The Political Chase

The Jihadist in the White House

The White House billed George Bush’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) national convention as a major foreign policy speech. For once, I believe they’re telling the truth and we damn well better heed the warning.

George Bush did not present a foreign policy indicative of our history nor of our values. Instead he presented a foreign policy of American imperialism and tyranny, using revisionist history tailored specifically to promote his and Dick Cheney’s insatiable desire to achieve global domination. Today, George W. Bush turned President Kennedy’s pledge that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” literally on its head.

Bush seized one of this country’s greatest failures, Vietnam, and presented it as the guiding light for the future in Iraq. But that, I believe, was not the kingpin of Bush’s lunacy. Bush made it abundantly clear, a Vietnam-war fortified Iraq is but one milestone in a global battle against civilization itself.

I stand before you as a wartime President. I wish I didn’t have to say that, but an enemy that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001, declared war on the United States of America. And war is what we’re engaged in. The struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it’s a struggle for civilization. We fight for a free way of life against a new barbarism — an ideology whose followers have killed thousands on American soil, and seek to kill again on even a greater scale.

There is no mistaking the parallel between Bush Democracy and Dick Cheney’s 1992 manifesto — a Dr. Strangelove plan for global domination.

I want to open today’s speech with a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack — and our nation was propelled into a conflict that would take us to every corner of the globe.

The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight.

If this story sounds familiar, it is — except for one thing. The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I’ve described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia.

Ultimately, the United States prevailed in World War II, and we have fought two more land wars in Asia…The lesson from Asia’s development is that the heart’s desire for liberty will not be denied. Once people even get a small taste of liberty, they’re not going to rest until they’re free….Today, the names and places have changed, but the fundamental character of the struggle has not changed. Like our enemies in the past, the terrorists who wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places seek to spread a political vision of their own — a harsh plan for life that crushes freedom, tolerance, and dissent.

In 2003 we abandoned a justified war in Afghanistan, and began a war against ideology and civilization disguised as a war against weapons of mass destruction that presented a clear and present danger. George Bush and Dick Cheney have not been held accountable for that deviation and in the absence of consequences, their ideological war continues unabated using various forms of deception and distraction to advance each step of the way. And there is no end in sight.

We’re still in the early hours of the current ideological struggle, but we do know how the others ended — and that knowledge helps guide our efforts today. The ideals and interests that led America to help the Japanese turn defeat into democracy are the same that lead us to remain engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq.

George Bush is on a divine mission, but his mission is not from God. Instead it is the divine guidance from the god George Bush created within himself - a Manichean god that was dismissed as heresy by St. Augustine in the 4th century A.D.

Bush repeatedly referenced and overly simplified the good-versus-evil basis for fighting World War II. Few can argue that World War II in its simplest form was a war based on good versus evil, but only the most misinformed, deluded person would establish a posit that was the entirety of how and why World War II began or evolved, and that is exactly what George Bush is doing. Everything is pure Manichean. Good versus evil. Black and white. There is no gray, therefore the only argument is a simple-minded argument that is undebatable. There is no argument against fighting “evil” when Manichean theology is applied to everything.

Furthermore, when George Bush sees himself as representing Manichean good, anyone that merely disagrees with him by default is evil. Consequently, the more people disagree with him, not sharing his values of good, the more he is emboldened to wage his war against evil. The Manichean dogma dictates evil must be eliminated. To put it simply and bluntly, George Bush, the President of the United States, has declared his own radical, fundamentalist jihad - the very thing he is seeking to destroy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

You know, the experts sometimes get it wrong [about World War II -- the Japanese and the Germans]. An interesting observation, one historian put it — he said, “Had these erstwhile experts” – he was talking about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society — he said, “Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage.”

I do not intend to minimize the danger of George Bush embracing a Vietnam principle in Iraq, but I believe it is extremely important to recognize what looms above and beyond Iraq. Bush’s infusion of a Vietnam principle is reckless endangerment and well articulated in the LA Times.

Historian Robert Dallek, who has written about the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, accused Bush of twisting history. “It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,” he said in a telephone interview.

“We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn’t work our will,” he said.

“What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,” he continued. “We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.”

George Bush has lost all sense of reality, especially with the added twist of Vietnam. He’s convinced he knows precisely what is in the hearts and minds of the people in the Middle East.

Across the Middle East, millions of ordinary citizens are tired of war, they’re tired of dictatorship and corruption, they’re tired of despair. They want societies where they’re treated with dignity and respect, where their children have the hope for a better life. They want nations where their faiths are honored and they can worship in freedom.

