Posts Tagged ‘JEB BUSH’
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 3, 2023 at 12:06 am
On October 16, 2015, then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump told a brutal truth to take down his opponent, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida.
Interviewed on Bloomberg TV, Trump said what—to Republicans—had been the unsayable about former President George W. Bush: “I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.”
“Hold on,” said correspondent Stephanie Ruhle, “you can’t blame George Bush for that.”
“He was President, okay? Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was President,” Trump said. “The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
Donald Trump
Immediately after Trump’s remarks, the Right exploded.
Representative Peter King (R-NY) said that no one saw the 9/11 attacks coming and that blaming the former president was a cheap shot.
Speaking on Right-wing Fox Radio, King added: “I think Donald Trump is totally wrong there. That sounds like a Michael Moore talking point.”
And Jeb Bush rushed to his brother’s defense on Twitter: “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
Of course, “my brother” didn’t keep safe those 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11.
Nor did Jeb mention that, during his first eight months in office before September 11, “my brother” was on vacation 42% of the time.
But holding Bush accountable for the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center is taboo for Right-wing Republicans.
Conversely, Republicans spent four years blaming President Barack Obama for the deaths of four Americans killed in an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001
Fortunately, British historian Nigel Hamilton has brutally laid bare the facts of this needless tragedy.
Hamilton is the author of several acclaimed political biographies, including JFK: Reckless Youth and Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency.
His book: American Caesars: The Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush, appeared in 2010.
It was inspired by a classic work of ancient biography: The Twelve Caesars, by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus—known as Suetonius.
Suetonius, a Roman citizen and historian, had chronicled the lives of the first 12 Caesars of Imperial Rome: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.
Hamilton wanted to examine post-World War II United States history as Suetonius had examined that of ancient Rome: Through the lives of the 12 “emperors” who had held the power of life and death over their fellow citizens—and those of other nations.
For Hamilton, the “greatest of American emperors, the Caesar Augustus of his time,” was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led his country through the Great Depression and World War II.
His “”great successors” were Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy—who, in turn, contained the Soviet Union abroad and presided over sustained economic prosperity at home.
By contrast, “arguably the worst of all the American Caesars” was “George W. Bush, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, who willfully and recklessly destroyed so much of the moral basis of American leadership in the modern world.”
Among the most lethal of Bush’s offenses: The appointing of officials who refused to take seriously the threat posed by Al-Qaeda.
These included:
- Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Secretary of Defense: “I don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.”
- National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice initially refused to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject. Then she insisted the matter be handled only by a more junior Deputy Principals meeting in April, 2001.
- Vice President Dick Cheney focused his attention on fomenting a war against Iraq.
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly ignored American Intelligence warnings that Al-Qaeda was planning a major attack on the American mainland.
The only major administration official who did take Al-Qaeda seriously was Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council. But Clarke’s position didn’t give him Cabinet-level rank.
Richard Clarke
This put him at a severe disadvantage when dealing with higher-ranking Bush officials—such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rice.
Clarke alerted Federal Intelligence agencies that “Al-Qaeda is planning a major attack on us.” He asked the FBI and CIA to report to his office all they could learn about suspicious persons or activities at home and abroad.
Finally, at a meeting with Rice on September 4, 2001, Clarke challenged her to “picture yourself at a moment when in the very near future Al-Qaeda has killed hundreds of Americans, and imagine asking yourself what you wish then that you had already done.”
Seven days later, Al-Qaeda struck, and 3,000 Americans died horrifically—and needlessly.
Neither
Bush,
Cheney,
Rice,
Rumsfeld
nor Wolfowitz
ever apologized for their criminal negligence.
Nor has any of them ever been held accountable.
After 9/11, they wrapped themselves in the flag and posed as America’s saviors.
Only Richard Clarke—who had vainly argued for stepped-up security precautions and taking the fight to Al-Qaeda—gave that apology.
On March 24, 2004, Clarke testified at the public 9/11 Commission hearings. Addressing relatives of victims in the audience, he said: “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you.”
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Military, Politics on March 14, 2023 at 12:10 am
At one time, Americans believed that the wholesale rewriting of history happened only in the Soviet Union.
“The problem with writing about history in the Soviet Union,” went a popular joke inside the Soviet Union, “is that you never know what’s going to happen yesterday.”
A classic example of this occurred in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Lavrentiy Beria had been head of the NKVD, the dreaded predecessor to the KGB, from 1938 to 1953. On June 26, 1953, three months after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Beria was arrested on orders of his fellow Communist Party leaders, who feared he intended to purge them.
Beria was executed on December 23.
Lavrentiy Beria
But the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had just gone to press with a long article singing Beria’s praises.
What to do?
The editors of the Encyclopedia wrote an equally long article about “the Bering Straits,” which was to be pasted over the article about Beria, and sent this off to its subscribers. An unknown number of them decided it was safer to paste accordingly.
Similarly, Joseph Stalin was depicted in Soviet “history” texts as the architect of Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany during World War II.
No “historian” dared mention that Stalin’s wholesale purges of the Red Army in the 1930s had made the country vulnerable to the German attack in 1941. As had Stalin’s “nonaggression” pact with Germany in 1939, where he and Adolf Hitler secretly divided Poland between them.
Joseph Stalin
But Russians no longer have a monopoly on rewriting history.
During the 2016 Presidential election, the Republican party furiously rewrote history in a desperate attempt to win the White House.
Specifically, its members tried to convince Americans that:
- President George W. Bush “kept us safe” (excluding, of course, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, which slaughtered 3,000 Americans); and/or
- President Bush wasn’t to blame for 9/11—it was his predecessor, Bill Clinton (who left office more than a year and a half before 9/11).
World Trade Center – September 11, 2001
In 2015, Jeb Bush entered the “Rewriting History for Americans” sweepstakes.
