No, (probably) even Bush's speechwriters aren't so crass as to make such a blindingly partisan move in the American electoral race when their dummy is acting as Head of State of both Democratic and Republican Americans at a major international event. We need to look beyond purely domestic motivations - and we'll find them in the aspirations and dreams of the neoconservative lobby and their Very Serious Person enablers in the media.

Yesterday, University of Columbia journalsim Professor Todd Gitlin had a very timely post at Talking Points Memo which, I think, points to Bush's real agenda.

I'm attending Shimon Peres' President's Conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel... for two days now, so many speakers have been preoccupied with Iran, and talking rather casually about the prospect of a preventive strike.

The sense of threat here is vivid, it is deeply felt, it is completely comprehensible, and it rises occasionally, or more than occasionally, to a well-nigh hysterical pitch--so much so that the Amerian strategist Edward Luttwak arose Monday night at a banquet at Peres' house to warn assembled luminaries against fearing annihilation at the hands of an Ahmadinejad who, after all, was not Hitler but Mussolini, and an inept one at that. It is not lost on any Israeli that Ahmadinejad, in his usual delicate manner, last week called Israel a "stinking corpse."

Weirdly, at a Wednesday afternoon workshop, the selfsame Luttwak declared that Iran's reformers would actually welcome a sharp outsider's attack on their nuclear facilities. No other panelist disputed his suggestion, which was greeted with much applause from a largely Israeli audience.

Which explains Bush's thinly-veiled threats of regime change in his speech.

After Luttwak's proclamation, and a game but much less applauded attempt by UCLA Professor Steven L. Spiegel to speak up for an alliance-negotiation approach to Iran instead of a mlitary attack, the session moderator, Israel's former ambassador to the US, Itamar Rabinovitch, somehow intimated--I'm sorry I didn't take down his exact words--that Israel's government would put it to Bush that if he didn't take action, Israel would.

Just outside the hall, I ran into a friend, also a liberal Jew, who had attended the same session, wasn't sitting with me but heard the same implicit threat. Alarmed (can one be too alarmed about such matters?), and assuming that Rabinovitch would be well informed, we checked out our dire impression with a sober, well-connected European official. This person isn't quite sure what's up against Iran but also worries that such an attack might be in the offing even if no government in Europe would be onboard.

And veteran British political reform campaigner Anthony Barnett adds in comments to Gitlin's post:

I have heard the same concerns in London. The 'urgency' is that the Russians are providing significant ground-to-air systems which apparently are likely to be operational by September and could be relatively effective given the distances and the need for more than one strike and therefore the lack of surprise. It seems that the Bush administration is regarded as too weak and the US military too opposed for an American strike to be considered - so it has to be an Israeli one permitted by Washington over the summer.

Bush, in his speech to the Knesset, signalled clearly that his administration will quietly support Israel if it decided to take direct action against Iran - as it did recently against Syria. It's worth noting that any Israeli attack on Iran would almost certainly have to transit Iraqi airspace.

Plumbers = Authorities now?

Okay boys and girls, let us read this article together and see what the actual scandal is (see poll after):

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, who led investigations into companies blamed for the state's subprime mortgage mess, resigned under a cloud on Wednesday after admitting to an affair with a female staff member.

"Unfortunately, it is now clear that the last step I must take to fix these problems is to resign as attorney general effective immediately," Dann told reporters.

In addition to Dann's relationship with a member of his staff, his office was roiled by sexual harassment claims.

Also, local media reported that authorities staged a raid on the attorney general's offices on Wednesday, carting away documents as part of an undisclosed investigation.

Well, can you spot the actual scandal in this story?

Brian Williams' "Truthiness" in Advertising

Posted by Brad Jacobson

For some time now, MSNBC has been running commercials touting their election coverage team's commitment to providing information that better enables Americans to make informed choices at the voting booth. But in context of the unfolding Pentagon TV war analysts scandal, one of these promos (which I believe is new) stood out for its particular hypocrisy.

To a melodramatic background score that's one part patriotic sentimentality (scene in Mel Gibson movie after character's army triumphs), one part childhood wonder (kids riding bikes in the sky to silhouette of the moon in E.T.), and one part lovers reuniting after a long separation (archetypal open-armed sprint across verdant meadow), this is the TV promo's content:

TEXT GRAPHIC: Decision 2008

TEXT GRAPHIC: Why Do People Care About Politics?

IMAGE: "VOTE HERE" sign with people standing in line behind it.

BRIAN WILLIAMS VOICEOVER: This is a participatory democracy.

TEXT GRAPHIC: Know

IMAGE: Black and white shot of people voting in the foreground; full-color American flag hanging prominently in the background.

BRIAN WILLIAMS VOICEOVER: I think you owe it to your democracy to know as much as you can about what's going on.

