'a spotted hyena wearing a baby-blue nec ktie'?

“
       "If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing a baby-blue
       necktie, most Americans would salute and sing 'Hail to the Chief.'"

       By Hal Crowther

I used to take a drink on occasion with a network newsman famed for
his impenetrable calm -- his apparent pulse rate that of a large mammal
in deep hibernation -- and in an avuncular moment he advised me that
I'd do all right, in the long run, if I could only avoid the kind of journalism
committed to the keyboard "with trembling fingers." I recognized the
wisdom of this advice and endeavored over the years to write as little
as possible when my blood pressure was soaring and my face was
streaked with tears. The lava flows of indignation ebb predictably with
age and hardening arteries, and nearing three-score I thought I'd never
have to take another tranquilizer -- or a double bourbon -- to keep my
fingers steady on the keys.

I never imagined 2004. It would be sophomoric to say that there was
never a worse year to be an American. My own memory preserves the
dread summer of 1968. My parents suffered the consequences of 1941
and 1929, and my grandfather Jack Allen, who lived through all those
dark years, might have added 1918, with the flu epidemic and the Great
War in France that each failed, very narrowly, to kill him. Drop back
another generation or two and we encounter 1861.

But if this is not the worst year yet to be an American, it's the worst
year by far to be one of those hag-ridden wretches who comment on the
American scene. The columnist who trades in snide one-liners flounders
like a stupid comic with a tired audience; TV comedians and talk-show
hosts who try to treat 2004 like any zany election year have become
grotesque, almost loathsome. Our most serious, responsible newspaper
columnists are so stunned by the disaster in Iraq that they've begun to
quote poetry by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. They lower their
voices; they sound like Army chaplains delivering eulogies over ranks of
flag-draped coffins, under a hard rain from an iron sky.

Yeats' "blood-dimmed tide is loosed." The war news has already
deteriorated from bad to tragic to pre-apocalyptic, which leaves no
suitable category for these excruciating reports on the sexual torture
of Iraqi prisoners. Fingers, be still. In less than a year, the morale
of the occupying forces has sunk so low that murder, suicide, rape and
sexual harassment have become alarming statistics, and now the
warriors of democracy -- the emissaries of civilization -- stand accused
of every crime this side of cannibalism. Osama bin Laden has always
anathematized America's culture, as well as its geopolitical influence.
to him these atrocities are a sign of Allah's certain favor, a great moral
victory, a vindication of his deepest anger and darkest crimes.

Where does it go from here? The nightmare misadventure in Iraq is over,
beyond the reach of any reasonable argument, though many more body
bags will be filled. In Washington, chicken hawks will still be squawking
about "digging in" and winning, but Vietnam proved conclusively that no
modern war of occupation will ever be won. Every occupation is doomed.
The only way you "win" a war of occupation is the old-fashioned way, the
way Rome finally defeated the Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave
everyone else, raze the cities and sow the fields with salt.

Otherwise the occupied people will fight you to the last peasant, and
why shouldn't they? If our presidential election fails to dislodge the
crazy bastards who annexed Baghdad, many of us in this country would
welcome regime change by any intervention, human or divine. But if, say,
the Chinese came in to rescue us -- Operation American Freedom -- how
long would any of us, left-wing or right, put up with an occupying army
teaching us Chinese-style democracy? A guerrilla who opposes an
invading army on his own soil is not a terrorist, he's a resistance fighter.
In Iraq we're not fighting enemies but making enemies. As Richard Clarke
and others have observed, every dollar, bullet and American life that we
spend in Iraq is one that's not being spent in the war on terrorism. Every
Iraqi, every Muslim we kill or torture or humiliate is a precious shot of
adrenaline for Osama and al Qaeda.

The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst
blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful,
egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign
policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep watching. Apologists
strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the similarities are
stunning. In every action our soldiers kill innocent civilians, and in
every other action apparent innocents kill our soldiers -- and there's
never any way to sort them out. And now these acts of subhuman
sadism, these little My Lais.

Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous
flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op on the USS Abraham Lincoln in
front of the banner that read "Mission Accomplished," the shaming truth
is that everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go wrong, as
many of us predicted it would go wrong -- if anything, more hopelessly
wrong than any of us would have dared to prophesy. Iraq is an epic
trainwreck, and there's not a single American citizen who's going to
walk away unscathed.

The shame of this truth, of such a failure and so much deceit exposed,
would have brought on mass resignations or votes of no confidence in
any free country in the world. In Japan not long ago, there would have
been ritual suicides, shamed officials disemboweling themselves with
samurai swords. Yet up to this point -- at least to the point where we
see grinning soldiers taking pictures of each other over piles of naked
Iraqis -- neither the president, the vice president nor any of the
individuals who urged and designed this debacle have resigned or been
terminated -- or even apologized. They have betrayed no familiarity with
the concept of shame.

Thousands of young Americans are dead, maimed or mutilated, XXX
billions of dollars have been wasted and all we've gained is a billion new
enemies and a mouthful of dust -- of sand. Chaos reigns, but in the
midst of it we have this presidential election. George Bush has defined
himself as a war president, and it's fitting that the war should be his
undoing. But even now the damned polls don't guarantee, or even
indicate, his demise.

Conventional wisdom says that an incumbent president with a $200
million war chest cannot be defeated, and that one who commands a
live, bleeding, suffering army in the field is doubly invincible. By this
logic, the most destructively incompetent president since Andrew
Johnson will be rewarded with a second term. That would probably
mean a military draft and more wars in the oil countries, and, under
visionaries like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, a chance for the USA
to emulate 19th-century Paraguay, which simultaneously declared war
on Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and fought ferociously until 90% of
the male population was dead.

What hope then? Impeachment is impossible when the president's party
controls both houses of Congress, though Watergate conspirator John
Dean, who ought to know, claims in his new book that there are
compelling legal arguments for a half dozen bills of impeachment against
George W. Bush. Peer pressure? At the White House, world opinion gets
no more respect than FBI memos or uncomfortable facts. Many Americans
seem unaware that scarcely anyone on the planet Earth supported the Iraq
adventure, no one anywhere except the 40-50 million Republican loyalists
who voted for George Bush in 2000.

Among significant world leaders he recruited only Great Britain's Tony
Blair -- whose career may be ruined because most Britons disagree with
him -- and the abominable Ariel Sharon, that vile tub of blood and
corruption who recently used air-to-ground missiles to assassinate a
paraplegic in a wheelchair at the door of his mosque. (Palestinians
quickly squandered any sympathy or moral advantage they gained from
this atrocity by strapping a retarded 16-year-old into a suicide bomber's
kit. Such is the condition of the human race in the Middle East,
variously known as the Holy Land or the Cradle of Civilization.) Says
Sharon, oleaginously, of Bush: "Something in his soul committed him to
act with great courage against world terror."

The rest of the known world, along with the United Nations, has been
dead set against us from the start. But they carry no weight. Thanks to
our tax dollars and the well-fed, strong but not bulletproof bodies of
our children -- though mostly children from lower-income families --
George Bush and his lethal team of oil pirates, Cold Warriors and
Likudists commands the most formidable military machine on earth. No
nation, with the possible exception of China, would ever dare to oppose
them directly.

But the Chinese aren't coming to save us. Nothing and no one can stop
these people except you and me, and the other 100 million or so
American citizens who may vote in the November election. This isn't your
conventional election, the usual dim-witted, media-managed Mister
America contest where candidates vie for charm and style points and hire
image coaches to help them act more confident and presidential. This is
a referendum on what is arguably the most dismal performance by any
incumbent president -- and inarguably the biggest mistake. This is a
referendum on George W. Bush, arguably the worst thing that has
happened to the United States of America since the invention of the
cathode ray tube.