On October 16, 2015, during an interview on Bloomberg TV, Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate for President in 2016, dared speak (for Republicans) the unspeakable:
“When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time. He was President, OK? Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
Bush was quick to respond on Twitter: “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
Jeb Bush
Trump replied:
“At the debate you said your brother kept us safe–I wanted to be nice & did not mention the WTC came down during his watch, 9/11.”
And: “No @JebBush, you’re pathetic for saying nothing happened during your brother’s term when the World Trade Center was attacked and came down.”
Suddenly, on February 13, another Republican Presidential candidate rushed to rewrite 9/11: Florida United States Senator Marco Rubio.
According to Rubio: “The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.”
And on the following day, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he again made the charge: “If you’re going to ascribe blame, don’t blame George W. Bush, blame a decision that was made years earlier, not to take out bin Laden when the opportunity presented itself.”
All of which ignored such embarrassing truths as:
- During the first eight months of the Bush Presidency, Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, was not permitted to brief President Bush, despite mounting evidence of plans for a new Al-Qaeda outrage.
- From January 20 to September 11, 2001, Bush was on vacation, according to the Washington Post, 42% of the time.
- National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice initially refused to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject of terrorism. Then she insisted that the matter be handled only by a more junior Deputy Principals meeting.
- Paul Wolfowitz, the number-two man at the Department of Defense, said: “I don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.”
- Even after Clarke outlined the threat posed by Al-Qaeda, Wolfowitz—whose real target was Saddam Hussein—said: “You give bin Laden too much credit.”
- Finally, at a meeting with Rice on September 4, 2001, Clarke challenged her to “picture yourself at a moment when in the very near future Al-Qaeda has killed hundreds of Americans, and imagine asking yourself what you wish then that you had already done.”
- Seven days later, Al-Qaeda struck, and 3,000 Americans died horrifically—and needlessly.
- Neither Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld nor Wolowitz ever admitted their negligence. Nor has any of them been brought to account.
People who say the Republicans are “batshit crazy” for denying responsibility for 9/11 clearly haven’t read—or understood—George Orwell’s novel, 1984.
The unnamed Party’s slogan is: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
The same holds true for Republicans: They hope to rewrite the past, as Joseph Stalin did, to wash away their crimes and errors–and pin these on their self-declared enemies.
And thus gain—and retain—absolute power over 300 million Americans.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Humor, Politics, Social commentary on October 27, 2022 at 12:10 am
Words are weapons—or can be, if used properly.
Republicans learned this truth after World War II.
- Richard Nixon became a United States Senator in 1950 by attacking Helen Gahagen Douglas as “The Pink Lady.”
- from 1954 onward, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and other Red-baiting Republicans essentially paralyzed the Democratic party through such slanderous terms as “Comsymps,” “fellow-travelers” and “Fifth Amendment Communists.”
Pulitzer-Prize winning author David Halberstam summed up the effectiveness of such tactics in his monumental study of the origins of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest:
“But if they did not actually stick, and they did not, [Joseph McCarthy’s] charges had an equally damaging effect: They poisoned. Where there was smoke, there must be fire. He wouldn’t be saying these things [voters reasoned] unless there was something to it.”
Joseph McCarthy
As a whole, Democrats have proven indifferent to or ignorant of the power of effective language.
President Donald Trump solicited Russian Communist aid to win the Presidency in 2016. He solicited aid from Chinese Communists to retain it in 2020.
He attacked countless Americans and world leaders—including those presiding over America’s NATO alliance. But he has never even criticized Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Yet even with such clear-cut evidence, Democrats refused to directly accuse him of treason, as in:
- “TrumPutin”
- “Commissar-in-Chief”
- “Putin’s Poodle”
- “Red Donald”
- “Putin’s Puppet”
The Kremlin
Similarly, Trump has gotten a free pass on treason from the news media. None have dared suggest the obvious: That he moved boxes of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate to sell them to America’s enemies in exchange for huge sums to pay his upcoming legal bills.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump repeatedly lied about its lethality and opposed the use of masks and social distancing to combat it. As a result, 400,000 Americans had died by the time he left office.
Yet no Democrat has dared label him “Coronavirus-in-Chief.”
Nor has the news media directly held him accountable for those deaths.
Tyrants are conspicuously vulnerable to ridicule. Yet here, too, Democrats have proven unable or unwilling to make use of this powerful weapon.
In this YouTube-obsessed age, Democrats could effectively assail Trump with a series of ridiculing videos. For example, Trump’s well-established “bromance” with Putin could be turned into a parody of the famous song, “Johnny B. Good”:
Way back inside the Kremlin where the lights glow red
There ruled a man named Putin who would poison you dead.
He came up with a plan to make his Russia great
And all it took was bribes and Republican hate.
And Trumpy was a man who couldn’t read or spell
But he could sell out his land just like he’s ringing a bell.
Many of Trump’s fiercest defenders in the House and Senate have taken “campaign contributions” (i.e., bribes) from Russian oligarchs linked to Putin. They could be pointedly attacked by turning the Muppet song, “The Rainbow Connection,” into “The Russian Connection.”
Why are there so many tales about Russians
And Right-wingers taking bribes?
Russians are Commies and have lots of rubles
For traitors with something to hide.
So I’ve been told and some choose to believe it
It’s clear as the old KGB.
Someday we’ll find it
The Russian Connection—
The bribers, the traitors—you’ll see.
A continuing theme among Republican politicians is that they are paragons of religious virtue, while Democrats are champions of Satan.
Yet Democrats have done nothing to publicize such truths as:
- Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is a serial adulterer.
- Former Speaker Dennis Hastert is a convicted sodomizer of teenage boys.
- Josh Duggar, a Right-wing star of the high-rated “reality” series, 19 Kids and Counting, has been sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for possessing child pornography.
- Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, has boasted: “Marriage is a wonderful thing and I’m a firm believer in it.” Yet she engaged in open affairs with at least two members of her local gym—for which Perry Greene is now divorcing her.
Most Americans don’t follow political news closely—and know nothing of such revelations.
Moreover, Democrats need to repeatedly advertise such facts—to counter Republicans’ constant claims of being the moral arbiters of America. And this needs to be done through major advertising campaigns on TV—where most Americans get their news about politics.
Throughout 2016, liberals celebrated on Facebook and Twitter the “certain” Presidency of former First Lady Hillary Clinton. They were cheered on by First Lady Michelle Obama’s naive advice on political tactics: “When they go, we go high.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump planned to subvert the 2016 election by Russian Intelligence agents and millions of Russian trolls flooding the Internet with legitimately fake news.
History has proven which tactics proved superior.
It’s long past time for Democrats to accept that they—and the country’s democratic traditions—are engaged in a death-match with their Republican opponents.
Only certain defeat is guaranteed by adhering to Marquis of Queensbury when your enemy is using brass knuckles.
For Democrats to win elective victories and preserve America’s democratic traditions, they must find their own George Pattons to confront the Waffen-SS generals among Republican ranks.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on October 26, 2022 at 12:10 am
In 1996, Newt Gingrich, then Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, wrote a memo that encouraged Republicans to “speak like Newt.”
Entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” it urged Republicans to attack Democrats with such words as “corrupt,” “selfish,” “destructive,” “hypocrisy,” “liberal,” “sick,” and “traitors.”
Even worse, Gingrich encouraged the news media to disseminate such accusations. Among his suggestions:
- “Fights make news.”
- Create a “shield issue” to deflect criticism: “A shield issue is, just, you know, your opponent is going to attack you as lacking compassion. You better…show up in the local paper holding a baby in the neonatal center.”
Newt Gingrich
In the memo, Gingrich advised:
“….In the video “We are a Majority,” Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning.
“As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: ‘I wish I could speak like Newt.’
“That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases….
“This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media.
“The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used.”
Here is the list of words Gingrich urged his followers to use in describing “the opponent, their record, proposals and their party”:
- abuse of power
- anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
- betray
- bizarre
- bosses
- bureaucracy
- cheat
- coercion
- “compassion” is not enough
- collapse(ing)
- consequences
- corrupt
- corruption
- criminal rights
- crisis
- cynicism
- decay
- deeper
- destroy
- destructive
- devour
- disgrace
- endanger
- excuses
- failure (fail)
- greed
- hypocrisy
- ideological
- impose
- incompetent
- insecure
- insensitive
|
- intolerant
- liberal
- lie
- limit(s)
- machine
- mandate(s)
- obsolete
- pathetic
- patronage
- permissive attitude
- pessimistic
- punish (poor …)
- radical
- red tape
- self-serving
- selfish
- sensationalists
- shallow
- shame
- sick
- spend(ing)
- stagnation
- status quo
- steal
- taxes
- they/them
- threaten
- traitors
- unionized
- urgent (cy)
- waste
- welfare
|
Yes, speaking like Newt—or Adolf Hitler or Joseph R. McCarthy—“takes years of practice.”
And to the dismay of both Republicans and Democrats, Donald Trump has learned his lessons well.
On May 27, 2016, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks analyzed the use of insults by Republican Presidential front-runner Donald Trump. He did so with his counterpart, liberal syndicated columnist, Mark Shields, on The PBS Newshour.
DAVID BROOKS: “Trump, for all his moral flaws, is a marketing genius. And you look at what he does. He just picks a word and he attaches it to a person. Little Marco [Rubio], Lyin’ Ted [Cruz], Crooked Hillary [Clinton].
“And that’s a word. And that’s how marketing works. It’s a simple, blunt message, but it gets under.
“It sticks, and it diminishes. And so it has been super effective for him, because he knows how to do that. And she [Hillary Clinton] just comes with, ‘Oh, he’s divisive.’
“These are words that are not exciting people. And her campaign style has gotten, if anything…a little more stagnant and more flat.”
Donald Trump
MARK SHIELDS: “Donald Trump gratuitously slandered Ted Cruz’s wife. He libeled Ted Cruz’s father for being potentially part of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of the president of the United States, suggesting that he was somehow a fellow traveler in that.
“This is a libel. You don’t get over it….”
Hillary Clinton wasn’t the only Presidential candidate who proved unable to cope with Trump’s gift for insult. His targets—and insults—included:
- Former Texas Governor Rick Perry: “Wears glasses to seem smart.”
- Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush: “Low Energy Jeb.”
- Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders: “Crazy Bernie.”
- Ohio Governor John Kasich: “Mathematically dead and totally desperate.”
Trump has reserved his most insulting words for women. For example:
- Carly Fiorina, his Republican primary competitor: “Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”
- Megyn Kelly, Fox News reporter: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”
- California Rep. Maxine Waters: “An extremely low IQ person.”
- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “MS-13 Lover Nancy Pelosi.”
Only one candidate has shown the ability to rattle Trump: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
As Mark Shields noted on The PBS Newshour.
“Elizabeth Warren gets under Donald Trunp’s skin. And I think she’s been the most effective adversary. I think she’s done more to unite the Democratic party than either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
“I mean, she obviously—he can’t stay away from her. He is tweeting about her.”
And David Brooks offered: “And so the tactics…is either you do what Elizabeth Warren has done, like full-bore negativity, that kind of [get] under the skin, or try to ridicule him and use humor.”