Today, by and large the people in the Middle East could give a rat’s ass about freedom and liberty. They want electricity and water for 24 hours. George Bush and Dick Cheney emphatically knew in 2003 what the people in the Middle East wanted, but they were gravely mistaken, and time has generated all the necessary proof.

As evidenced in the next few passages, any notion of getting out of Iraq, the Middle East, or wherever else in the next 18 months is sheer fantasy as long as George Bush makes the decisions. Moreover, if these passages are not cause for concern, I don’t know what is.

Our troops are seeing this progress that is being made on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they’re gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq? Here’s my answer is clear: We’ll support our troops, we’ll support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed.

Prevailing in this struggle is essential to our future as a nation. And the question now that comes before us is this: Will today’s generation of Americans resist the allure of retreat, and will we do in the Middle East what the veterans in this room did in Asia?

The journey is not going to be easy, as the veterans fully understand. At the outset of the war in the Pacific, there were those who argued that freedom had seen its day and that the future belonged to the hard men in Tokyo. A year and a half before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s Foreign Minister gave a hint of things to come during an interview with a New York newspaper. He said, “In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished, the democratic system bankrupt.”

There is no power like the power of freedom and no soldier as strong as a soldier who fights for a free future for his children. And when America’s work on the battlefield was done, the victorious children of democracy would help our defeated enemies rebuild, and bring the taste of freedom to millions.

We can do the same for the Middle East. Today the violent Islamic extremists who fight us in Iraq are as certain of their cause as the Nazis, or the Imperial Japanese, or the Soviet communists were of theirs. They are destined for the same fate.

George Bush’s speech today was anything but a rollout of a Parker’s Brothers game. We have a serious case of the equivalent of an out of control jihadist in the White House in possession of the most powerful military capabilities in the world.

Bush Flagrantly Lies in VFW Speech

Col Nathan R. Jessep (Jack Nicholson) needs to stand about one inch from George Bush’s face, muster up all the fiery intimidation of a well-tenured Marine, and bark, “Son, you can’t handle the truth.” It appears The Decider told a whopper in his remarks to the VFW this morning - a very good catch by Spencer Ackerman.

Addressing the VFW national convention, Bush said:

Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year.

The Decider’s remark, presented as a statement of fact, is as deceptive as the lies he told about WMD’s in Iraq. Furthermore, we can be absolutely certain about this - when anybody lies as Bush did today, the lie behind it is huge.

This is Spencer’s breakdown of The Decider’s Fuzzy Math.

That “and other extremists” line sure does a lot of work here. No order of battle for the insurgency is available, but all credible estimates peg al-Qaeda in Iraq as by far the smallest contingent. One rough assessment, cited by The New York Times last month, put AQI at possessing perhaps 5,000 fighters. Yet Bush suggested this morning that the U.S. has captured as many as 12,000 members of AQI so far this year.

Since the surge began, the U.S. has had between 17,000 and 23,000 Iraqis in custody each month, according to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index (pdf). Last month, Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times reported that of the 19,000 detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, only 135 were foreigners — the most likely indicator of membership in al-Qaeda. Military and intelligence veterans of the Iraq war typically say that determining Iraqi membership in AQI is extraordinarily difficult, and not something that lends itself particularly well to flat, quantitative statements.

As Spencer aptly acknowledges, Bush’s statement cannot be proven unequivocally wrong, because of the “other” factor, which is the overwhelming majority of those “killed or captured.” However, there is no rational logic to support The Decider’s statement in the context presented.

How many veterans do you think heard that statement and accepted it in the very manner Bush intended for them to? I would be surprised if 5% of the people caught the blatant lie.

Political Lunch 08-22-07

Today on 49th episode of The Lunch, Rob and Will cover the candidates’ differences on Iraq, the GOP infighting over immigration etc., Mike Huckabee’s strategy to come from behind, and Chris Dodd’s overnight conversion on the Fed.

Click To Play

Bush Backpedals on al-Maliki Remarks

President Bush did some serious backpedaling today after Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lashed out at the remarks Bush made in a speech yesterday and the recent call for the ousting of al-Maliki by Sens. Levin and Warner.

Of course, Bush did nothing wrong. He blamed everything he said on the media.

So, it appears there are now two people in the world Bush takes orders from: Dick Cheney and Nouri al-Maliki.

Formats available: Windows Media (.wmv), Flash Video (.flv)

Freedom of Speech - George Bush Style

(Update below)

John F. Kennedy said, ?We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.?

In the words of Lloyd Bentsen, George Bush is no Jack Kennedy.

