The signpost appearing up ahead in the fog. Viet Nam.
U.S. Toll in Iraq Nears '91 War Deaths
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Tuesday raised its count of Americans killed by hostile fire in Iraq since the war began in March to 143, a figure that approaches the 147 killed in the 1991 Gulf War.
When President Bush declared major combat operations had ended on May 1, the number killed in action stood at 114. Since then, guerrilla-style attacks have taken another 29 American lives, and Bush as well as U.S. military commanders have said the war is not yet over...
____________________________________________________
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Bush is Scheered off at the knees for his damn dirty lying!
July 8, 2003
Robert Scheer:
A Diplomat's Undiplomatic Truth: They Lied
They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document — now known to be a crude forgery — that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either.
What is startling in Wilson's account, however, is that the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the vice president's office were all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of command disputed that this "evidence" of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program was a hoax.
Yet, nearly a year after Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney and the U.S. security apparatus, Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, invoked the fraudulent Iraq-Africa uranium connection as a major justification for rushing the nation to war: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."...
_________________________________________________________
July 8, 2003
Robert Scheer:
A Diplomat's Undiplomatic Truth: They Lied
They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document — now known to be a crude forgery — that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either.
What is startling in Wilson's account, however, is that the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the vice president's office were all informed that the Niger-Iraq connection was phony. No one in the chain of command disputed that this "evidence" of Iraq's revised nuclear weapons program was a hoax.
Yet, nearly a year after Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney and the U.S. security apparatus, Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, invoked the fraudulent Iraq-Africa uranium connection as a major justification for rushing the nation to war: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."...
_________________________________________________________
Here's a follow-up statement DIRECTLY FROM THE WHITE HOUSE: The President LIED about the evidence he cited to go to war. This wasn't a lie about a blow-job dealing with a private affair. Innocents by the thousands were slaughtered and maimed while millions have had their lives thrown into chaos and peril by calculated lying by Bush before the entire nation and the world in a State of the Union address. A nation's tragic fate was created by a lie. And it is tragic because it's only getting worse in Iraq day by day. Why was it okay to impeach Clinton over trying to hide a tawdy affair and yet now we have a leader who is caught in a whooper LIE with mountains of evidence building up by the minute?
Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says
(The evidence is mounting by the minute that the White House always knew it was "flawed" but Bush went ahead and lied about it anyway!)
By DAVID E. SANGER NY TIMES
WASHINGTON, July 7 — The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.
_____________________________________________________________
Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says
(The evidence is mounting by the minute that the White House always knew it was "flawed" but Bush went ahead and lied about it anyway!)
By DAVID E. SANGER NY TIMES
WASHINGTON, July 7 — The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.
_____________________________________________________________
Sunday, July 06, 2003
Have you signed up? ---Sam
Answers Now on Distortion of Evidence!
Dear friend,
The President took the nation to war based on his assertion that Iraq
posed an imminent threat to our country. Now the evidence that
backed that assertion is falling apart.
If the Bush administration distorted intelligence or knowingly used
false data to support the call to war, it would be an unprecedented
deception. Even if weapons are now found, it'll be difficult to
justify pre-war language that indicated that the exact location of the
weapons was known and that they were ready to deploy at a moment's
notice. With a crisis of credibility brewing abroad and the integrity
of our President and our foreign policy on the line, we need answers
now.
Please join me in asking Congress to establish an independent,
bipartisan commission to investigate the distortion of evidence now, at:
http://www.moveon.org/distortion/
A President may make no more important decision than whether or not to
take a country to war. If Bush and his officials deceived the American
public to create support for the Iraq war, they need to be held
accountable.
Thanks.
MoveOn.org
________________________________________________________________________
Answers Now on Distortion of Evidence!
Dear friend,
The President took the nation to war based on his assertion that Iraq
posed an imminent threat to our country. Now the evidence that
backed that assertion is falling apart.
If the Bush administration distorted intelligence or knowingly used
false data to support the call to war, it would be an unprecedented
deception. Even if weapons are now found, it'll be difficult to
justify pre-war language that indicated that the exact location of the
weapons was known and that they were ready to deploy at a moment's
notice. With a crisis of credibility brewing abroad and the integrity
of our President and our foreign policy on the line, we need answers
now.
Please join me in asking Congress to establish an independent,
bipartisan commission to investigate the distortion of evidence now, at:
http://www.moveon.org/distortion/
A President may make no more important decision than whether or not to
take a country to war. If Bush and his officials deceived the American
public to create support for the Iraq war, they need to be held
accountable.
Thanks.
MoveOn.org
________________________________________________________________________
Write the NY TIMES and call them on the spinning of this war!
I did and here's the email.
From: Sam Park
Date: Sun Jul 6, 2003 11:11:36 AM US/Pacific
To: Editor NY TIMES
Subject: Re:
I beg to differ with General Myer's assessment of the attacks in Iraq.
<< But General Myers said that it was wrong to think that the entire country was unstable or that coalition troops everywhere were under siege. To bolster his point he broke down the threat by geography and source.
In northern Iraq, which is dominated by Kurds, and the south, where Shiite Muslims prevail, "the situation is basically stable," with water, electric and sanitation systems back to prewar levels or better, General Myers said on Fox TV.
The problem, he added, was in Sunni-dominated central areas, and particularly in a triangle formed by Baghdad; Ramadi, to the west, where a bomb explosion on Saturday killed seven United States-trained Iraqi police recruits marching from their graduation ceremony; and Tikrit, to the northwest, a stronghold of Mr. Hussein.
"That's where 90 percent of the incidents are," he said. >>
And yet we have this story (from AP)
<< Six British Soldiers Killed in S. Iraq
Wed Jun 25, 1:15 AM ET
By STEVEN GUTKIN, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Six British soldiers were killed in a police station in southern Iraq and eight were wounded in a nearby ambush Tuesday, marking the deadliest day of attacks on coalition forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
The casualties were a shock to British troops occupying the largely Shiite south, which until now had been essentially free of the daily hit-and-run attacks plaguing American soldiers in central and western Iraq. British troops have felt so secure they have been patrolling the country's second-largest city, Basra, without flak jackets or helmets. >>
This attack was not done by one of "five (political) groups" as the General suggests but an angry mob of locals who, wrong or ignorantly, killed the soldiers for reasons stemming from frustrations with the occupation.
The General and the Bush administration that he serves are constantly spinning the situation in Iraq for political purposes. The truth is they were not prepared for occupying the country after the war. Their intelligence on the country was flawed from the beginning and the tragic results are the daily killing of American and British soldiers in what is turning into a bloody quagmire.
Sam F. Park
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I did and here's the email.
From: Sam Park
Date: Sun Jul 6, 2003 11:11:36 AM US/Pacific
To: Editor NY TIMES
Subject: Re:
I beg to differ with General Myer's assessment of the attacks in Iraq.
<< But General Myers said that it was wrong to think that the entire country was unstable or that coalition troops everywhere were under siege. To bolster his point he broke down the threat by geography and source.
In northern Iraq, which is dominated by Kurds, and the south, where Shiite Muslims prevail, "the situation is basically stable," with water, electric and sanitation systems back to prewar levels or better, General Myers said on Fox TV.
The problem, he added, was in Sunni-dominated central areas, and particularly in a triangle formed by Baghdad; Ramadi, to the west, where a bomb explosion on Saturday killed seven United States-trained Iraqi police recruits marching from their graduation ceremony; and Tikrit, to the northwest, a stronghold of Mr. Hussein.
"That's where 90 percent of the incidents are," he said. >>
And yet we have this story (from AP)
<< Six British Soldiers Killed in S. Iraq
Wed Jun 25, 1:15 AM ET
By STEVEN GUTKIN, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Six British soldiers were killed in a police station in southern Iraq and eight were wounded in a nearby ambush Tuesday, marking the deadliest day of attacks on coalition forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
The casualties were a shock to British troops occupying the largely Shiite south, which until now had been essentially free of the daily hit-and-run attacks plaguing American soldiers in central and western Iraq. British troops have felt so secure they have been patrolling the country's second-largest city, Basra, without flak jackets or helmets. >>
This attack was not done by one of "five (political) groups" as the General suggests but an angry mob of locals who, wrong or ignorantly, killed the soldiers for reasons stemming from frustrations with the occupation.