A May 12, 2016 story on CNN—“Elizabeth Warren Gives Trump a Dose of His Own Medicine on Twitter”—noted: “Whenever Trump criticizes her, Warren fires right back at him, sometimes twice as hard.”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on April 14, 2022 at 12:12 am
Republicans and their Rightist allies have repeatedly compared President Barack Obama and other Democrats to Adolf Hitler. But their propaganda campaign draws heavily on the Nazi leader’s own advice.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler laid out his formula for successful propaganda: “All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials.
“Those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotypical formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”
Adolf Hitler
Among the slanders Right-wingers hurl at Democrats:
“Liberals,” “radicals, “bankrupting,” “treason,” subversion,” “slander,” “terrorism,” “betrayal,” “catastrophe,” “shattering the American dream,” “leftists,” “Communists,” “government takeover,” “socialism,” “power grab,” “secularism,” “environmentalism.”
In recent years, the GOP has targeted gays and lesbians as America’s subversive enemies.
These attacks have come as thinly disguised as efforts to “restore religious freedom.”.
On March 26, 2015, Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
This allows any individual or corporation to cite its religious beliefs as a defense when sued by a private party.
Thus, a bakery that doesn’t want to make a cake to be used at a gay wedding or a restaurant that doesn’t want to serve lesbian patrons can legally refuse to do so.
The bill seems modeled on a proposed law that the Republican House and Senate in Arizona sent to Governor Jan Brewer in 2014.
Under threat of a nationwide boycott of Arizona if the bill became law, Brewer vetoed it.
Republicans have introduced similar “right-to-discriminate” legislation in other states as well:
- In Kansas, lawmakers voted to exempt individuals from providing any service that was “contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
- That bill passed the state’s House chamber on February 11, 2014, triggering national backlash. It stalled in the Senate and didn’t advance beyond that body.
- In January, 2014, South Dakota Republicans introduced a bill to let businesses refuse to serve same-sex couples on the grounds that “businesses are private and that their views on sexual orientation are protected to the same extent as the views of private citizens.”
- The South Dakota bill—which was killed in February, 2014—would have made it illegal for a gay person to file a lawsuit charging discrimination.
Republicans claim they want to “get the government off the backs of the people.” But their fixation on regulating the sexual lives of Americans ensures government intrusions of the most intimate kind.
Since 9/11, Republicans have warned that Muslims are trying to impose Sharia (Islamic law) on America.
Ironically, Right-wing legislators, in elevating religion above the secular law, may have laid the legal foundations for making that possible.
What will happen when some Muslims claim their right–guaranteed in Islamic religious law–to have as many as four wives?
And when they claim that the “religious freedom” laws protect that right?
Republicans have defended such legislation by equating gays with child predators.
In fact, the Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute states that 90% of child molesters target children in their network of family and friends, and the majority are men married to women.
Yet Republicans and their Rightist allies have refused to condemn such heterosexual—and Right-wing—child molesters as Dennis Hastert and Josh Duggar.
Josh Duggar, the “all-American” child molester
On May 21, 2015, responding to press leaks, Duggar resigned as director of the Family Research Council, a Right-wing organization dedicated to fighting sexually-oriented issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and pornography.
In 2002-3, as a 14-15 year-old, Duggar had fondled the breasts and vaginas of five underage girls—four of whom were his own sisters.
Before Duggar was forced to admit his scandalous depravities, he had hobnobbed with many influential Right-wingers, including:
- Senator Rafael “Ted” Cruz;
- Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush;
- Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee;
- Texas Governor Rick Perry.
On December 8, 2021, a federal jury found Duggar guilty of receipt of child pornography and possession of child pornography. He faces up to 20 years of imprisonment and fines up to $250,000 on each count.
And on October 28, 2015, Hastert—Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2007—pleaded guilty to structuring money transactions in a way to avoid requirements to report where the money was going.
Dennis Hastert
The reason: To conceal the truth about his past as a child molester. Hastert had abused four young boys when he was their high school wrestling coach. One was only 14 years old.
Despite such setbacks, the politics of “smear and fear” have been good to Republicans—and their Right-wing allies.
The Republican “base” refuses to learn that those who portray themselves as morally superior are:
- Hypocrites, who are in effect saying: “Do as I say, not as I do,” or
- Fanatics, who intend to force their version of morality on others.
So long as millions of hate-filled Right-wingers support the endless succession of “two minute hates,” Republicans will continue to target an endless series of victims.
The good news: As blacks, Hispanics, women, gays and others become a significant political force, Republicans will stop attacking them and court them for votes.
The bad news: Republicans will move on to find other still-helpless scapegoats for America’s troubles.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary, Uncategorized on April 13, 2022 at 12:10 am
In 1953, Red-baiting Wisconsin United States Senator Joseph R. McCarthy finally overstepped himself.
He attacked the leadership of the United States Army as “a hotbed of traitors” and convened an inquiry through the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
But the hearings backfired, exposing McCarthy as the bullying demagogue he was. A Senate committee voted to condemn his behavior, charging that he had “acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”
Although McCarthy remained in the Senate another two and a half years, his political influence had ended.
Yet even without McCarthy, Republicans rode the issue of anti-Communism to victory from 1948 to 1992.
After holding the White House for eight years under Dwight D. Eisenhower, they lost it in 1960 to John F. Kennedy and again in 1964 to Lyndon B. Johnson.
By 1968, with the nation mired in Vietnam and convulsed by antiwar demonstrations and race riots, Americans turned once more to those who preyed upon their fears and hates.
They elected Richard Nixon, who promised to end the Vietnam war and crack down on “uppity” blacks and antiwar demonstrators.
The same strategy re-elected him in 1972.
After Jimmy Carter won the Presidency in 1976 and lost it in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, Republicans held the White House until 1992.
During the 1970s and 1980s, they continued to accuse their opponents of being devious agents—or at least unwitting pawns—of “the Communist conspiracy.”