One problem with this referendum is that the case against George Bush
Is much too strong. Just to spell it out is to sound like a bitter partisan. I
sit here on the 67th birthday of Saddam Hussein facing a haystack of
incriminating evidence that comes almost to my armpit. What matters
most, what signifies? Journalists used to look for the smoking gun, but
this time we have the cannons of Waterloo, we have Gettysburg and
Sevastopol, we have enough gunsmoke to cause asthma in heaven. I'm
overwhelmed. Maybe I should light a match to this mountain of paper
and immolate myself. On the near side of my haystack, among hundreds
of quotes circled and statistics underlined, just one thing leaped out at me.
A quote I had underlined was from the testimony of Hermann Goering
at the Nuremberg trials, not long before Hitler's vice-fuhrer poisoned
himself in his jail cell:

"... It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a
democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them
they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in
every country."

Goering's dark wisdom gained weight when a friend called me and
Reported that Vice President Cheney was so violently partisan in his
commencement speech at Westminster College in Missouri -- so rabid
in his attacks on John Kerry as a anti-American peace-marching crypto-
communist – that the college president felt obliged to send the student
body an email apologizing for Cheney's coarseness.

If you think it's exceptionally shameless for a man who dodged Vietnam
to play the patriot card against a decorated veteran, remember that
Georgia Republicans played the same card, successfully, against Sen.
Max Cleland, who suffered multiple amputations in Vietnam. In 2001 and
2002, George Bush and his Machiavelli, Karl Rove, approved political
attack ads that showed the faces of Tom Daschle and other Democratic
senators alongside the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
And somewhere in hell, Goering and Goebbels toasted each other with
a schnapps.

Am I polarized? I've never been a registered Democrat, I'm sick of this
two-party straitacket, I wish to God it didn't take Yale and a major
American fortune to create a presidential candidate. The only current
Democratic leaders who show me any courage are Nancy Pelosi and old
Bob Byrd -- Hillary Clinton has been especially cagy and gutless on this
War -- and John Kerry himself may leave a lot to be desired. He deserves
your vote not because of anything he ever did or promises to do, but
simply because he did not make this sick mess in Iraq and owes no
allegiance to the sinister characters who designed it. And because his
own "place in history," so important to the kind of men who run for
president, would now rest entirely on his success in getting us out of it.

Kerry made a courageous choice at least once in his life, when he came
home with his ribbons and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. But
Sen. Kerry could turn out to be a stiff, a punk, an alcoholic, and he'd
still be a colossal improvement over the man who turned Paul Wolfowitz
loose in the Middle East. The myth that there was no real difference
between Democrats and Republicans, which I once considered seriously
and which Ralph Nader rode to national disaster four years ago, was
shattered forever the day George Bush announced his cabinet and his
appointments for the Department of Defense.

I'm aware that there are voters -- 40 million? -- who don't see it this
way. I come from a family of veterans and commissioned officers; I
understand patriots in wartime. If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air
Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute
and sing "Hail to the Chief." President Bush cultivated his patriots by
spending $46 million on media in the month of March alone. Somehow
I'm on his mailing list. (Is that because my late father, with the same
name, was a registered Republican, or can Bush afford to mail his
picture to every American with an established address?) Twice a week
I open an appeal for cash to crush John Kerry and the quisling liberal
conspiracy, and now I own six gorgeous color photographs of the
president and his wife. I'm sure some of my neighbors frame the
president's color photographs and fill those little blue envelopes he
sends us with their hard-earned dollars.

I struggle against the suspicion that so many of my fellow Americans are
conceptually challenged. I want to reason with my neighbors; I want to
engage these lost Americans. What makes you angry, neighbor? What
arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that this administration
made terrorism a low priority, dismissed key intelligence that might have
prevented the 9/11 catastrophe, then exploited it to justify the pre-planned
destruction of Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with al Qaeda? All
this is no longer conjecture, but direct reportage from cabinet-level
meetings by the turncoat insiders Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill.