The General and the Bush administration that he serves are constantly spinning the situation in Iraq for political purposes. The truth is they were not prepared for occupying the country after the war. Their intelligence on the country was flawed from the beginning and the tragic results are the daily killing of American and British soldiers in what is turning into a bloody quagmire.
Sam F. Park
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to a small town, exploit their fears of 9/11, run a flag up their ass and have Bush come out and preach while singing from the re-election hymn. It's the Sam Walton style strategy for raising millions of campaign dollars (all while ruining the local businesses and "mainstreet" USA).
Bush's Brigadier of Bucks
How Jack Oliver, a little-known 34-year-old from Missouri, is managing the most formidable cash machine in American political history
By MATTHEW COOPER AND MICHAEL WEISSKOPF
Monday, Jun. 30, 2003
George Bush could not have picked a better place to demonstrate the reach of his "shock and awe" money campaign. Headlining a luncheon at the Airport Marriott in the liberal Democratic bastion of San Francisco last Friday, the President politely thanked his supporters for their "hard-earned dollars" and walked away $1.6 million richer. But the backroom brigadier of Bush's financial blitz was quietly working the velvet rope at the ballroom's VIP section. Jack Oliver, a little-known 34-year-old from Missouri, is the man largely responsible for what is being heralded as the most formidable money machine in modern political history...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bush's Brigadier of Bucks
How Jack Oliver, a little-known 34-year-old from Missouri, is managing the most formidable cash machine in American political history
By MATTHEW COOPER AND MICHAEL WEISSKOPF
Monday, Jun. 30, 2003
George Bush could not have picked a better place to demonstrate the reach of his "shock and awe" money campaign. Headlining a luncheon at the Airport Marriott in the liberal Democratic bastion of San Francisco last Friday, the President politely thanked his supporters for their "hard-earned dollars" and walked away $1.6 million richer. But the backroom brigadier of Bush's financial blitz was quietly working the velvet rope at the ballroom's VIP section. Jack Oliver, a little-known 34-year-old from Missouri, is the man largely responsible for what is being heralded as the most formidable money machine in modern political history...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WMD? Who? George doesn't even know.
Who Lost the WMD?
As the weapons hunt intensifies, so does the finger pointing. A preview of the coming battle
By MASSIMO CALABRESI AND TIMOTHY J. BURGER
Sunday, Jun. 29, 2003
Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. "Who?" Bush asked.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who Lost the WMD?
As the weapons hunt intensifies, so does the finger pointing. A preview of the coming battle
By MASSIMO CALABRESI AND TIMOTHY J. BURGER
Sunday, Jun. 29, 2003
Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. "Who?" Bush asked.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So we're beginning the national nightmare of having our soldiers (and soon, anyone from America working there) killed on a daily basis in Iraq. British troops are dying. A British jounalist was just shot and killed. How did we end up in this mess? Why should many who supported the war feel shame and guilt over it? Because they pay more attention to game shows and sit-coms than following the news and events that shape our country and government? They have no sense of history nor care to study the very democracy they are charged with governing. An election rolls around and they wake up from their self-induced sleep for five minutes to see who looks best like an actor playing president on TV and whose commercials deliver the best sound byte while attacking the other candidate.
A few thoughts on America today from various patriots who do care about our history, government and nation.
ROBERT BYRD
U.S. Senator from West Virginia
Nathan Hale volunteered to go behind the British lines in response to a call for volunteers by General Washington. He was discovered and arrested as a spy. That was on Sept. 21, 1776. The next morning he was hauled up before a crude gallows, and they said, "Do you have anything to say?" He said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
So here was Nathan Hale, who was willing to give everything he had. And yet we're not willing today in the U.S. Senate—the Senate passed that resolution shifting the power to declare war from the Congress to the President of the U.S. That was a shame, and only 23 Senators voted against shifting that power. When it came to the Senate, and we didn't cast a vote that demonstrated courage and not intimidation, we should have been reminded of Nathan Hale.
If the Founders had seen just that one vote, they would have been ashamed of us. We politicians have a duty, and we in the Senate have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The Constitution says Congress shall have the power to declare war. Yet we stood that right on its head, turned right around and shifted that power over to a President who was not even elected by a majority of the American people.
PAULINE MAIER
Author, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence; currently working on a book on the ratification of the federal Constitution
What's wonderful about John Adams is his attitude toward the deification of the Founders, which was one of immense skepticism. The reinterpretation of the Founders as somehow a special species of human beings akin to religious figures came in after the War of 1812, but John Adams lived to see it, and being an outspoken man, he criticized it. He said, "You know, I don't recognize these people." He particularly execrated the cult of Washington. The idea was that they were human beings, not religious figures. He had the grace to say to a young American, "I'll let you in on a big secret: I don't think my generation was any better than yours."
[Yet] these were the people who laid down the basis for the institutions under which we now live. They managed to carry off a revolution that ended not in more carnage but in peace and in a constitutional order. This is a historical wonder.
How do you think they would take to a country in which the Supreme Court chooses the next President? In their craziest fantasies, the anti-Federalists never thought this would be possible—that Congress doesn't assiduously guard the right to declare war. They would find what came of the institutions they defined bewildering.
BERNARD BAILYN
Author, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders
The founding fathers matter today because they changed the course of history. In devising the forms of our public institutions, they thought long and hard about the problem of power—the power of the state, of the government—and how to protect the individual's liberties from the necessary powers of government. It came up first in their resistance to what they believed was the growth of autocratic power in Britain and in justifying rebellion against it. It came up in the writing of the first state constitutions. And it came up above all in writing and ratifying the Constitution.
The debate on the Constitution, which lasted for almost a year, was one of the greatest struggles over the principles of power and liberty ever recorded. And the result of that debate was that you could not properly have a bill of powers (which is what the Constitution is) without joining to it a bill of rights. That balance between the two—between powers and liberties—is the heart of their thinking, and if there is anything more relevant to our problems today, I don't know what it is.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A few thoughts on America today from various patriots who do care about our history, government and nation.
ROBERT BYRD
U.S. Senator from West Virginia
Nathan Hale volunteered to go behind the British lines in response to a call for volunteers by General Washington. He was discovered and arrested as a spy. That was on Sept. 21, 1776. The next morning he was hauled up before a crude gallows, and they said, "Do you have anything to say?" He said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
So here was Nathan Hale, who was willing to give everything he had. And yet we're not willing today in the U.S. Senate—the Senate passed that resolution shifting the power to declare war from the Congress to the President of the U.S. That was a shame, and only 23 Senators voted against shifting that power. When it came to the Senate, and we didn't cast a vote that demonstrated courage and not intimidation, we should have been reminded of Nathan Hale.
If the Founders had seen just that one vote, they would have been ashamed of us. We politicians have a duty, and we in the Senate have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The Constitution says Congress shall have the power to declare war. Yet we stood that right on its head, turned right around and shifted that power over to a President who was not even elected by a majority of the American people.
PAULINE MAIER
Author, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence; currently working on a book on the ratification of the federal Constitution
What's wonderful about John Adams is his attitude toward the deification of the Founders, which was one of immense skepticism. The reinterpretation of the Founders as somehow a special species of human beings akin to religious figures came in after the War of 1812, but John Adams lived to see it, and being an outspoken man, he criticized it. He said, "You know, I don't recognize these people." He particularly execrated the cult of Washington. The idea was that they were human beings, not religious figures. He had the grace to say to a young American, "I'll let you in on a big secret: I don't think my generation was any better than yours."
[Yet] these were the people who laid down the basis for the institutions under which we now live. They managed to carry off a revolution that ended not in more carnage but in peace and in a constitutional order. This is a historical wonder.
How do you think they would take to a country in which the Supreme Court chooses the next President? In their craziest fantasies, the anti-Federalists never thought this would be possible—that Congress doesn't assiduously guard the right to declare war. They would find what came of the institutions they defined bewildering.
BERNARD BAILYN
Author, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders
The founding fathers matter today because they changed the course of history. In devising the forms of our public institutions, they thought long and hard about the problem of power—the power of the state, of the government—and how to protect the individual's liberties from the necessary powers of government. It came up first in their resistance to what they believed was the growth of autocratic power in Britain and in justifying rebellion against it. It came up in the writing of the first state constitutions. And it came up above all in writing and ratifying the Constitution.