Even as late as 1992, President George H.W. Bush and the Republican establishment charged that Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton might be a KGB plant.
George H.W. Bush
Their evidence: During his tenure at Oxford University in 1969-70, Clinton had briefly visited Moscow.
Thus, the Republican charged that he might have been “programmed” as a real-life “Manchurian candidate” to become, first, Governor of Arkansas—one of America’s poorest states—and then President.
What made this charge all the more absurd: The Soviet Union had officially dissolved in December, 1991.
Republicans continued to accuse their opponents of being “Communists” and “traitors.” But these charges no longer carried the weight they had while the Soviet Union existed.
Right-wingers had to settle for attacking their opponents as “liberals” and “soft on crime.”
When riots flared in 1992 after the acquittal of LAPD officers who had savagely beaten Rodney King, President George H.W. Bush blamed the carnage on the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s.
Then, on September 11, 2001, Republicans—and their right-wing supporters—at last found a suitable replacement for the Red Menace.
Two highjacked jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center in New York and one struck the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
World Trade Center on September 11, 2001
Exit The Red Bogeyman. Enter The Maniacal Muslim.
Consider:
- Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minn.): On July 13, 2012, she sent letters to the Inspectors General of the Departments of Defense; State; Justice; and Homeland Security, demanding a “a multi-department investigation into potential Muslim Brotherhood infiltration into the United States Government.”
- Rick Santorum: On supporting the racial profiling of Muslims: “Obviously, Muslims would be someone you look at, absolutely.”
- Mitt Romney: “Based on the numbers of American Muslims in our population, I cannot see that a Cabinet position [for a Muslim] would be justified.”
The 2008 election of Barack Obama pushed the Republican “treason chorus” to new heights of infamy.
Barack Obama
Almost immediately after Obama took office, he came under attack by an industry of right-wing book authors such as Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.
The following titles vividly reveal the hates, fears and ambitions of their authors–and audience:
- Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda by Sean Hannity
- How Barack Obama is Bankrupting the U.S. Economy by Stephen Moore
- The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists by Aaron Klein
- The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency by Ken Blackwell
- Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies by Michelle Malkin
- Why Obama’s Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster by David Gratzer
- Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policicies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America by Christopher C. Horner
- America’s March to Socialism: Why We’re One Step Closer to Giant Missile Parades by Glenn Beck
- The War On Success: How the Obama Agenda Is Shattering the American Dream by Tommy Newberry
- Liberalism is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions by Michael Savage
- Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism by Ann Coulter
Yet despite Right-wingers’ slanderous and fear-mongering claims, the United States actually prospered during the Obama years.
- Thanks to government loans from President Obama, American capitalism was saved from its own excesses during the George W. Bush administration.
- Employment went up. CEOs did extremely well.
- In contrast to the corruption that had plagued the administration of Ronald Reagan—whom Republicans idolize—no such scandals haunted the Obama Presidency.
- There had been no major-scale terrorist attacks on American soil–as had occurred on 9/11 under President George W. Bush.
- Millions of Americans who had been unable to obtain healthcare did so under Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
- Obama actually stood up to Russian President Vladimir Putin—as opposed to his successor, Donald Trump, who constantly praised him.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on April 12, 2022 at 12:12 am
The Right’s fixation on transgender “dangers” is only the latest in a long string of “enemies” painted by the Republican party.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the “enemy” was blacks. The key to winning votes of racist whites without appearing racist lay in what Republicans called “the Southern Strategy.”
It was this that won Richard Nixon the Presidency in 1968 and 1972 and the White House for George H.W. Bush in 1988.
In a now-infamous 1981 interview, Right-wing political consultant Lee Atwater explained how this worked:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires.
“So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.
“Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites….
“‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’
“So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”
Lee Atwater
At the end of his life, Atwater recognized the monster he had helped unleash.
Like Reinhard Heydrich—the designer of the “Final Solution” who, on his deathbed, begged forgiveness for his crimes—Atwater, in a 1991 article for Life, apologized to former Democratic Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the 1988 campaign.
But blacks have by no means been the only targets—and victims—of Republican hate campaigns. A partial list of these would include:
- Liberals
- Women
- Socialists
- Secularists
- Disabled
- Environmentalists
- Hispanics
- Gays
- Lesbians
And now transgenders.
George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel, 1984, serves as a better guide to Republican electioneering than any official statement of the GOP.
1984 is set in a futuristic dictatorship called Oceania, whose constantly alternating mortal enemies are Eurasia and Eastasia.
A daily fixture of life in Oceania is the “Two Minutes Hate.” During this, Party members must watch a film depicting the Party’s enemies and express their hatred for them in exactly two minutes.
Chief among these is Emmanuel Goldstein, who is obviously based on Leon Trotsky, the longtime antagonist of Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union for almost 30 years.
The “Two Minutes Hate” serves as a form of brainwashing, whose purpose is to whip ordinary citizens into a frenzy of hatred and loathing for whoever the Party designates as it—and their—-mortal enemies.
Since the end of World War II, Republicans have regularly hurled the charge of “treason” against anyone who dared to run against them for office or think other than Republican-approved thoughts.
Republicans had been locked out of the White House from 1933 to 1952, during the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
Determined to regain the Presidency by any means, they found that attacking the integrity of their fellow Americans a highly effective tactic.
During the 1950s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy rode a wave of paranoia to national prominence–by attacking the patriotism of anyone who disagreed with him.
Joseph McCarthy
Elected to the Senate in 1946, he rose to national prominence on February 9, 1950, after giving a fiery speech in Wheeling, West Virginia:
“The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
Americans were already growing increasingly fearful of Communism:
- Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had not withdrawn the Red Army from the countries it had occupied in Eastern Europe during World War II.
- In 1948, the Soviet Union developed—and demonstrated—its own atomic bomb, an achievement U.S. scientists had claimed would not happen for at least a decade.
