comments
Dear Patrick- may I have your permission to fwd this note to friends ?
" Patrick" > wrote:
Dear Mary Rose,
I wish I knew the answer to this. Levin and Stabenow must know about the Minutes and if they don't (a scary thought), they might listen to John Kerry, who's supposed to give a speech about it today or tomorrow. The Democratic leadership, except for John Conyers, has utterly failed to publicize these Minutes. I suppose it's because almost all of them were complicit in letting Bush get away with going to war based on lies while they hid under their desks and whimpered.
Anyway, I read about this over a month ago, when it appeared in the British press a few days before the election over there. The publicity about Blair's lying and mendacity as revealed in the Minutes was one of the main reasons his party lost 100 seats, because the British press did its job and made a big deal about what it considered the "smoking gun" about Blair's criminal behavior. I immediately sent copies of the Minutes to my two[Senators (who pay no attention to anyone to the left of Ann Coulter, and I'm sure automatically assign my correspondence to their "watch this subversive" file) and to my Representative, Sheila Jackson-Lee. Amazingly, within a couple of days Congressman John Conyers, ranking Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee (he represents the 14th District of Michigan -- isn't that close to you?) had put together a letter (signed by 88 other Members of Congress, including Sheila Jackson-Lee) asking Bush to answer some serious quesitons about the Minutes and the lies and criminality revealed in it. Bush has ignored the letter so far (Scotty McClellan just giggles whenever one of the lapdogs in the Press Corps gets up the nerve to mention it) as has much of the mainstream press. I don't think either the Washington Post or the New York Times has mentioned the letter, and it took two weeks before the Post acknowledged the Minutes, and then it did so under a misleading headline on page 17A. The Times has been even more worthless: If Paul Krugman hadn't mentioned it in his column, the Times would have gone merrily on its way pretending that it didn't exist, and it still is spending much more time on stuff like the Mi hael Jackson trial (or that cute white blonde teenager who got killed in Aruba; you know there wouldn't even have been a squib about her if she'd been black) than on what is clearly the "smoking gun" showing that Bush and Blair cooked the evidence and went to war based on lies and the knowledge that they were violating the law. What's it going to take to impeach these criminals? They're not only guilty of waging "aggressive war" (the crime for which we hanged the Nazis and Japanese leaders after World War Two) but they're running an illegal secret prison system with torture chambers set up around the world in which they are killing and torturing the "disappeared" (when they aren't urinating on the Koran) and when Amnesty International points out what they're up to, they scream "How dare you call our gulag a gulag?" and get all huffy about how the U.S. is a beacon for democracy and freedom and don't you forget it or you'll end up in Gitmo like the ! rest of the terrorists.
John Kerry is supposed to give a speech today about the Minutes, but I'm sure the Michael Jackson verdict will take precedence over what he says. Meanwhile, Joe Biden and John Edwards are busy giving the Republicans ammo to use against Howard Dean by attacking him for using "harsh language" to describe the Republicans' lack of actual work experience and for calling Tom Delay a "crook." I wrote my own harsh note to that idiot blowhard Biden telling him to forget ever getting my vote for President. Not that the Senator from MNBA cares about my vote, when he can get thousands of dollars in return for signing on to that bankruptcy bill. What is wrong with these people?
It's not much, but you can join your name to John Conyers' letter demanding that Bush answer a number of questions about the Minutes (not that President Cuckoo Bananas -- the memorable name given to him recently by Homer Simpson -- will do anything but stonewall, since the Crime Syndicate knows that honest answers will send the whole gang to hell). Below is the URL for signing the letter and having your name added to the list. As of June 4, Conyers had 130,000 signatures, and he's hoping to get 250,000 (I don't think Gitmo is big enough for them to lock us all up there). You can also access Conyers' original letter of May 5, 2005 (the one McClellan giggles at), with the signatures of the 88 Members of Congress attached (and which the Post and Times sent down the Memory Hole), here:
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/letters/bushsecretmemoltr5505.pdf
The petition is here:
http://johnconyers.campaignoffice.com/index.asp?Type=SUPERFORMS&SEC={7E88A142-70E1-443D-9283-5279CA506563}
The surfacing of the Minutes has given me some faint hope that maybe this bunch can be brought down if only enough of us show our anger at what they've done to this country. I'm not very optimistic, since they control the voting machines and the press, but what else can we do, other than give money to Amnesty International and the ACLU? The non-co-opted courts (and how long will those last, what with extremists like Priscilla Owens and Janice Rogers Brown and their ilk being put on the bench?) and international law are the only weapons we've got left, especially since the mainstream press (with the honorable exception of the Knight-Ridder chain) is too cowed to tell the tru! th about these scoundrels.
Venceremos,
Patrick
" Patrick" > wrote:
Dear Mary Rose,
I wish I knew the answer to this. Levin and Stabenow must know about the Minutes and if they don't (a scary thought), they might listen to John Kerry, who's supposed to give a speech about it today or tomorrow. The Democratic leadership, except for John Conyers, has utterly failed to publicize these Minutes. I suppose it's because almost all of them were complicit in letting Bush get away with going to war based on lies while they hid under their desks and whimpered.
