The Little Fish

Scooter Libby (Liddy?) resigned today after being indicted for what the Bush administration would call treason if anyone else had done it.

Will Libby take any of the larger fish with him? Might Dick Cheney have been involved in treason? What about Karl Rove? Maybe even George Bush? I guess that starting a war based on lies isn't illegal or treasonous, but how much did the Liar in Chief know about the outing of a CIA undercover operative?

Could it be that most of the top brass as the White House should be in the Graybar Hotel?

We can only hope!

Rosa Parks

I note the passing of a true American heroine, a woman who decided that enough was enough, Rosa Parks. For a black woman to do what she did in 1950s Birmingham took more guts than are possessed by the occupants of the entire Bush White House executive suite.

What Rosa Parks did could have cost her life. When has any member of the Bush administration stood bravely for anything that hadn't already been vetted by a poll?

We need more people like Rosa Parks. More people who look at things the way they are, decide that something is wrong, and say "Bullshit!" Not that Rosa Parks ever said that. But she probably did.

Today the entire country is a lot like 1950s Alabama. There's a lot that's wrong, but too many people are just standing around, whistling, and averting their eyes. Afraid to say that the administration used lies to pull us into a war that has now cost 2000 lives. Afraid to admit that members of the Bush administration traitorously revealed the identity of a CIA agent for political purposes. Afraid to say that the neocons who are running the country are a bunch of sycophants who have their eyes on nothing more than what's in it for them.

Afraid of what? The truth?

Well, bullshit! Rosa, we'll miss you.

For another point of view on Rosa Parks and the meaning of her life, be sure to visit the "Editor Mom" blog.

Secret Service protects Bush from high school Bill of Rights project

It's good to know that the Secret Service has the nation's high schools covered. Not alone, mind you, but with the help of the “patriots” at Wal-Mart (the company that buys much of what it sells from China).

The Progressive reports an incident on September 20 at Currituck County High School in North Carolina. Selina Jarvis, chair of the social studies department, had assigned the senior civics and economics class a Bill of Rights project. The assignment: Take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights.

The magazine report quotes Jarvis, who says one student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

The right to dissent is supposed to be one of our rights, but when the student took his film to the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, an employee called the Kitty Hawk police who turned the matter over to the Secret Service. No big surprise there. Some yahoo in a Wal-Mart wants to make trouble for a student and turns the kid in to another yahoo at the police department. So the Secret Service got the tip, realized it would be pointelss to visit the kid, and filed it as "unfounded", right?

Wrong!

The Secret Service sent agents to the high school on September 20 and Jarvis told The Progressive that the Secret Service took his poster. The agents then called on the teacher, who explained what the project was all about.

Wasn't the poster a little suspect, the agents wanted to know. Jarvis: “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!” The agents told Jarvis that the student's poster “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted.”

Fortunately, the U.S. Attorney's elevator goes at least most of the way to the top, the student was not indicted, and the Secret Service drorpped the case.

Jarvis, quoted in The Progressive, has a 1-word description of the incident: “ridiculous”.

Conservatives are finally catching on to Bush

The American Conservative is about as far from my political point of view as a publication can be, but I agree with the October 24, 2005, issue.

In an article titled "Money for Nothing", Philip Giraldi takes the Bushies to task for the billions (with a B) of dollars that have just disappeared in Iraq. The money has "gone to bribe Iraqis," the article says, and to "line contractors’ pockets." Contractors such as the one that Dick Cheney used to work for? Giraldi, by the way, is a former CIA Officer. He is now a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.

Key quotes from a conservative's conservative publication:

• "When the final page is written on America’s catastrophic imperial venture, one word will dominate the explanation of U.S. failure—corruption."


• "The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program."


• "Some of the corruption grew out of the misguided neoconservative agenda for Iraq, which meant that a serious reconstruction effort came second to doling out the spoils to the war’s most fervent supporters." I know this sounds like something Ed Schultz would say, but it's from the cover article in The American Conservative. Wow!


• "The 15-month proconsulship of the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] disbursed nearly $20 billion, two-thirds of it in cash, most of which came from the Development Fund for Iraq that had replaced the UN Oil for Food Program and from frozen and seized Iraqi assets. Most of the money was flown into Iraq on C-130s in huge plastic shrink-wrapped pallets holding 40 'cashpaks,' each cashpak having $1.6 million in $100 bills. Twelve billion dollars moved that way between May 2003 and June 2004, drawn from accounts administered by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The $100 bills weighed an estimated 363 tons." I don't know about you, but this is corruption far beyond what I suspected. When it comes to thievery, these guys are professionals.


• "Once in Iraq, there was virtually no accountability over how the money was spent." This is a Republican administration and the Republicans are supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility.


• "Money also disappeared in truckloads and by helicopter. The CPA reportedly distributed funds to contractors in bags off the back of a truck. In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier’s name or provide a good description of him." Wait a minute! Earlier I said these guys are professionals when it comes to thievery. Maybe not. Maybe they're just astonishingly stupid.


• "Paul Bremer, meanwhile, had a slush fund in cash of more than $600 million in his office for which there was no paperwork."


• "Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, has a no-bid monopoly contract with the Army Corps of Engineers that is now estimated to be worth $10 billion. In June 2005, Pentagon contracting officer Bunny Greenhouse told a congressional committee that the agreement was the 'most blatant and improper contracting abuse' that she had ever witnessed, a frank assessment that subsequently earned her a demotion." Where is the Congressional investigation? Where is the special prosecutor?


• "Another U.S. firm well connected to the Bush White House, Custer Battles, has provided security services to the coalition, receiving $11 million in Iraqi funds including $4 million in cash in a sole-source contract to supply security at Baghdad International Airport. The company had never provided airport security before receiving the contract."


• "Another American contractor, CACI International, which was involved in the Abu Ghraib interrogations, was accused by the GAO in April 2004 of having failed to keep records on hours of work that it was billing for and of routinely upgrading employee job descriptions so that more could be charged per employee per hour. Both are apparently common practices among contractors in Iraq, and audits routinely determine that there is little in the way of paperwork to support billings."

These are just small snippets from a huge (2800 words) article. If you can read this without being outraged, without feeling that everyone in the White House should be in prison, then you are stronger than I am.

And again I point out that is not from some goof-ball lefty publication. This article is from The American Conservative: Scott McConnell founded The American Conservative with Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos in 2002. A Ph.D.in history from Columbia University, he was formerly the editorial page editor of the New York Post and has been a columnist for Antiwar.com and New York Press. His work has been published in Commentary, Fortune, National Review, The New Republic, and many other publications.

Why another anti-Bush blog?

George W. Bush is a liar. He even lies about having lied to us. Then the back-story changes again when someone points out the lies. The administration is all spin and little substance. So now it's time for us to "byte" back.

I occasionally post new material to www.BushLiedAgain.com and I try to keep up with the latest disasters of the Bush Administration on my "Bush Remover" site at CafePress.

Patriotism is all about doing everything you can to ensure that your country is headed in the right direction. In this case, it has everything to do with pointing out this corrupt administration's missteps, lies, abuses, and mistakes.