- In 1949, China fell to the triumphant armies of Mao Tse Tung.
But anti-communism as a lever to political advancement sharply accelerated following McCarthy’s speech. Republicans—resentful at being denied the White House since 1932—seized upon anti-communism as their passport to power.
No American—no matter how prominent—was safe from the accusation of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer—”a Comsymp” or “fellow traveler” in the style of the era.
Among those accused:
- Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had overseen America’s strategy for defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan
- President Harry S. Truman
- Playwrights Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller
- Actors Charlie Chaplin, Zero Mostel, Lloyd Bridges, Howard Da Silva, Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield
- Composers Arron Copland and Elmer Bernstein
- Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who presided over the creation of America’s atomic bomb
- Actresses Lee Grant, Delores del Rio, Ruth Gordon and Lucille Ball
- Journalists Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer, who had chronicled the rise of Nazi Germany
- Folksinger Pete Seeger
- Writers Irwin Shaw, Howard Fast, John Steinbeck and Dashiell Hammett
Even “untouchable” Republicans became targets for such slander.
The most prominent of these was President Dwight D. Eisenhower–labeled ”a conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy” by Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society in 1958.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics on January 21, 2022 at 12:10 am
At one time, Americans believed that the wholesale rewriting of history happened only in the Soviet Union.
“The problem with writing about history in the Soviet Union,” went the joke, “is that you never know what’s going to happen yesterday.”
A classic example of this occurred in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Lavrenti Beria had been head of the NKVD, the dreaded secret police, from 1938 to 1953. In 1953, following the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Beria was arrested and executed on orders of his fellow Communist Party leaders, who feared they were targets of a coming purge.
Lavrenti Beria
But the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had just gone to press with a long article singing Beria’s praises.
What to do?
The editors of the Encyclopedia wrote an equally long article about “the Bering Straits,” which was to be pasted over the article about Beria, and sent this off to its subscribers. An unknown number of them decided it was safer to paste accordingly.
During the 2016 Presidential election, the Republican party furiously rewrote history in a desperate attempt to win the White House.
Specifically, its members tried to convince Americans that:
- President George W. Bush “kept us safe” (excluding, of course, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, which snuffed out the lives of 3,000 Americans); and/or
- President Bush isn’t to blame for 9/11—it’s his predecessor, Bill Clinton (who left office more than a year and a half before 9/11).
Joseph Stalin was depicted in Soviet “history” texts as the architect of Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany during World War II.
No “historian” dared mention that Stalin’s wholesale purges of the Red Army in the 1930s had made the country vulnerable to the German attack in 1941. As had Stalin’s “nonaggression” pact with Germany in 1939, where he and Hitler aggressively divided Poland between them.
Joseph Stalin
But Russians no longer have a monopoly on rewriting history.
In 2015, Jeb Bush entered the “Rewriting History for Americans” sweepstakes.
On October 16, 2015, during an interview on Bloomberg TV, Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate for President in 2016, dared speak (for Republicans) the unspeakable:
“When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time. He was President, OK? Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
Bush was quick to respond on Twitter: “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
Jeb Bush
Trump replied:
“At the debate you said your brother kept us safe–I wanted to be nice & did not mention the WTC came down during his watch, 9/11.”
And: “No @JebBush, you’re pathetic for saying nothing happened during your brother’s term when the World Trade Center was attacked and came down.”
Suddenly, on February 13, another Republican Presidential candidate rushed to rewrite 9/11: Florida United States Senator Marco Rubio.
According to Rubio: “The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.”
And on the following day, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he again made the charge: “If you’re going to ascribe blame, don’t blame George W. Bush, blame a decision that was made years earlier, not to take out bin Laden when the opportunity presented itself.”
All of which ignores such embarrassing truths as:
- During the first eight months of the Bush Presidency, Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, was not permitted to brief President Bush, despite mounting evidence of plans for a new Al-Qaeda outrage.
- From January 20 to September 11, 2001, Bush was on vacation, according to the Washington Post, 42% of the time.
- National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice initially refused to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject of terrorism. Then she insisted that the matter be handled only by a more junior Deputy Principals meeting.
- Paul Wolfowitz, the number-two man at the Department of Defense, said: “I don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.”
- Even after Clarke outlined the threat posed by Al-Qaeda, Wolfowitz—whose real target was Saddam Hussein—said: “You give bin Laden too much credit.”
- Finally, at a meeting with Rice on September 4, 2001, Clarke challenged her to “picture yourself at a moment when in the very near future Al-Qaeda has killed hundreds of Americans, and imagine asking yourself what you wish then that you had already done.”
- Seven days later, Al-Qaeda struck, and 3,000 Americans died horrifically—and needlessly.
- Neither Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld nor Wolowitz ever admitted their negligence. Nor has any of them been brought to account.
People who say the Republicans are “batshit crazy” for denying responsibility for 9/11 clearly haven’t read—or understood—George Orwell’s novel, 1984.
The unnamed Party’s slogan is: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
The same holds true for Republicans: They hope to rewrite the past, as Joseph Stalin did, to wash away their crimes and errors–and pin these on their self-declared enemies.
And thus gain—and retain—absolute power over 300 million Americans.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on December 15, 2021 at 12:16 am
Florida Representative Matt Gaetz is only the latest “family values” Republican to be revealed as a Fascistic hypocrite.
On January 29, he released the following statement: “America is unique in the world because we acknowledge that our rights come from God, not government….And I will always stand up for family values, which includes giving a voice to the unborn.”
Now the Justice Department is investigating Gaetz for an alleged sexual sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl in 2019.
Other “family values” hypocrites have included:
- Josh Duggar. On December 9, a federal jury found him guilty of receipt and possession of child pornography. He faces up to 20 years of imprisonment and fines up to $250,000 on each count.