The debate on the Constitution, which lasted for almost a year, was one of the greatest struggles over the principles of power and liberty ever recorded. And the result of that debate was that you could not properly have a bill of powers (which is what the Constitution is) without joining to it a bill of rights. That balance between the two—between powers and liberties—is the heart of their thinking, and if there is anything more relevant to our problems today, I don't know what it is.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, July 04, 2003
From Agent Largent (thanks for sending the whole article as I don't have a subscription to SALON) the Joe Consason skewing of rabid right winger Ann Coulter and her new rant, "Treason". This review is required reading so take notes there will be a test later.
Has she no shame?
Of course not, and now we know why: In her new book "Treason," Ann Coulter reveals that her role model is Joe McCarthy. And her grasp of facts is even worse than her judgment.
By Joe Conason
July 4, 2003 | "Slander" is defined in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as "a false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed." The venerable American legal lexicon goes on to note that such defamatory words are sometimes "actionable in themselves, without proof of special damages," particularly when they impute "guilt of some offence for which the party, if guilty, might be indicted and punished by the criminal courts; as to call a person a 'traitor.'"
So how appropriate it is that in the rapidly growing Ann Coulter bibliography, last year's bestselling "Slander" is now followed by "Treason," her new catalog of defamation against every liberal and every Democrat -- indeed, every American who has dared to disagree with her or her spirit guide, Joe McCarthy -- as "traitors." And like a criminal who subconsciously wants to be caught, Coulter seems compelled to reveal at last her true role model. (Some of us had figured this out already.)
She not only lionizes the late senator, whose name is synonymous with demagogue, but with a vengeance also adopts his methods and pursues his partisan purposes. She sneers, she smears, she indicts by falsehood and distortion -- and she frankly expresses her desire to destroy any political party or person that resists Republican conservatism (as defined by her).
"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America," according to her demonology. "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down." And: "Liberals relentlessly attack their country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are, because that would be 'McCarthyism,' which never existed." (Never existed? Her idol gave his 1952 book that very word as its title.)
Coulter went from cable network sideshow to full-fledged media star last year when her book "Slander," fed by the same ferocious right wing of the country that elevated both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News -- both of which did much to promote Coulter -- became a runaway bestseller. "Treason" displays many of the same mental habits as did "Slander": the obsession with "manly" men, the disparagement of women as weak-willed and whorish, the disturbed attraction to images of violence. "When Republicans ignite the explosive energy of the hardhats, liberals had better run for cover," she barks, obviously longing for the days when construction workers beat up antiwar demonstrators. And there is the same spittle-flecked name-calling, like a Tourette's sufferer without the mordant energy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is "Jackie Kennedy's poodle." The late religious scholar Reinhold Niebuhr was "a big, sonorous bore." Labor leader Walter Reuther was a "sanctimonious fraud." McCarthy? "A poet," she tells us.
If so, Coulter is inspired by the same paranoid muse. She crafts images of liberals "dedicated to mainstreaming Communist ideals at home," seeking "to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and truth." To make such accusations requires a certain kind of mind, to put it politely. Or to put it less politely -- as the managing editor of Commentary remarked in his scathing review of "Slander" -- Coulter "pretends to intellectual seriousness where there is none." But in the marketplace for conservative ideology, her brand of fakery is hot.
The likelihood is that Coulter's many avid fans are as conveniently ignorant of the past as she seems to be. So the rubes who buy "Treason" will believe her when she accuses George Catlett Marshall, the great general who oversaw the reconstruction of Europe, of nurturing a "strange attraction" to "sedition" and of scheming to assist rather than hinder Soviet expansion.
Her duped readers will believe that Marshall and President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin only because Republicans won the midterm elections in 1946. They probably won't know that Truman confronted the Soviets in the Mediterranean with a naval task force several months before Election Day; or that the new Republican majority cut Truman's requested military budget by $500 million as soon as they took over Congress in January 1947, nearly crippling the American occupation of Germany and Japan; or that Truman, Marshall and Dean Acheson had to plead with the isolationist Republican leadership to oppose Russian designs on Greece and Turkey.
Her deceptive style is exemplified in an anecdote she lifts from an actual historian and twists to smear Truman. She writes: "Most breathtakingly, in March 1946, Truman ostentatiously rebuffed Churchill after his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Immediately after Churchill's speech, Truman instructed his Secretary of State Dean Acheson not to attend a reception for Churchill a week later in New York."
Has she no shame?
In that passage -- footnoted to James Chace's magisterial 1998 biography of Acheson -- Coulter demonstrates that she is both an intentional liar and an incompetent writer. The pages she cites from Chace explain quite clearly that Acheson (who was not then Secretary of State and would not be promoted to that office until 1949) was urged to avoid the New York reception by Secretary of State James Byrnes, not Truman. The British apparently didn't notice that "ostentatious rebuff," since they immediately invited Acheson and his wife to a cordial lunch with Churchill in Washington. And as for Truman, Chace notes that it was he who had invited Churchill to Missouri, his home state, to deliver the speech -- which the American president read in advance, assuring the former prime minister that his strong warning about communist intentions would "do nothing but good."
So replete is "Treason" with falsehoods and distortions, as well as so much plain bullshit, that it may well create a cottage industry of corrective fact-checking, just as "Slander" did last year. (The fun has already begun with Brendan Nyhan's devastating review on the Spinsanity Web site. So far the Spinsanity sages have found "at least five factual claims that are indisputably false" in "Treason," along with the usual Coulter techniques of phony quotation, misleading sourcing, and sentences ripped from context or falsely attributed.)
Such heavy-handed deception was precisely the sort of tactic employed by McCarthy himself against Acheson and all his other targets. In his book "McCarthyism: The Fight for America," for instance, he charged that the Truman aide had "hailed the Communist victory in China as 'a new day which has dawned in Asia.'" Of course, Acheson had neither said nor written anything of the kind.
To Coulter, McCarthy is simply a great man worthy of her emulation. In her alternate universe, he isn't the slimy traducer Americans have come to know and despise. He's bright, witty, warm-hearted and macho, a sincere farm boy who exposes the treasonous cowardice of the urbane Acheson, Marshall and other "sniffing pantywaists." She seems to regard him as kind of a Jimmy Stewart type, albeit with jowls and five o'clock shadow and a serious drinking problem.
And he never, ever attacked anyone who didn't deserve it.
"His targets were Soviet sympathizers and Soviet spies," Coulter proclaims without qualification. But elsewhere she says that he wasn't even really trying to find either communists or spies, but only seeking to expose "security risks" in government jobs. Whatever his mission, it was noble and succeeding admirably until 1954, when "liberals immobilized him with their Army-McCarthy hearings and censure investigation."
Actually, McCarthy was brought down by his own televised misconduct during those hearings -- and by the outrage not of Democrats but of Republicans, including President Eisenhower and a caucus of courageous GOP senators. (Among the latter was the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush of Connecticut, whose vote to censure McCarthy is another little fact that Coulter forgets to mention.)
The truth is that some of McCarthy's targets were or had been communists -- and therefore by definition "sympathizers" of the Soviet Union -- but he never uncovered a single indictable spy. There had been dozens of Soviet agents in government before and during World War II. But those espionage rings had been broken up by the FBI well before McCarthy showed up brandishing a bogus "list" of 57 or 205 or 81 Communists in the State Department.
Yet the Wisconsin windbag amassed sufficient power for a time to destroy innocent individuals, most notably Owen Lattimore, described smirkingly by Coulter as McCarthy's "biggest star" and the man he once named as Stalin's "top espionage agent" in the United States. "Somewhat surprisingly," as Coulter is obliged to note, Lattimore's name has yet to be found in Moscow's excavated KGB archives or in the Venona cables decrypted by U.S. Army counterespionage agents. The dearth of evidence against Lattimore matters not at all to Coulter, however. Though the eminent China expert was neither a spy nor a communist, he certainly knew and worked with some communists -- and worst of all, he disagreed with the far right about U.S. policy toward China.
Then there are names that Coulter doesn't dare name, such as Theodore Kaghan, a favorite McCarthy target who worked for the Voice of America. In fact, she doesn't mention the Voice of America investigation at all, perhaps because it was so obviously a destructive waste of time and money. Kaghan, a valiant opponent of the communists in Berlin, was dismissed from his VOA position under pressure from McCarthy. He was wholly innocent, but the reckless senator's inquisition ruined him and sabotaged Western interests. That same destructive pattern occurred in the State Department, in the Army Signal Corps, and in other government agencies. His ham-handed brutality made McCarthy an immense boon to communist propaganda abroad, especially in Europe. They loved it when his counsel Roy Cohn and his assistant David Schine junketed around the continent, tasked with removing thousands of "pro-communist" books from the shelves of U.S.-funded libraries.