IMAGE: Old man (again in black and white), holding an American flag (again in full color) and seated on a bench, is gazing out toward the New York harbor.

TEXT GRAPHIC: That's Why You Care

TEXT GRAPHIC: That's Why We Cover It

IMAGE: Brian Williams' face, then the major faces of MSNBC election coverage.

TEXT GRAPHIC: MSNBC Decision 2008

TEXT GRAPHIC: MSNBC The Place for Politics

To this day, however, Brian Williams and MSNBC, along with CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC, have failed to respond to a PBS NewsHour request for an interview about The New York Times exposé, which revealed ex-generals-turned-TV war analysts, shilling directly for the Pentagon, appeared regularly on their programs. (Yesterday, Media Matters published a study that found "since January 1, 2002, the analysts named in the Times article -- many identified as having ties to the defense industry -- collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR.")

Williams, who in that MSNBC promo says, "This is a participatory democracy" in which "you owe it to your democracy to know as much as you can about what's going on," has, along with his network colleagues, prevented millions of people from knowing what's gone on in the run-up to the war in Iraq and over the course of the occupation. Williams champions our participatory democracy in MSNBC's ad yet fails to share with his viewers any information about what President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, presciently predicted would be the single greatest threat to our democracy - the "military-industrial complex."

On January 17, 1961, Eisenhower - a Republican president, former lifetime military man and war hero - explicitly cautioned: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Yet here's Williams only acknowledgment of his network's involvement with these Pentagon-shilling TV war generals - not from behind his anchor desk but on his NBC Nightly News blog The Daily Nightly (April 29, 2008):

Chess, Poker, Global Thermonuclear War?

Um, folks, this is a bit disturbing via Wired:

"The Air Force wants a suite of hacker tools, to give it "access" to -- and "full control" of -- any kind of computer there is.  And once the info warriors are in, the Air Force wants them to keep tabs on their "adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected."

The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online.  The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity initiative."  That includes an electronic test range, where federally-funded hackers can test out the latest electronic attacks.  "You used to need an army to wage a war," a recent Air Force commercial notes.  "Now, all you need is an Internet connection."

Liquid Lunching With Rummie

Posted By Cernig

Audio segments from the Pentagon's document dump reveal that fun and games were had by all at a Christmastime 2006 luncheon hosted by Donald Rumsfield for the Pentagon's pet military analysts:

As documented by Newsvine, it all went down at a valedictory luncheon Rumsfeld hosted for those analysts on December 12, 2006. Many of the "message force multipliers" named in the original New York Times piece were in attendance, including David L. Grange, Donald W. Sheppard, James Marks, Rick Francona, Wayne Downing, and Robert H. Scales, Jr. They were treated to an extraordinary conversation (Newsvine has highlights, the hour-long clip of which can be found here) with Rumsfeld, that included many jaw-dropping moments, such as Rumsfeld admitting that in Iraq, the U.S. "can't lose militarily, but...can't win by military means alone," an agreement that Iraq could use a Syngman Rhee-type dictator (because that's what democracy smells like!), and a lengthy passage where Rumsfeld jokingly offers a bottle of champagne to anyone who could kill Moqtada al Sadr. You sure don't see too many people joking on al Sadr these days!

But by far the most extraordinary part of this luncheon is the antipathy the gathered members exhibit toward the American people for having the temerity to vote the Democrats back into power. When Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans the lack of "sympathetic ears" on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld offers that the American people lack "the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats." What's to be done? According to Rumsfeld, "The correction for that, I suppose, is [another] attack."

Germany Declines To Copy Rice's NSC "Failure"

Posted By Cernig

How long do you think America's reputation will take to recover from the Bush administration's ineptness?

Germany's foreign minister has rejected plans by Chancellor Angela Merkel's party to set up a U.S.-style National Security Council to oversee foreign policy, saying the body proved a failure in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech in Berlin on Monday that the U.S. NSC, which was run by Condoleezza Rice when the United States launched its invasion of Iraq, had "suppressed all counterarguments" to the war in 2003.

"This cannot be the model for us," said Steinmeier, a member of the centre-left Social Democrats, who under former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder staunchly opposed the Iraq war.

Decades, that's how long. For as long as the U.S. is in Iraq, and a while after that, America's reputation will be that of the superpower that started a war by fixing the intelligence around the policy, just because it could.

Our beloved leader... not really...

With 80%+ of the US public not much liking our leader, Bush has found love in the arms of a foreign nation, Israel... nope, not hardly.  In Jerusalem, over 14,000 police officers have to guard Bush from the public.  Yes, one city has to basically empty out its police stations so that the most unpopular leader in the history of the United States can make a cameo to spin the "we come in peace" version of reality.  Maybe Bush should go to where he is most at home - Saudi Arabia.