In 2015, he had resigned as director of the Family Research Council, a Right-wing organization that fights sexually-oriented issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and pornography.
The reason: The oldest son of the “all-American” Duggar family, as a 14-15 year-old, had fondled the breasts and vaginas of five underage girls—four of whom were his own sisters. And the news of this had just broken.
- Dennis Hastert. On May 28, 2015, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives (1999-2007) was indicted for violating federal banking laws and lying to the FBI.
He had tried to conceal $3.5 million in hush-money payments over several years to a man who was blackmailing him.
The source of the blackmail: A homosexual—and possibly coerced–relationship that had occurred before Hastert entered Congress in 1981.
It had begun with an underage student while Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach at Yorkville High School in Yorkville, Ill.
“I felt a special bond with our wrestlers,” Hastert wrote in his 2004 memoirs, Speaker: Lessons From Forty Years of Coaching and Politics. “And I think they felt one with me.”
Hastert wasn’t indicted for having had a sexual relationship with an underage student. The statute of limitations had long ago run out on that offense.
He was indicted for trying to evade federal banking laws and lying to the FBI.
Dennis Hastert
The indictment did not provide specifics about Hastert’s relationship with the former student. But it clearly indicated that Hastert’s early career at Yorkville High School was material to the charges.
Jeffrey Cramer, a former federal prosecutor now head of the Chicago division of the private security company, Kroll, told the Chicago Tribune: “Three-and-a-half million is a lot of money to keep a secret hidden.”
According to the indictment, the FBI began investigating the cash withdrawals in 2013.The Bureau wanted to know if Hastert was using the cash for criminal purposes or if he was the victim of a criminal extortion.
When questioned by the FBI, Hastert said he was storing cash because he didn’t feel safe with the banking system: “Yeah … I kept the cash. That’s what I’m doing.”
One part of Hastert’s life was not secret: His opposition to homosexual rights.
From 1997 to 2007, Hastert voted for the Marriage Protection Act, which “forbids requiring any state or any other political subdivision of the United States to credit as a marriage a same-sex relationship treated as marriage in another state or equivalent government.”
Hastert also voted in favor of a Constitutional amendment to “establish that marriage shall consist of one man and one woman.”
He also voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which banned companies from discriminating against employees “on the basis of sexual orientation.”
Owing to Hastert’s “deeply conservative” voting record, in 1998, he received perfect scores of 100 from
- The National Rifle Association;
- The Christian Coalition;
- The National Right to Life Committee; and
- The Chamber of Commerce
Hastert makes the third Republican “family values” Speaker of the House to become ensnared in an ethics scandal.
Newt Gingrich was the first Speaker (1985-1999) in the history of the House to be reprimanded and punished for ethics violations. His offense: Claiming tax-exempt status for a college course run for political purposes.
He successor, Bob Livingston, was forced to resign when publisher Larry Flynt revealed his sexual infidelities.
And then Dennis Hastert, whose depraved conduct involved a male high school student.
Of course, Democrats have had their sex scandals as well—as President Bill Clinton can thoroughly attest. But Democrats usually don’t suffer as badly from them.
The reason: Republicans portray themselves not as vote-hustling politicians but as moral examples for the nation. So for them, being caught literally with their pants down proves a double-whammy.
They are condemned, first, for their specific illegal/immoral acts—and then for the sheer hypocrisy of their false claims of sainthood.
Ironically, Right-wingers would fare better when caught in sexual affairs if they simply admitted their sexual tastes and registered as Democrats.
But in heavily Right-wing states like Texas and Oklahoma, they wouldn’t stand a chance of being elected as a Democrat.
And Red-state voters, feeling themselves moral arbiters of the nation, wouldn’t elect anyone they thought was “unnatural.”
So Right-wingers will continue pretending to be moral paragons—and will continue paying the price when they’re exposed as hypocritical mortals.
Meanwhile, their voters never learn—and will continue to vote their hatred to elect “holier-than-thou” pretenders to morality.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 13, 2021 at 12:07 am
On October 16, 2015, then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump told a brutal truth to take down his opponent, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida.
Interviewed on Bloomberg TV, Trump said what—to Republicans—had been the unsayable about former President George W. Bush: “I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.”
“Hold on,” said correspondent Stephanie Ruhle, “you can’t blame George Bush for that.”
“He was President, okay? Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was President,” Trump said. “The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
Donald Trump
Immediately after Trump’s remarks, Jeb Bush rushed to his brother’s defense on Twitter: “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
Of course, “my brother” didn’t keep safe those 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11.
Nor did Jeb mention that, during his first eight months in office before September 11, “my brother” was on vacation 42% of the time.
But holding Bush accountable for the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center is taboo for Right-wing Republicans.
Conversely, Republicans spent four years blaming President Barack Obama for the deaths of four Americans killed in an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001
Fortunately, British historian Nigel Hamilton has brutally laid bare the facts of this needless tragedy.
Hamilton is the author of several acclaimed political biographies, including JFK: Reckless Youth and Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency.
His book: American Caesars: The Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush, appeared in 2010.
It was inspired by a classic work of ancient biography: The Twelve Caesars, by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus—known as Suetonius.
Suetonius, a Roman citizen and historian, had chronicled the lives of the first 12 Caesars of Imperial Rome: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.
Hamilton wanted to examine post-World War II United States history as Suetonius had examined that of ancient Rome: Through the lives of the 12 “emperors” who had held the power of life and death over their fellow citizens—and those of other nations.
For Hamilton, the “greatest of American emperors, the Caesar Augustus of his time,” was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led his country through the Great Depression and World War II.
His “”great successors” were Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy—who, in turn, contained the Soviet Union abroad and presided over sustained economic prosperity at home.