To transform McCarthy into a hero, Coulter carefully airbrushes all these unpleasant episodes from his career. "This version will be unfamiliar to most Americans inasmuch as it includes facts," she explains, introducing her biographical sketch of the Wisconsin senator. Perhaps it includes some facts, but it certainly omits others.
Coulter discusses McCarthy's impressive high school record in considerable loving detail. But somehow she neglects to mention McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous 1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy case to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy. The S.S. officers were guilty, as the Senate report confirmed -- although most of them later got their death sentences commuted in a gesture to former Nazi officials who aided the West in the Cold War. But McCarthy had succeeded in his larger purpose, winning publicity for himself and casting a negative light on the war-crimes trials.
By Coulter's loose definition, his involvement in the Malmedy incident proves that McCarthy was a "traitor." He lied publicly to advance totalitarian forces in Europe against American interests. He sided with enemy forces against American soldiers. He falsely accused American officials of crimes. Moreover, he took up this tainted cause at least in part because of heavy financial support from an ultra-right-wing German-American businessman in Wisconsin. He managed to help both Nazis and communists at once, a feat rarely seen since the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
That irony would be lost on Coulter, as she proceeds with her single-minded smearing of Democrats and liberals. It turns out that all her raking over the ancient history of communism and anti-communism serves only as preparation to construct false contemporary analogies. Just as anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was a traitor, so was anyone who opposed the war in Vietnam or dissented from Reagan's war in Nicaragua or doubted Bush's war in Iraq.
In Coulter's beloved country there is no place for debate, only conformity. And in "Treason" there is no space for the complicated, mundane reality of American political life. Conservatives good, liberals bad, is her shrieking mantra. She knows what her audience will buy -- and that most of them aren't bright enough to notice the contradictions.
So while Patrick Buchanan is a good guy when he red-baits liberals during the Reagan era, he suddenly disappears from the pages of "Treason" when he opposes the war in Iraq. For that matter, so do all the right-wing critics of Bush's war, from Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas to the entire staff of the ultra-right Cato Institute. Their existence can't be acknowledged -- because if they do exist, they are "traitors," too. And there is no such creature as a right-wing traitor (which means that the dozens of Americans convicted of spying for Nazi Germany in 1942, the political leadership of the Confederacy, the Tories of the Revolutionary era, Timothy McVeigh, and Robert Hanssen all, naturally, go unmentioned in "Treason").
Likewise absent from Coulter's cracked cosmology are the liberals and Democrats who supported the Iraq war, including dozens of senators, members of Congress, the editors of the New Republic, the Democratic Leadership Council, and writers such as Paul Berman and Kenneth Pollack. According to her, Democrats voted for the war resolution only because they feared their true treasonous nature would otherwise be exposed. In fact, their votes in favor of Bush's resolution perversely proved that they were traitors!
"Liberals spent most of the war on terrorism in a funk because they didn't have enough grist for the antiwar mill. They nearly went stark raving mad at having to mouth patriotic platitudes while burning with a desire to aid the enemy." Somebody is raving here, but it isn't a liberal. With this book, Coulter has paid her homage and surpassed her master.
From now on, maybe we should call it Coulterism.
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Has she no shame?
Of course not, and now we know why: In her new book "Treason," Ann Coulter reveals that her role model is Joe McCarthy. And her grasp of facts is even worse than her judgment.
By Joe Conason
July 4, 2003 | "Slander" is defined in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as "a false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed." The venerable American legal lexicon goes on to note that such defamatory words are sometimes "actionable in themselves, without proof of special damages," particularly when they impute "guilt of some offence for which the party, if guilty, might be indicted and punished by the criminal courts; as to call a person a 'traitor.'"
So how appropriate it is that in the rapidly growing Ann Coulter bibliography, last year's bestselling "Slander" is now followed by "Treason," her new catalog of defamation against every liberal and every Democrat -- indeed, every American who has dared to disagree with her or her spirit guide, Joe McCarthy -- as "traitors." And like a criminal who subconsciously wants to be caught, Coulter seems compelled to reveal at last her true role model. (Some of us had figured this out already.)
She not only lionizes the late senator, whose name is synonymous with demagogue, but with a vengeance also adopts his methods and pursues his partisan purposes. She sneers, she smears, she indicts by falsehood and distortion -- and she frankly expresses her desire to destroy any political party or person that resists Republican conservatism (as defined by her).
"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America," according to her demonology. "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down." And: "Liberals relentlessly attack their country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are, because that would be 'McCarthyism,' which never existed." (Never existed? Her idol gave his 1952 book that very word as its title.)
Coulter went from cable network sideshow to full-fledged media star last year when her book "Slander," fed by the same ferocious right wing of the country that elevated both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News -- both of which did much to promote Coulter -- became a runaway bestseller. "Treason" displays many of the same mental habits as did "Slander": the obsession with "manly" men, the disparagement of women as weak-willed and whorish, the disturbed attraction to images of violence. "When Republicans ignite the explosive energy of the hardhats, liberals had better run for cover," she barks, obviously longing for the days when construction workers beat up antiwar demonstrators. And there is the same spittle-flecked name-calling, like a Tourette's sufferer without the mordant energy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is "Jackie Kennedy's poodle." The late religious scholar Reinhold Niebuhr was "a big, sonorous bore." Labor leader Walter Reuther was a "sanctimonious fraud." McCarthy? "A poet," she tells us.
If so, Coulter is inspired by the same paranoid muse. She crafts images of liberals "dedicated to mainstreaming Communist ideals at home," seeking "to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and truth." To make such accusations requires a certain kind of mind, to put it politely. Or to put it less politely -- as the managing editor of Commentary remarked in his scathing review of "Slander" -- Coulter "pretends to intellectual seriousness where there is none." But in the marketplace for conservative ideology, her brand of fakery is hot.
The likelihood is that Coulter's many avid fans are as conveniently ignorant of the past as she seems to be. So the rubes who buy "Treason" will believe her when she accuses George Catlett Marshall, the great general who oversaw the reconstruction of Europe, of nurturing a "strange attraction" to "sedition" and of scheming to assist rather than hinder Soviet expansion.
Her duped readers will believe that Marshall and President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin only because Republicans won the midterm elections in 1946. They probably won't know that Truman confronted the Soviets in the Mediterranean with a naval task force several months before Election Day; or that the new Republican majority cut Truman's requested military budget by $500 million as soon as they took over Congress in January 1947, nearly crippling the American occupation of Germany and Japan; or that Truman, Marshall and Dean Acheson had to plead with the isolationist Republican leadership to oppose Russian designs on Greece and Turkey.
Her deceptive style is exemplified in an anecdote she lifts from an actual historian and twists to smear Truman. She writes: "Most breathtakingly, in March 1946, Truman ostentatiously rebuffed Churchill after his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Immediately after Churchill's speech, Truman instructed his Secretary of State Dean Acheson not to attend a reception for Churchill a week later in New York."
Has she no shame?
In that passage -- footnoted to James Chace's magisterial 1998 biography of Acheson -- Coulter demonstrates that she is both an intentional liar and an incompetent writer. The pages she cites from Chace explain quite clearly that Acheson (who was not then Secretary of State and would not be promoted to that office until 1949) was urged to avoid the New York reception by Secretary of State James Byrnes, not Truman. The British apparently didn't notice that "ostentatious rebuff," since they immediately invited Acheson and his wife to a cordial lunch with Churchill in Washington. And as for Truman, Chace notes that it was he who had invited Churchill to Missouri, his home state, to deliver the speech -- which the American president read in advance, assuring the former prime minister that his strong warning about communist intentions would "do nothing but good."
So replete is "Treason" with falsehoods and distortions, as well as so much plain bullshit, that it may well create a cottage industry of corrective fact-checking, just as "Slander" did last year. (The fun has already begun with Brendan Nyhan's devastating review on the Spinsanity Web site. So far the Spinsanity sages have found "at least five factual claims that are indisputably false" in "Treason," along with the usual Coulter techniques of phony quotation, misleading sourcing, and sentences ripped from context or falsely attributed.)