If the Pentagon ever thought Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction,"
it was only because the Pentagon gave them to him. As Kevin Phillips
recounts in American Dynasty, officials of the Reagan and first Bush
administrations eagerly supplied Saddam with arms while he was using
chemical weapons on the Kurds. They twice sent Donald Rumsfeld to
court Saddam, in 1983 and 1984, when the dictator was in the glorious
prime of his monsterhood.

This scandal, concurrent with Iran-Contra, was briefly called "Iraqgate,"
and, yes, among the names of those officials implicated you'll find most
of the engineers of our current foreign policy. (They also signaled their
fractious client, Saddam, that it might be all right to overrun part of Kuwait;
you remember what happened when he tried to swallow it all.) Does any
of this trouble you? Does it worry you that Dick Cheney, as president of
the nefarious Halliburton Corporation, sold Iraq $73 million in oilfield
services between 1997 and 2000, even as he plotted with the Wolfowitz
faction to whack Saddam? Or that Halliburton, with its CEO's seat still
warm from Cheney's butt, was awarded unbid contracts worth up to $15
billion for the Iraq invasion, and currently earns a billion dollars a month
from this bloody disaster? Not to mention its $27.4 million overcharge for
our soldiers' food.

These are facts, not partisan rhetoric. Do any of them even make you
restless? The cynical game these shape-shifters have been playing in
the Middle East is too Byzantine to unravel in 1,000 pages of text. But
the hypocrisy of the White House is palpable, and beggars belief. If there's
one American who actually believes that Operation Iraqi Freedom was
about democracy for the poor Iraqis, then you, my friend, are too
dangerously stupid to be allowed near a voting booth.

Does it bother you even a little that the personal fortunes of all four
Bush brothers, including the president and the governor, were acquired
about a half step ahead of the district attorney, and that the royal
family of Saudi Arabia invested $1.476 billion in those and other Bush
family enterprises? Or, as Paul Krugman points out, that it's much
easier to establish links between the Bush and bin Laden families than
any between the bin Ladens and Saddam Hussein. Do you know about
Ahmad Chalabi, the administration's favorite Iraqi and current agent in
Baghdad, whose personal fortune was established when he embezzled
several hundred million from his own bank in Jordan and fled to London
to avoid 22 years at hard labor?

That's just a sampling from my haystack. Maybe I can reach you as an
environmentalist, one who resents the gutting of key provisions in the
Clean Air Act? My own Orange County, N.C., chiefly a rural area, was
recently added to a national register of counties with dangerously
polluted air. You say you vote for the president because you're a
conservative. Are you sure? I thought conservatives believed in civil
liberties, a weak federal executive, an inviolable Constitution, a
balanced budget and an isolationist foreign policy. George Bush has
an attorney general who drives the ACLU apoplectic and a vice president
who demands more executive privilege (for his energy seances) than any
elected official has ever received. The president wants a Constitutional
amendment to protect marriage from homosexuals, of all things. Between
tax cuts for his high-end supporters and three years playing God and
Caesar in the Middle East, George Bush has simply emptied America's
wallet with a $480 billion federal deficit projected for 2004 and the
tab on Iraq well over $100 billion and running.

"A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know what the word means,"
Barry Goldwater said in 1994, when the current cult of right-wing
radicals and "neocons" had begun to define and assert themselves.
Goldwater was my first political hero, before I was old enough to read
his flaws. But his was the conservatism of the wolf -- the lone wolf --
and this is the conservatism of sheep.

All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a few slogans from talk
radio and pickup truck bumpers, a sneer at "liberals" and maybe a
name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John Locke, whom most of them
have never read. Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a ludicrous
but not harmless cretin like Rush Limbaugh, who has just compared the
sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to "a college fraternity prank" (and who
once called Chelsea Clinton "the family dog" -- you don't have to worry
about shame when you have no brain).