By contrast, “arguably the worst of all the American Caesars” was “George W. Bush, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, who willfully and recklessly destroyed so much of the moral basis of American leadership in the modern world.”
Among the most lethal of Bush’s offenses: The appointing of officials who refused to take seriously the threat posed by Al-Qaeda.
These included:
- Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Secretary of Defense: “I don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.”
- National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice: Initially refused to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject. Then she insisted the matter be handled only by a more junior Deputy Principals meeting in April, 2001.
- Vice President Dick Cheney: Focused his attention on fomenting a war against Iraq.
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: Repeatedly ignored American Intelligence warnings that Al-Qaeda was planning a major attack on the American mainland.
The only major administration official who did take Al-Qaeda seriously was Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council. But Clarke’s position didn’t give him Cabinet-level rank.
Richard Clarke
This put him at a severe disadvantage when dealing with higher-ranking Bush officials—such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rice.
Clarke alerted Federal Intelligence agencies that “Al-Qaeda is planning a major attack on us.” He asked the FBI and CIA to report to his office all they could learn about suspicious persons or activities at home and abroad.
Finally, at a meeting with Condoleeza Rice on September 4, 2001, Clarke challenged her to “picture yourself at a moment when in the very near future Al-Qaeda has killed hundreds of Americans, and imagine asking yourself what you wish then that you had already done.”
Apparently, that moment never came for Rice—or any other Bush officials.
Seven days later, Al-Qaeda struck, and 3,000 Americans died horrifically—and needlessly.
Neither Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz ever apologized for their negligence. Nor has any of them ever been held accountable.
After 9/11, they wrapped themselves in the flag and posed as America’s saviors.
- Bush retired from office with a lavish pension and full Secret Service protection.
- He wrote his memoirs and was paid $7 million for the first 1.5 million copies.
- Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice retired to private business, wrote their own memoirs, and lived in comfort as respected elder statesmen.
Only Richard Clarke—who had vainly argued for stepped-up security precautions and taking the fight to Al-Qaeda—gave that apology.
On March 24, 2004, Clarke testified at the public 9/11 Commission hearings. Addressing relatives of victims in the audience, he said: “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you.”
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3,000 AMERICANS DIED, WHILE THE GUILTY WENT FREE
In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 3, 2023 at 12:06 amOn October 16, 2015, then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump told a brutal truth to take down his opponent, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida.
Interviewed on Bloomberg TV, Trump said what—to Republicans—had been the unsayable about former President George W. Bush: “I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.”
“Hold on,” said correspondent Stephanie Ruhle, “you can’t blame George Bush for that.”
“He was President, okay? Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was President,” Trump said. “The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
Donald Trump
Immediately after Trump’s remarks, the Right exploded.
Representative Peter King (R-NY) said that no one saw the 9/11 attacks coming and that blaming the former president was a cheap shot.
Speaking on Right-wing Fox Radio, King added: “I think Donald Trump is totally wrong there. That sounds like a Michael Moore talking point.”
And Jeb Bush rushed to his brother’s defense on Twitter: “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
Of course, “my brother” didn’t keep safe those 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11.
Nor did Jeb mention that, during his first eight months in office before September 11, “my brother” was on vacation 42% of the time.
But holding Bush accountable for the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center is taboo for Right-wing Republicans.
Conversely, Republicans spent four years blaming President Barack Obama for the deaths of four Americans killed in an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001
Fortunately, British historian Nigel Hamilton has brutally laid bare the facts of this needless tragedy.
Hamilton is the author of several acclaimed political biographies, including JFK: Reckless Youth and Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency.
His book: American Caesars: The Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush, appeared in 2010.
It was inspired by a classic work of ancient biography: The Twelve Caesars, by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus—known as Suetonius.
Suetonius, a Roman citizen and historian, had chronicled the lives of the first 12 Caesars of Imperial Rome: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.
Hamilton wanted to examine post-World War II United States history as Suetonius had examined that of ancient Rome: Through the lives of the 12 “emperors” who had held the power of life and death over their fellow citizens—and those of other nations.
For Hamilton, the “greatest of American emperors, the Caesar Augustus of his time,” was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led his country through the Great Depression and World War II.
His “”great successors” were Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy—who, in turn, contained the Soviet Union abroad and presided over sustained economic prosperity at home.
By contrast, “arguably the worst of all the American Caesars” was “George W. Bush, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, who willfully and recklessly destroyed so much of the moral basis of American leadership in the modern world.”
Among the most lethal of Bush’s offenses: The appointing of officials who refused to take seriously the threat posed by Al-Qaeda.
These included:
The only major administration official who did take Al-Qaeda seriously was Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council. But Clarke’s position didn’t give him Cabinet-level rank.
Richard Clarke
This put him at a severe disadvantage when dealing with higher-ranking Bush officials—such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rice.
Clarke alerted Federal Intelligence agencies that “Al-Qaeda is planning a major attack on us.” He asked the FBI and CIA to report to his office all they could learn about suspicious persons or activities at home and abroad.
Finally, at a meeting with Rice on September 4, 2001, Clarke challenged her to “picture yourself at a moment when in the very near future Al-Qaeda has killed hundreds of Americans, and imagine asking yourself what you wish then that you had already done.”
Seven days later, Al-Qaeda struck, and 3,000 Americans died horrifically—and needlessly.
Neither
Bush,
Cheney,
Rice,
Rumsfeld
nor Wolfowitz
ever apologized for their criminal negligence.
Nor has any of them ever been held accountable.
After 9/11, they wrapped themselves in the flag and posed as America’s saviors.
Only Richard Clarke—who had vainly argued for stepped-up security precautions and taking the fight to Al-Qaeda—gave that apology.
On March 24, 2004, Clarke testified at the public 9/11 Commission hearings. Addressing relatives of victims in the audience, he said: “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you.”
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