Such heavy-handed deception was precisely the sort of tactic employed by McCarthy himself against Acheson and all his other targets. In his book "McCarthyism: The Fight for America," for instance, he charged that the Truman aide had "hailed the Communist victory in China as 'a new day which has dawned in Asia.'" Of course, Acheson had neither said nor written anything of the kind.
To Coulter, McCarthy is simply a great man worthy of her emulation. In her alternate universe, he isn't the slimy traducer Americans have come to know and despise. He's bright, witty, warm-hearted and macho, a sincere farm boy who exposes the treasonous cowardice of the urbane Acheson, Marshall and other "sniffing pantywaists." She seems to regard him as kind of a Jimmy Stewart type, albeit with jowls and five o'clock shadow and a serious drinking problem.
And he never, ever attacked anyone who didn't deserve it.
"His targets were Soviet sympathizers and Soviet spies," Coulter proclaims without qualification. But elsewhere she says that he wasn't even really trying to find either communists or spies, but only seeking to expose "security risks" in government jobs. Whatever his mission, it was noble and succeeding admirably until 1954, when "liberals immobilized him with their Army-McCarthy hearings and censure investigation."
Actually, McCarthy was brought down by his own televised misconduct during those hearings -- and by the outrage not of Democrats but of Republicans, including President Eisenhower and a caucus of courageous GOP senators. (Among the latter was the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush of Connecticut, whose vote to censure McCarthy is another little fact that Coulter forgets to mention.)
The truth is that some of McCarthy's targets were or had been communists -- and therefore by definition "sympathizers" of the Soviet Union -- but he never uncovered a single indictable spy. There had been dozens of Soviet agents in government before and during World War II. But those espionage rings had been broken up by the FBI well before McCarthy showed up brandishing a bogus "list" of 57 or 205 or 81 Communists in the State Department.
Yet the Wisconsin windbag amassed sufficient power for a time to destroy innocent individuals, most notably Owen Lattimore, described smirkingly by Coulter as McCarthy's "biggest star" and the man he once named as Stalin's "top espionage agent" in the United States. "Somewhat surprisingly," as Coulter is obliged to note, Lattimore's name has yet to be found in Moscow's excavated KGB archives or in the Venona cables decrypted by U.S. Army counterespionage agents. The dearth of evidence against Lattimore matters not at all to Coulter, however. Though the eminent China expert was neither a spy nor a communist, he certainly knew and worked with some communists -- and worst of all, he disagreed with the far right about U.S. policy toward China.
Then there are names that Coulter doesn't dare name, such as Theodore Kaghan, a favorite McCarthy target who worked for the Voice of America. In fact, she doesn't mention the Voice of America investigation at all, perhaps because it was so obviously a destructive waste of time and money. Kaghan, a valiant opponent of the communists in Berlin, was dismissed from his VOA position under pressure from McCarthy. He was wholly innocent, but the reckless senator's inquisition ruined him and sabotaged Western interests. That same destructive pattern occurred in the State Department, in the Army Signal Corps, and in other government agencies. His ham-handed brutality made McCarthy an immense boon to communist propaganda abroad, especially in Europe. They loved it when his counsel Roy Cohn and his assistant David Schine junketed around the continent, tasked with removing thousands of "pro-communist" books from the shelves of U.S.-funded libraries.
To transform McCarthy into a hero, Coulter carefully airbrushes all these unpleasant episodes from his career. "This version will be unfamiliar to most Americans inasmuch as it includes facts," she explains, introducing her biographical sketch of the Wisconsin senator. Perhaps it includes some facts, but it certainly omits others.
Coulter discusses McCarthy's impressive high school record in considerable loving detail. But somehow she neglects to mention McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous 1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy case to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy. The S.S. officers were guilty, as the Senate report confirmed -- although most of them later got their death sentences commuted in a gesture to former Nazi officials who aided the West in the Cold War. But McCarthy had succeeded in his larger purpose, winning publicity for himself and casting a negative light on the war-crimes trials.
By Coulter's loose definition, his involvement in the Malmedy incident proves that McCarthy was a "traitor." He lied publicly to advance totalitarian forces in Europe against American interests. He sided with enemy forces against American soldiers. He falsely accused American officials of crimes. Moreover, he took up this tainted cause at least in part because of heavy financial support from an ultra-right-wing German-American businessman in Wisconsin. He managed to help both Nazis and communists at once, a feat rarely seen since the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
That irony would be lost on Coulter, as she proceeds with her single-minded smearing of Democrats and liberals. It turns out that all her raking over the ancient history of communism and anti-communism serves only as preparation to construct false contemporary analogies. Just as anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was a traitor, so was anyone who opposed the war in Vietnam or dissented from Reagan's war in Nicaragua or doubted Bush's war in Iraq.
In Coulter's beloved country there is no place for debate, only conformity. And in "Treason" there is no space for the complicated, mundane reality of American political life. Conservatives good, liberals bad, is her shrieking mantra. She knows what her audience will buy -- and that most of them aren't bright enough to notice the contradictions.
So while Patrick Buchanan is a good guy when he red-baits liberals during the Reagan era, he suddenly disappears from the pages of "Treason" when he opposes the war in Iraq. For that matter, so do all the right-wing critics of Bush's war, from Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas to the entire staff of the ultra-right Cato Institute. Their existence can't be acknowledged -- because if they do exist, they are "traitors," too. And there is no such creature as a right-wing traitor (which means that the dozens of Americans convicted of spying for Nazi Germany in 1942, the political leadership of the Confederacy, the Tories of the Revolutionary era, Timothy McVeigh, and Robert Hanssen all, naturally, go unmentioned in "Treason").
Likewise absent from Coulter's cracked cosmology are the liberals and Democrats who supported the Iraq war, including dozens of senators, members of Congress, the editors of the New Republic, the Democratic Leadership Council, and writers such as Paul Berman and Kenneth Pollack. According to her, Democrats voted for the war resolution only because they feared their true treasonous nature would otherwise be exposed. In fact, their votes in favor of Bush's resolution perversely proved that they were traitors!
"Liberals spent most of the war on terrorism in a funk because they didn't have enough grist for the antiwar mill. They nearly went stark raving mad at having to mouth patriotic platitudes while burning with a desire to aid the enemy." Somebody is raving here, but it isn't a liberal. With this book, Coulter has paid her homage and surpassed her master.
From now on, maybe we should call it Coulterism.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MUST READ! You owe yourself a drink at the WHISKEY BAR for a...
Day in the Life
I read the news today, oh boy . . .
Day in the Life
I read the news today, oh boy . . .
On the celebration of our country's beginnings it is our duty to try to understand how its image as a great shinning beacon of liberty has been warped into that of a small-minded brute with a flamethrower.
THE NEW AMERICAN ORDER
Fri Jul 4, 2:23 AM ET
Richard Reeves
By Richard Reeves
LONDON -- "What exactly do you think you're doing around the world?" a French reporter asked me the other day. He was not the first nor the last. They are "dissing" the United States all across what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calls "Old Europe."
THE NEW AMERICAN ORDER
Fri Jul 4, 2:23 AM ET
Richard Reeves
By Richard Reeves
LONDON -- "What exactly do you think you're doing around the world?" a French reporter asked me the other day. He was not the first nor the last. They are "dissing" the United States all across what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calls "Old Europe."
Bush's "Bring it on!" election style is a big help to our men overseas.
U.S. Soldier Killed; 10 G.I.'s Injured in Separate Attack
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:05 a.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Mortar rounds slammed into a U.S. base north of Baghdad, wounding at least 10 American soldiers, the U.S. military said Friday.
Meanwhile, an American soldier was killed in an attack on his convoy in the capital late Thursday, U.S. military spokesman Cpl. Todd Pruden said.
News of the attacks was a somber start to American Independence Day activities for the 150,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq.
U.S. Soldier Killed; 10 G.I.'s Injured in Separate Attack
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:05 a.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Mortar rounds slammed into a U.S. base north of Baghdad, wounding at least 10 American soldiers, the U.S. military said Friday.
Meanwhile, an American soldier was killed in an attack on his convoy in the capital late Thursday, U.S. military spokesman Cpl. Todd Pruden said.
News of the attacks was a somber start to American Independence Day activities for the 150,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq.
