The economy and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are NOT going to get better by the election. Wait until the polls are taken then.
Poll Shows Drop in Bush Approval Rating
By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The American public has growing doubts about President Bush (news - web sites)'s efforts to improve the nation's economy and improve its health care system, a poll says, but they're not convinced that Democrats have the answers.
Bush's approval rating stood at 60 percent in the survey released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a significant drop from his 74 percent rating on April 9, the day the 40-foot statue of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) fell in Baghdad and U.S. commanders said the Iraqi ruler's reign had ended.
The daily violence in Iraq (news - web sites) since Bush announced an end to major combat is bothering the public, with the number of Americans saying the military effort in Iraq is going very well down to 23 percent from 61 percent in mid-April. Still, two-thirds of those surveyed said the United States made the right decision to use military force against Iraq, and most Republicans and Democrats support the effort to rebuild the war-torn nation.
The poll of 1,201 adults conducted June 19-July 2 found growing criticism of Bush's handling of domestic issues...
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Wednesday, July 09, 2003
Bush stonewalled and tried to keep the 9/11 investigations closed. Lacking that he is attempting to run the clock out on the investigation. 70 million dollars and an unlimited time table to investigate Clinton's past and only 12 million and a year and a half to investigate the greatest security breach and attack on our nation in history. Hiding something? You figure it out.
U.S. Officials May Hamper Attacks Probe
By LAURENCE ARNOLD, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - A lack of cooperation from the Bush administration could hamper an independent inquiry into the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the commission's leaders say...
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U.S. Officials May Hamper Attacks Probe
By LAURENCE ARNOLD, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - A lack of cooperation from the Bush administration could hamper an independent inquiry into the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the commission's leaders say...
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Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Attention American Citizens! You stand hereby directed to prove your patriotism by printing out hundreds of the wartime morale posters at this website and distributing them widely throughout your community!
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I'm still waiting for my conservative friends and their elite GOP leaders who said they impeached Clinton over a lie (for the honor of the office and the dignity of the nation) to lead the charge into investigating lies used to send our country and its fighting men into war and causing the deaths of thousands, including those of our own soldiers.
While I'm waiting I think I'll see if a monkey flies out of my butt.
Dems Urge Probe of Iraqi Uranium Claim
DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Democrats pressed for deeper investigation of pre-war U.S. intelligence efforts Tuesday after the White House admitted President Bush (news - web sites) had erred in his State of the Union speech when he said Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had tried to buy uranium in Africa.
As weeks have passed with the American search turning up no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (news - web sites), criticism has been building concerning assertions the administration made as justification for the war.
"This is a very important admission," said Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. "It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information. And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation of all of the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken."
Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also said that the development underscored a need for more investigation.
"The reported White House statements only reinforce the importance of an inquiry into why the information about the bogus uranium sales didn't reach the policy-makers during 2002 and why, as late as the president's State of the Union address in January 2003, our policy-makers were still using information which the intelligence community knew was almost certainly false," Levin said.
Michael Anton, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said in a statement, "We now know that documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger had been forged."...
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While I'm waiting I think I'll see if a monkey flies out of my butt.
Dems Urge Probe of Iraqi Uranium Claim
DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Democrats pressed for deeper investigation of pre-war U.S. intelligence efforts Tuesday after the White House admitted President Bush (news - web sites) had erred in his State of the Union speech when he said Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had tried to buy uranium in Africa.
As weeks have passed with the American search turning up no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (news - web sites), criticism has been building concerning assertions the administration made as justification for the war.
"This is a very important admission," said Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. "It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information. And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation of all of the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken."
Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also said that the development underscored a need for more investigation.
"The reported White House statements only reinforce the importance of an inquiry into why the information about the bogus uranium sales didn't reach the policy-makers during 2002 and why, as late as the president's State of the Union address in January 2003, our policy-makers were still using information which the intelligence community knew was almost certainly false," Levin said.
Michael Anton, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said in a statement, "We now know that documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger had been forged."...