I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between
Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's
polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people
who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by the
president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into the
hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world pities
or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will test is the
power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the
obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust under a blood-
soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical, most sophisticated
political campaign in human history will be out trolling for fools. I pray to
God it doesn't catch you.



Hal Crowther is a former writer for Time and Newsweek, the Buffalo News
and the North Carolina Spectator before parking his column at the weekly
Independent in Durham, N.C., and The Progressive Populist, among others.
He won the H.L. Mencken Award for column writing in 1992. Write him at
219 N. Churton St., Hillsborough, NC 27278.
”

“gay”

“Ass.”

“

---

message from Poster Boy For Fetal-Alcohol Syndrome being ignored

---

"Did you just hear something?

Must've been the wind....”

“Amen to that article! Oh, and no, I didn't hear anything.

Tilt, where did you get that? I gotta send the link to my (Republican, leaning towards Bush but we're trying to push him the other way) Dad. Original source would be better than this post.”

“I rec'd it in an email...

I inquired about the source and am hoping to get a reply with a link soon. I'll let you know when I hear something.”

“Gotcha.”

“I found this with a websearch ---

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0527-10.htm


Good luck! I hope it doesn't just piss him off, <Grin>”

“Thanks. Normally we (my brother and I) would never be able to sway him from his "Republican" voting policy. He's really more midline or even Democrat, but he's registered Rep. and votes that way. Anyway, I think we may have a shot at getting through to him before November. I hope. How the polls show that there is still almost no difference between Kerry and Bush is beyond me. Bush = Satan, or at least he controls him for sure. Maybe Satan has control over all those pollees, too.

Ok, off to email this link...”

“Nice piece.


Bush is an A-hole, and this about sums it up.”

“I couldn't have said it better myself.”

“Sometimes I fail to understand why people don't just call him on it.


Why kerry just doesn't let slip the hounds of war was were. Why be civil at this point?

Shrub and his cabal of inter-related oil and defense interest thugs are taking this country to hell in a handbasket (or to Iraq in a Humvee).


Kerry should have his folks shred bush and cheney mercilessly with stuff like the content of this essay. I don't know how Cheney is even allowed out in public without being torn apart and shouted down.


I have a good childhood friend who was just deployed for 15 months. To Kuwait, he is a rear echlon puke in IT services.

He leaves his wife and 2 children. She sends me an incessant stream of pro bush CRAP. The latest was two juxtiposed pictures of Bush getting ready to throw a football, and looking tough and macho, with one of Kerry fumbling a catch and looking kind of spastic in the process.

The tag line was "which one do you want leading the country?"

What the F? I realize its only a joke . ..but it pretty sums up the republican good ole cowboy image.


Who cares if your administration and its policies are build on a house of lies if you can ladn on an aircraft carrier in a jump suit and high five the deck crew.



KERRY should be play that shot over and over and over with the "mission accomplished" banner in the background . . .then have a big rubber stamp smack the words LIES across the TV screen and start scrolling the names of the dead and wounded soliders incurred since that debacle.


What an ass.”

“Ass."
Mutt
12:13:06 PM
08/06/04



LMHO thats the best comeback I have ever heard here on TT. truly made me laugh out loud


*kisses* Mutt”

“if only it was me. someone is stealing my identity. kind of funny, though.”

“I guess Bush and Kerry are both fighting tooth and nail over that remaining undecided 6% I keep hearing about. Kerry seems to be playing it fairly cool while Bush, Inc. runs reams of attack ads and Cheney spews invective coast to coast. Maybe the Kerry people are hoping the negativity backfires on Bush/Cheney.

The last few weeks ought to be really interesting.”

“Ron Reagan wrote an equally good piece in Esquire.”

“This one is a little easier to read.”

“Yes, I think it's definitely more damning coming from him.

I've already heard the shots being fired at him by the Novak types after his first comments about Bush after the funeral. Perhaps Bush's yes-men could tell that more was on the way.

It sounds like the death of his father has liberated him.”

“because behind the image lies . . . nothing?”