It's bad in Iraq and will be getting worse by the election. Here's a slice of why Bush will have a real fight on his hands next year. Even the military families are getting pissed off at the lack of planning for AFTER the war.
Anger Rises for Families of Troops in Iraq
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN NY TIMES
FORT HOOD, Tex., July 3 — Luisa Leija was in bed the other morning, she recalled, when her 9-year-old daughter bounded in the room, saying, "Mommy, mommy, there's a man in uniform at the door." (click title above for rest of story)
Anger Rises for Families of Troops in Iraq
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN NY TIMES
FORT HOOD, Tex., July 3 — Luisa Leija was in bed the other morning, she recalled, when her 9-year-old daughter bounded in the room, saying, "Mommy, mommy, there's a man in uniform at the door." (click title above for rest of story)
Thursday, July 03, 2003
You tell 'em, Dubya! And remember. This isn't a quagmire. Rummy said so.
Iraqis Defy Bush, Wound Seven U.S. Soldiers in Attacks
Thu Jul 3, 5:41 AM ET
By Daniel Trotta
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Seven American soldiers were wounded in two separate attacks on occupation forces in Iraq on Thursday, a day after President Bush said there were enough U.S. troops in Iraq to deal with the militants.
Three Iraqis killed, 10 US soldiers wounded as violence flares in Iraq
In a sign the guerrilla-style attacks were growing increasingly bold, assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade on a U.S. Humvee vehicle on a major street in central Baghdad shortly after 10 a.m. (0600 GMT), witnesses said.
Iraqis Defy Bush, Wound Seven U.S. Soldiers in Attacks
Thu Jul 3, 5:41 AM ET
By Daniel Trotta
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Seven American soldiers were wounded in two separate attacks on occupation forces in Iraq on Thursday, a day after President Bush said there were enough U.S. troops in Iraq to deal with the militants.
Three Iraqis killed, 10 US soldiers wounded as violence flares in Iraq
In a sign the guerrilla-style attacks were growing increasingly bold, assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade on a U.S. Humvee vehicle on a major street in central Baghdad shortly after 10 a.m. (0600 GMT), witnesses said.
Let's all go out and play baseball (T-ball for the kiddies) and eat ice cream!
Jobless Rate Surges to Nine-Year High
By Caren Bohan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. unemployment rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, the government said on Thursday in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.
The jobless rate climbed to 6.4 percent last month from May's 6.1 percent, the Labor Department ( news -web sites ) said, a much worse reading than the 6.2 percent forecast by U.S. economists in a Reuters survey. The rate reached the highest level since a matching 6.4 percent in April 1994.
"It's ugly on the surface and uglier when you look inside," economist Stuart Hoffman of PNC Financial Services Group said about the jobs report. "You now have declines in private-sector jobs for five straight months. And the hemorrhaging of manufacturing continues, there doesn't seem to be any abatement."
Jobless Rate Surges to Nine-Year High
By Caren Bohan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. unemployment rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, the government said on Thursday in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.
The jobless rate climbed to 6.4 percent last month from May's 6.1 percent, the Labor Department ( news -web sites ) said, a much worse reading than the 6.2 percent forecast by U.S. economists in a Reuters survey. The rate reached the highest level since a matching 6.4 percent in April 1994.
"It's ugly on the surface and uglier when you look inside," economist Stuart Hoffman of PNC Financial Services Group said about the jobs report. "You now have declines in private-sector jobs for five straight months. And the hemorrhaging of manufacturing continues, there doesn't seem to be any abatement."
First off, let me apologize about not being around of late. Work has demanded my attentions. Okay, I had some fun, too. Now, let's get back to examining the astute leadership of those playing with themselves in the White House.
Wow! Now this is real news! Bush is "concerned" about people out of work! And listen to this. Tax cuts will solve the problem!
W.House: Bush Concerned About Jobless Rate Rise
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush is concerned about a rise in the U.S. jobless rate and believes recently enacted tax cuts will help the economy, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Thursday.
The government reported the jobless rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.
"The president continues to be concerned about any American who is looking for work and is unable to find it," Fleischer said.
He said Bush was pleased that income tax withholding tables were now being adjusted to reflect recently enacted tax cuts and the first of child credit checks were going out at the end of July.
"We are also an economy that is having a slow recovery from that short and shallow recession and that's further evidenced in today's unemployment report," he said.
Wow! Now this is real news! Bush is "concerned" about people out of work! And listen to this. Tax cuts will solve the problem!
W.House: Bush Concerned About Jobless Rate Rise
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush is concerned about a rise in the U.S. jobless rate and believes recently enacted tax cuts will help the economy, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Thursday.
The government reported the jobless rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.
"The president continues to be concerned about any American who is looking for work and is unable to find it," Fleischer said.
He said Bush was pleased that income tax withholding tables were now being adjusted to reflect recently enacted tax cuts and the first of child credit checks were going out at the end of July.
"We are also an economy that is having a slow recovery from that short and shallow recession and that's further evidenced in today's unemployment report," he said.
Monday, June 30, 2003
One Republican against Bush
By Amelia Hansen San Mateo Times
Monday, June 30, 2003 - SAN MATEO -- The keynote speaker at Sunday's 2003 Peninsula Symposium and Benefit for Peace, Justice and Human Rights railed against President Bush and left the audience with a straightforward message for the 2004 presidential election: "Remember the A-B-C's -- Anything but Bush and Cheney." The message was met with unsurprising enthusiasm from the crowd. But the speaker himself had a bit of a surprising background: Scott Ritter, former U.N. chief weapons inspector, is a self-professed conservative Republican who admitted to the audience he voted for Bush three years ago.
Since then, Ritter said, Bush has lied to the American public about the true situation in Iraq, particularly in regard to the weapons of mass destruction, which American forces, to date, have failed to locate.
"I leave the door open that they still may find something," Ritter said to the group of 100 or so people gathered in the darkened auditorium at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center on Sunday. "But even if anything is found, it won't be anywhere near what they said it was -- thousands of tons of biological weapons."
Ritter's new book, "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America," published by Context Books, is due out next week.
A 12-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and an intelligence officer who served as a central weapons inspector between 1991 and 1998, Ritter said if no weapons are found, Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq should be condemned -- whether he lied or made an honest mistake.
"If Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction, they are in violation of international law," Ritter said. "If they aren't, then we are in violation of international law." Click For Rest Of Story
By Amelia Hansen San Mateo Times
Monday, June 30, 2003 - SAN MATEO -- The keynote speaker at Sunday's 2003 Peninsula Symposium and Benefit for Peace, Justice and Human Rights railed against President Bush and left the audience with a straightforward message for the 2004 presidential election: "Remember the A-B-C's -- Anything but Bush and Cheney." The message was met with unsurprising enthusiasm from the crowd. But the speaker himself had a bit of a surprising background: Scott Ritter, former U.N. chief weapons inspector, is a self-professed conservative Republican who admitted to the audience he voted for Bush three years ago.
Since then, Ritter said, Bush has lied to the American public about the true situation in Iraq, particularly in regard to the weapons of mass destruction, which American forces, to date, have failed to locate.
"I leave the door open that they still may find something," Ritter said to the group of 100 or so people gathered in the darkened auditorium at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center on Sunday. "But even if anything is found, it won't be anywhere near what they said it was -- thousands of tons of biological weapons."
Ritter's new book, "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America," published by Context Books, is due out next week.
A 12-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and an intelligence officer who served as a central weapons inspector between 1991 and 1998, Ritter said if no weapons are found, Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq should be condemned -- whether he lied or made an honest mistake.
"If Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction, they are in violation of international law," Ritter said. "If they aren't, then we are in violation of international law." Click For Rest Of Story
I posted what that commie rag, ARMY TIMES, had to say about Bush's lying concerning the treatment of military personal and families, now that liberal sob-sister Pat Buchahan is crying over Bush's lack of leadership and asks what is the plan concerning the war in Iraq. How dare he question the supreme intelligence of our leader!
WHY ARE WE STILL HERE?
Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted: June 30, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
"What are we getting into here?" asked the sergeant from the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, stationed north of Baghdad. "The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Is it worth it? Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?"
The questions that sergeant put to a Washington Post reporter are ones our commander in chief had better begin to address.
For less than three months after the fall of Baghdad, we have lost almost as many men in Iraq as we did in three weeks of war. One U.S. soldier is now dying there every day.