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From that hysterical rag, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR:
Conservatives' core duty on WMD
By Doug Bandow
...Conservatives' lack of interest in the WMD question takes an even more ominous turn when combined with general support for presidential warmaking. Republicans - think President Eisenhower, for instance - once took seriously the requirement that Congress declare war. These days, however, Republican presidents and legislators, backed by conservative intellectuals, routinely argue that the chief executive can unilaterally take America into war.
Thus, in their view, once someone is elected president, he or she faces no legal or political constraint. The president doesn't need congressional authority; Washington doesn't need UN authority. Allied support is irrelevant. The president needn't offer the public a justification for going to war that holds up after the conflict ends. The president may not even be questioned about the legitimacy of his professed justification. Accept his word and let him do whatever he wants, irrespective of circumstances.
This is not the government created by the Founders. This is not the government that any believer in liberty should favor...
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Conservatives' core duty on WMD
By Doug Bandow
...Conservatives' lack of interest in the WMD question takes an even more ominous turn when combined with general support for presidential warmaking. Republicans - think President Eisenhower, for instance - once took seriously the requirement that Congress declare war. These days, however, Republican presidents and legislators, backed by conservative intellectuals, routinely argue that the chief executive can unilaterally take America into war.
Thus, in their view, once someone is elected president, he or she faces no legal or political constraint. The president doesn't need congressional authority; Washington doesn't need UN authority. Allied support is irrelevant. The president needn't offer the public a justification for going to war that holds up after the conflict ends. The president may not even be questioned about the legitimacy of his professed justification. Accept his word and let him do whatever he wants, irrespective of circumstances.
This is not the government created by the Founders. This is not the government that any believer in liberty should favor...
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Occupation's Ordeals Ravage Iraqi Psyche
...Unable to communicate with English speakers, most Iraqis worry about the foreigners' intentions. And even some who have long-standing friendships with Americans speak darkly about what will happen if the occupation drags on.
"Even if I joined the resistance, I don't think I could kill an American soldier," said Wamidh Nadhmi, who for years entertained U.S. reporters in his Baghdad home with quiet, cautious criticism of Hussein's regime. "I'm an old man, a political scientist. I don't think I could pull the trigger."
But the thought has crossed his mind, he said. It is an irrational response to an irrational situation.
"There are three primary causes of stress: loss, change and threat," said Buthanina Hilo, dean of the psychology department at Baghdad University. The fall of Hussein and the arrival of the Americans have brought all three, she said.
Untold numbers of Iraqis have been thrown out of work by the war and its aftermath, losing their incomes and sense of purpose. The totalitarian discipline of Hussein's regime has been replaced by widespread crime and the uncertainty of American rule. Amid the dislocations of war, American bombs and bullets have been responsible for civilian as well as military casualties, and the lethal skirmishes show little sign of abating...
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...Unable to communicate with English speakers, most Iraqis worry about the foreigners' intentions. And even some who have long-standing friendships with Americans speak darkly about what will happen if the occupation drags on.
"Even if I joined the resistance, I don't think I could kill an American soldier," said Wamidh Nadhmi, who for years entertained U.S. reporters in his Baghdad home with quiet, cautious criticism of Hussein's regime. "I'm an old man, a political scientist. I don't think I could pull the trigger."
But the thought has crossed his mind, he said. It is an irrational response to an irrational situation.
"There are three primary causes of stress: loss, change and threat," said Buthanina Hilo, dean of the psychology department at Baghdad University. The fall of Hussein and the arrival of the Americans have brought all three, she said.
Untold numbers of Iraqis have been thrown out of work by the war and its aftermath, losing their incomes and sense of purpose. The totalitarian discipline of Hussein's regime has been replaced by widespread crime and the uncertainty of American rule. Amid the dislocations of war, American bombs and bullets have been responsible for civilian as well as military casualties, and the lethal skirmishes show little sign of abating...
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Photo of Bush lying during the State of the Union address.
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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...
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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...
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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."...
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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."...
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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