The White House has a formal policy manual that details precisely how to mitigate people who are not “extremely supportive of the Administration” publicly. (Their emphasis, not mine)

Whenever the president makes a public appearance, it has long since been White House policy to forbid the public from displaying or expressing dissent in any form against the president or his views. That includes the area, within one-half mile from where the president may speak and anywhere along the route which he may travel to appear in public. If you’re not a good Bushie, cheering him on and waving pro-Bush banners, you will likely find yourself thrown in prison.

People were thrown in jail in 2004 (and many before and since I’m sure) for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts to a public event Bush attended. Those arrested at the event subsequently filed a lawsuit and were recently able to obtain an official White House policy and procedure manual for “‘deterring potential protestors’ [sic] from President Bush’s public appearances around the country.”

The “Presidential Advance Manual” specifies, according to the Washington Post:

Any event must be open only to those with tickets tightly controlled by organizers. Those entering must be screened in case they are hiding secret signs. Any anti-Bush demonstrators who manage to get in anyway should be shouted down by “rally squads” stationed in strategic locations. And if that does not work, they should be thrown out. (Emphasis added.)

…Designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in the view of the event site or motorcade route. (Ed. Note: I have read in other press accounts, the ‘protest area’ must be no less than one-half mile from the location of the president.)

To counter any demonstrators…teams are told to create “rally squads” of volunteers with large hand-held signs, placards or banners with “favorable messages.” Squads should be placed in strategic locations and “at least one squad should be ‘roaming’ throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems,” the manual says.

“These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators,” it says. “The rally squad’s task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site.”

In a recent post I said, “Upon taking office in 2001, George Bush and unitary executive Dick Cheney, began the systematic corruption and dismantling, wherever possible, of the United States Constitution and the principles of democracy that have defined our country for more than 220 years.” Few could argue that is an inaccurate statement.

Late Update: Download a copy of the Presidential Advance Manual

Bush to transfrom bin Laden from terrorist to prophet

Beware. George Bush’s spin on Iraq is taking on a new form. When he starts to make sense and it seemingly begins to reflect the will of the People, something is up. Last night I listened to his press conference delivered in Canada and knew something was not right. He seemed almost humble and for an unbelievable moment, the truth almost came through in his words.

In a round about fashion, Bush admitted the political reconciliation in Iraq is not happening, which is precisely what the troop surge strategy was intended to do, ergo, the troop surge is a big flop in spite of what appears to be patches of local military success. Furthermore, in a heavy exercise of semantics, Bush said Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is failing and likely needs to be replaced.

And the fundamental question is, will the government respond to the demands of the people? And if the government doesn’t demand — respond to the demands of the people, they will replace the government. That’s up to the Iraqis to make that decision, not American politicians. The Iraqis will decide. They have decided they want a constitution, they have elected members to their parliament, and they will make the decisions, just like democracies do.

Now, after reading the advance reports of a speech Bush is to deliver today, I see my doubts were warranted. Bush isn’t about to give in to the will of the American people. He is just preparing new spin to continue the basics of old policy.

Bush knows his case for Iraq is about to face the most significant challenge and debate ever, therefore he must roll out a new version of BS. Today, he will invoke Vietnam — knowingly jab wounds that are still sore even after decades — to plead his case to continue the war in Iraq. But Vietnam is not all Bush has up his sleeve.

President Bush will try to put a twist on comparisons of the war to Vietnam by invoking the historical lessons of that conflict to argue against pulling out…Bush will tell members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that “then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” according to speech excerpts released Tuesday by the White House.

“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” Bush will say.

“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ” the president will say.

Now for the big guns. Bush will transform Osama bin Laden from Public Enemy No. 1 to a prophet.

The president will also make the argument that withdrawing from Vietnam emboldened today’s terrorists by compromising U.S. credibility, citing a quote from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden that the American people would rise against the Iraq war the same way they rose against the war in Vietnam, according to the excerpts.

“Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility, but the terrorists see things differently,” Bush will say.

Josh Marshall expresses it perfectly, “Osama is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better example of President Bush’s comically inept strategic thinking. Actually, lack of strategic thinking. I’m sure you’ve noticed how, as the president’s policies go further and further down the drain, he more and more often cites the authority of Osama bin Laden as the rationale for his policies. In this case, we must stay in Iraq forever wasting money and lives and destroying our position in the world because if we don’t we’ll have proved Osama bin Laden right.

Bush’s intentions are again quite clear. No matter how much deception is required nor the cost levied, George Bush intends to carry out His will. Not God’s as Bush has historically proclaimed and definitely not the American people, the people He serves - His boss, which He only ignores.