"Mission Accomplished," read the banner behind President Bush as he spoke from the carrier deck of the Lincoln. But if the original mission – to oust Saddam and end the mortal threat of his weapons of mass destruction – is "accomplished," why are we still there?
What is our new mission? What are the standards by which we may measure success? What will be the cost in blood and treasure? When can we expect to turn Iraq back over to the Iraqis? Or is ours to be a permanent presence, as in postwar Germany and Japan?
If that sergeant does not know what he is doing there, it is because his commander in chief has left him, and us, in the dark. And if the president does not begin soon to lay out the case for why we must keep 150,000 men in Iraq, the American people will begin to demand they be brought home. Already, one poll shows that 44 percent of the nation finds the present level of U.S. casualties "unacceptable."
This is not 1963. Americans no longer have the same patience or trust in government we had when JFK took us into Vietnam. We are no longer willing to have Americans die in open-ended wars for unexplained ends. Dean Rusk's familiar mantra, "We are there, and we are committed," is no longer enough.
When the United States lost 241 U.S. Marines in the bombing of the Beirut barracks 20 years ago, and 18 Army Rangers in the "Blackhawk Down" incident in Mogadishu, Americans demanded we get out. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton hastily did.
As has been written here many times, Americans are lousy imperialists. We are uninterested in ruling and reforming other peoples if they appear to want us out of their lives. Nor are we willing to shed American blood for visions of empire dancing in the heads of Potomac pundits.
This week, six British soldiers were killed – three executed – after surrendering to Iraqi civilians enraged over intrusive house searches that they believe dishonored them and their women. This was in the Shia region of southern Iraq, which had been thought to be pacified.
One is reminded of Yitzhak Rabin's remark after the invasion of southern Lebanon had ignited the peaceful population there: "We have let the Shia genie out of the bottle."
On their visit to Baghdad, Sens. Lugar and Biden warned the U.S. Army might have to remain in Iraq five years. But Americans are not going to tolerate five years, or even two years, of guerrilla war without a better explanation as to exactly what vital interest of ours requires us to stay in Iraq and fight this war.
Moreover, there is every indication the security situation is getting worse. The incident in the south is but one example. The heavy-handed but natural reaction of U.S. soldiers to being ambushed and sniped at and killed every day is another. Invading homes searching for weapons, rousting out and roughing up Iraqi men, and patting down their women is a sure way to antagonize a fighting people.
Lest we forget, among the "Intolerable Acts" that led to our own revolution was the "Quartering Act," where Bostonians had to provide shelter for British troops sent to pacify the city after Sam Adams' tea party down at the harbor.
We are told the United States cannot walk away from Iraq now, or it would descend into chaos. That may be true. But if chaos is one alternative, another is a no-win war such as Israel is today fighting against the Palestinians. And the chances of that are daily rising.
A recent U.S. strike in the west turned up the bodies of Saudis and Syrians who had come to fight Americans, as their fathers went to Afghanistan to fight Russians. Moreover, U.S. pressure on Iran to permit inspections of its nuclear facilities – or U.S. pre-emptive strikes – would surely be answered by the kind of Iranian aid to and instigation of the Shias in Iraq that Teheran gave to Hezbollah in Lebanon. And Hezbollah, after years of guerrilla war, drove the Israelis out of their country.
President Bush had best begin devising an exit strategy for U.S. troops, before our enemies succeed with theirs.
WHY ARE WE STILL HERE?
Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted: June 30, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
"What are we getting into here?" asked the sergeant from the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, stationed north of Baghdad. "The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Is it worth it? Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?"
The questions that sergeant put to a Washington Post reporter are ones our commander in chief had better begin to address.
For less than three months after the fall of Baghdad, we have lost almost as many men in Iraq as we did in three weeks of war. One U.S. soldier is now dying there every day.
"Mission Accomplished," read the banner behind President Bush as he spoke from the carrier deck of the Lincoln. But if the original mission – to oust Saddam and end the mortal threat of his weapons of mass destruction – is "accomplished," why are we still there?
What is our new mission? What are the standards by which we may measure success? What will be the cost in blood and treasure? When can we expect to turn Iraq back over to the Iraqis? Or is ours to be a permanent presence, as in postwar Germany and Japan?
If that sergeant does not know what he is doing there, it is because his commander in chief has left him, and us, in the dark. And if the president does not begin soon to lay out the case for why we must keep 150,000 men in Iraq, the American people will begin to demand they be brought home. Already, one poll shows that 44 percent of the nation finds the present level of U.S. casualties "unacceptable."
This is not 1963. Americans no longer have the same patience or trust in government we had when JFK took us into Vietnam. We are no longer willing to have Americans die in open-ended wars for unexplained ends. Dean Rusk's familiar mantra, "We are there, and we are committed," is no longer enough.
When the United States lost 241 U.S. Marines in the bombing of the Beirut barracks 20 years ago, and 18 Army Rangers in the "Blackhawk Down" incident in Mogadishu, Americans demanded we get out. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton hastily did.
As has been written here many times, Americans are lousy imperialists. We are uninterested in ruling and reforming other peoples if they appear to want us out of their lives. Nor are we willing to shed American blood for visions of empire dancing in the heads of Potomac pundits.
This week, six British soldiers were killed – three executed – after surrendering to Iraqi civilians enraged over intrusive house searches that they believe dishonored them and their women. This was in the Shia region of southern Iraq, which had been thought to be pacified.
One is reminded of Yitzhak Rabin's remark after the invasion of southern Lebanon had ignited the peaceful population there: "We have let the Shia genie out of the bottle."
On their visit to Baghdad, Sens. Lugar and Biden warned the U.S. Army might have to remain in Iraq five years. But Americans are not going to tolerate five years, or even two years, of guerrilla war without a better explanation as to exactly what vital interest of ours requires us to stay in Iraq and fight this war.
Moreover, there is every indication the security situation is getting worse. The incident in the south is but one example. The heavy-handed but natural reaction of U.S. soldiers to being ambushed and sniped at and killed every day is another. Invading homes searching for weapons, rousting out and roughing up Iraqi men, and patting down their women is a sure way to antagonize a fighting people.
Lest we forget, among the "Intolerable Acts" that led to our own revolution was the "Quartering Act," where Bostonians had to provide shelter for British troops sent to pacify the city after Sam Adams' tea party down at the harbor.
We are told the United States cannot walk away from Iraq now, or it would descend into chaos. That may be true. But if chaos is one alternative, another is a no-win war such as Israel is today fighting against the Palestinians. And the chances of that are daily rising.
A recent U.S. strike in the west turned up the bodies of Saudis and Syrians who had come to fight Americans, as their fathers went to Afghanistan to fight Russians. Moreover, U.S. pressure on Iran to permit inspections of its nuclear facilities – or U.S. pre-emptive strikes – would surely be answered by the kind of Iranian aid to and instigation of the Shias in Iraq that Teheran gave to Hezbollah in Lebanon. And Hezbollah, after years of guerrilla war, drove the Israelis out of their country.
President Bush had best begin devising an exit strategy for U.S. troops, before our enemies succeed with theirs.
From Fred Clark at The Slacktivist:
http://slacktivist.blogspot.com/2003_06_22_slacktivist_archive.html#105678945898439031
A DAY AT THE RACES
A tortured, obvious and over-extended metaphor.
Okay, so you're going to the track and your friend tells you to check in with this tipster before you place your bets.
So you find the guy and he tells you he's got a sure thing in the fourth race. So you put your money down, following his advice, picking Restored Honor to win, Dignity of the Office to place and Changing the Tone to show.
The fourth race comes up and you lose, watching Harken Hijinx and Partisan Pitbull in first and second, with Vandalism Fraud just edging out DUI Disclosure for third.
So you tell your friend the tipster lied to you.
"Lie is a strong word," your buddy says. "It was really just a matter of emphasis."
"The guy is 0-for-3," you say.
"Hey, these are picks," your friend reminds you. "They're not guarantees."
When you point out that the tipster said it was a "sure thing," your friend tells you that you don't understand how the game works. "That's just a term of art," he says. So you figure you'll give the tipster another chance.
This time he tells you to bet on Ongoing Surplus, Balanced Budget and Sacred Lockbox. You place your bets and you lose again -- this time to three ponies named Record Deficit, Prodigal Tax Cuts and $7 Trillion And Counting. Your wallet is really hurting and it looks like you've been had.
"That tipster is a liar," you say again.
"Go easy with the L-word," your buddy says. "Just because someone repeatedly tells you things that turn out not to be true doesn't make that person a liar. Maybe he just got some bad intelligence. Or maybe he was ideologically self-deceived. Or maybe he has secret, classified reasons for not telling you the truth -- you know, for matters of national security."
"National security? " you say. "Everybody who listened to this guy is broke."
"Calm down," your friend says. "You can't prove intent. He's no liar."
Thinking maybe you should have "sucker" tattooed on your forehead, you head back to the tipster for another try.
He tells you he's got a can't-miss scoop and you put your money on Domestic Security, Four Freedoms and Twin Towers. The three horses collide out of the gate. You've never seen anything so horrible. They end up having to shoot all three horses, plus the jockeys, the track announcer and several thousand people in the grandstands.
"That was the worst thing I've ever seen," you tell your friend. "It was an unprecedented calamity. I'm never trusting this guy again."
But your friend says that just because the disaster took place on the tipster's watch doesn't mean he bears any responsibility for it.
"You said yourself it was unprecedented," he reminds you. "So how could he have foreseen that?"
You're thinking that it's a tipster's job to foresee such things, but you let it pass.
"Sure, we're all broke and thousands are dead," your friend says, "but that just means that it's time to rally behind the tipster. At times like this we all have to band together for the good of the racing community."
This odd argument somehow strikes you as hypnotically compelling. You go back to relying on the miserable failure of a tipster, still feeling like a sucker, but somehow proud to be one. Following his lead, you blow your next paycheck on a horse called Dead Or Alive. It doesn't win, place or show, and you can't even get anybody at the window to tell you where it finished. It's like it just disappeared.
This goes on for years. You keep staking your fortunes based on what the tipster says and you keep getting burned. In all this time only one of his picks even manages to show -- a skinny nag named Jobless Recovery -- but it doesn't pay very well.
Finally, you tell your friend you're about done. You're willing to give the tipster one last chance to prove he's even remotely worth listening to. One last chance and that's it.
Surprisingly, your friend agrees.
"Fair enough," he says. "See who he's picking in the Iraqi Stakes. If that doesn't work out just the way he says, you have every right to ignore him in the future."
So it all comes down to this. You take every dime you can scrape together and put it all down on the three horses the tipster assures you are a sure thing -- Terrorist Ties, Imminent Danger and Democratic Beacon.
You lose, tearing up your tickets as Nigerian Forgery, Doctored Intel and Gaza-On-The-Tigris win running away.
"That's it! " you tell your friend. "You said yourself that this race should be the deciding factor and it was. He lied again. The tipster is a liar!"
"Whoa! Calm down. Again with the L-word," your friend says. "He told you those horses would win, so you just assumed he meant today? You've just got to give it time.
"And remember you still can't prove he was lying. He may just have been mistaken. Or deluded. Or caught up in an exaggeration. He may have been given bad information himself. So you can't say he's a liar.
"Don't you see? Just because someone is consistently mistaken or deluded -- just because everything he tells you isn't true -- that doesn't mean he can't be trusted, does it? Does it? "
http://slacktivist.blogspot.com/2003_06_22_slacktivist_archive.html#105678945898439031
A DAY AT THE RACES
A tortured, obvious and over-extended metaphor.
Okay, so you're going to the track and your friend tells you to check in with this tipster before you place your bets.
So you find the guy and he tells you he's got a sure thing in the fourth race. So you put your money down, following his advice, picking Restored Honor to win, Dignity of the Office to place and Changing the Tone to show.
The fourth race comes up and you lose, watching Harken Hijinx and Partisan Pitbull in first and second, with Vandalism Fraud just edging out DUI Disclosure for third.
So you tell your friend the tipster lied to you.
"Lie is a strong word," your buddy says. "It was really just a matter of emphasis."
"The guy is 0-for-3," you say.
"Hey, these are picks," your friend reminds you. "They're not guarantees."
When you point out that the tipster said it was a "sure thing," your friend tells you that you don't understand how the game works. "That's just a term of art," he says. So you figure you'll give the tipster another chance.
This time he tells you to bet on Ongoing Surplus, Balanced Budget and Sacred Lockbox. You place your bets and you lose again -- this time to three ponies named Record Deficit, Prodigal Tax Cuts and $7 Trillion And Counting. Your wallet is really hurting and it looks like you've been had.
"That tipster is a liar," you say again.
"Go easy with the L-word," your buddy says. "Just because someone repeatedly tells you things that turn out not to be true doesn't make that person a liar. Maybe he just got some bad intelligence. Or maybe he was ideologically self-deceived. Or maybe he has secret, classified reasons for not telling you the truth -- you know, for matters of national security."
"National security? " you say. "Everybody who listened to this guy is broke."
"Calm down," your friend says. "You can't prove intent. He's no liar."
Thinking maybe you should have "sucker" tattooed on your forehead, you head back to the tipster for another try.
He tells you he's got a can't-miss scoop and you put your money on Domestic Security, Four Freedoms and Twin Towers. The three horses collide out of the gate. You've never seen anything so horrible. They end up having to shoot all three horses, plus the jockeys, the track announcer and several thousand people in the grandstands.
"That was the worst thing I've ever seen," you tell your friend. "It was an unprecedented calamity. I'm never trusting this guy again."
But your friend says that just because the disaster took place on the tipster's watch doesn't mean he bears any responsibility for it.
"You said yourself it was unprecedented," he reminds you. "So how could he have foreseen that?"
You're thinking that it's a tipster's job to foresee such things, but you let it pass.
"Sure, we're all broke and thousands are dead," your friend says, "but that just means that it's time to rally behind the tipster. At times like this we all have to band together for the good of the racing community."
This odd argument somehow strikes you as hypnotically compelling. You go back to relying on the miserable failure of a tipster, still feeling like a sucker, but somehow proud to be one. Following his lead, you blow your next paycheck on a horse called Dead Or Alive. It doesn't win, place or show, and you can't even get anybody at the window to tell you where it finished. It's like it just disappeared.
This goes on for years. You keep staking your fortunes based on what the tipster says and you keep getting burned. In all this time only one of his picks even manages to show -- a skinny nag named Jobless Recovery -- but it doesn't pay very well.
Finally, you tell your friend you're about done. You're willing to give the tipster one last chance to prove he's even remotely worth listening to. One last chance and that's it.
Surprisingly, your friend agrees.
"Fair enough," he says. "See who he's picking in the Iraqi Stakes. If that doesn't work out just the way he says, you have every right to ignore him in the future."
So it all comes down to this. You take every dime you can scrape together and put it all down on the three horses the tipster assures you are a sure thing -- Terrorist Ties, Imminent Danger and Democratic Beacon.
You lose, tearing up your tickets as Nigerian Forgery, Doctored Intel and Gaza-On-The-Tigris win running away.
"That's it! " you tell your friend. "You said yourself that this race should be the deciding factor and it was. He lied again. The tipster is a liar!"
"Whoa! Calm down. Again with the L-word," your friend says. "He told you those horses would win, so you just assumed he meant today? You've just got to give it time.
"And remember you still can't prove he was lying. He may just have been mistaken. Or deluded. Or caught up in an exaggeration. He may have been given bad information himself. So you can't say he's a liar.
"Don't you see? Just because someone is consistently mistaken or deluded -- just because everything he tells you isn't true -- that doesn't mean he can't be trusted, does it? Does it? "
Sorry for the lateness of this posting. I've been working at my "real" job this weekend.
Let's see the Bush administration or Ann Coulter spin this and accuse the writers as being liberal traitors. Finish the piece by going to the website at ARMY TIMES.
Issue Date: June 30, 2003
Editorial
Nothing but lip service
In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately.
For example, the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary — including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day.
Similarly, the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones.
Then there’s military tax relief — or the lack thereof...
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=0-ARMYPAPER-1954515.php
Let's see the Bush administration or Ann Coulter spin this and accuse the writers as being liberal traitors. Finish the piece by going to the website at ARMY TIMES.
Issue Date: June 30, 2003
Editorial
Nothing but lip service
In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately.
For example, the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary — including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day.
Similarly, the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones.
Then there’s military tax relief — or the lack thereof...
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=0-ARMYPAPER-1954515.php
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