Anyway, I read about this over a month ago, when it appeared in the British press a few days before the election over there. The publicity about Blair's lying and mendacity as revealed in the Minutes was one of the main reasons his party lost 100 seats, because the British press did its job and made a big deal about what it considered the "smoking gun" about Blair's criminal behavior. I immediately sent copies of the Minutes to my two[Senators (who pay no attention to anyone to the left of Ann Coulter, and I'm sure automatically assign my correspondence to their "watch this subversive" file) and to my Representative, Sheila Jackson-Lee. Amazingly, within a couple of days Congressman John Conyers, ranking Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee (he represents the 14th District of Michigan -- isn't that close to you?) had put together a letter (signed by 88 other Members of Congress, including Sheila Jackson-Lee) asking Bush to answer some serious quesitons about the Minutes and the lies and criminality revealed in it. Bush has ignored the letter so far (Scotty McClellan just giggles whenever one of the lapdogs in the Press Corps gets up the nerve to mention it) as has much of the mainstream press. I don't think either the Washington Post or the New York Times has mentioned the letter, and it took two weeks before the Post acknowledged the Minutes, and then it did so under a misleading headline on page 17A. The Times has been even more worthless: If Paul Krugman hadn't mentioned it in his column, the Times would have gone merrily on its way pretending that it didn't exist, and it still is spending much more time on stuff like the Mi hael Jackson trial (or that cute white blonde teenager who got killed in Aruba; you know there wouldn't even have been a squib about her if she'd been black) than on what is clearly the "smoking gun" showing that Bush and Blair cooked the evidence and went to war based on lies and the knowledge that they were violating the law. What's it going to take to impeach these criminals? They're not only guilty of waging "aggressive war" (the crime for which we hanged the Nazis and Japanese leaders after World War Two) but they're running an illegal secret prison system with torture chambers set up around the world in which they are killing and torturing the "disappeared" (when they aren't urinating on the Koran) and when Amnesty International points out what they're up to, they scream "How dare you call our gulag a gulag?" and get all huffy about how the U.S. is a beacon for democracy and freedom and don't you forget it or you'll end up in Gitmo like the ! rest of the terrorists.
John Kerry is supposed to give a speech today about the Minutes, but I'm sure the Michael Jackson verdict will take precedence over what he says. Meanwhile, Joe Biden and John Edwards are busy giving the Republicans ammo to use against Howard Dean by attacking him for using "harsh language" to describe the Republicans' lack of actual work experience and for calling Tom Delay a "crook." I wrote my own harsh note to that idiot blowhard Biden telling him to forget ever getting my vote for President. Not that the Senator from MNBA cares about my vote, when he can get thousands of dollars in return for signing on to that bankruptcy bill. What is wrong with these people?
It's not much, but you can join your name to John Conyers' letter demanding that Bush answer a number of questions about the Minutes (not that President Cuckoo Bananas -- the memorable name given to him recently by Homer Simpson -- will do anything but stonewall, since the Crime Syndicate knows that honest answers will send the whole gang to hell). Below is the URL for signing the letter and having your name added to the list. As of June 4, Conyers had 130,000 signatures, and he's hoping to get 250,000 (I don't think Gitmo is big enough for them to lock us all up there). You can also access Conyers' original letter of May 5, 2005 (the one McClellan giggles at), with the signatures of the 88 Members of Congress attached (and which the Post and Times sent down the Memory Hole), here:
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/letters/bushsecretmemoltr5505.pdf
The petition is here:
http://johnconyers.campaignoffice.com/index.asp?Type=SUPERFORMS&SEC={7E88A142-70E1-443D-9283-5279CA506563}
The surfacing of the Minutes has given me some faint hope that maybe this bunch can be brought down if only enough of us show our anger at what they've done to this country. I'm not very optimistic, since they control the voting machines and the press, but what else can we do, other than give money to Amnesty International and the ACLU? The non-co-opted courts (and how long will those last, what with extremists like Priscilla Owens and Janice Rogers Brown and their ilk being put on the bench?) and international law are the only weapons we've got left, especially since the mainstream press (with the honorable exception of the Knight-Ridder chain) is too cowed to tell the tru! th about these scoundrels.
Venceremos,
Patrick
posted by ~~whileuwait @ 7:32 PM
2 Comments:
At Tuesday, June 07, 2005 2:26:00 AM,
Anonymous said…
I read the part about your anger at Biden and Edwards and wanted to point out that you should go check out Edwards response to the whole media flap at his official blog:
"What a flap has arisen over a disagreement about the way something is said! I was in Nashville over the weekend, thanking the good people of Tennessee who supported the Democratic presidential ticket this year, when I was asked whether I thought that it was fair to say that people who were Republican hadn’t done a good day’s work. Of course, I didn’t think so, and I said that. I don’t think our DNC chair, Howard Dean, would put it that way again if asked either. I disagreed with him, and I said so. And, I want to be clear, I would have to say so again if I were asked again. I said a lot of good things about Howard’s outreach program and invigoration of the internet as a communication and fundraising tool, but no one wrote about that. Instead the headlines blared that I disagreed with Howard. And then the flap arose: A chasm! A split! A revolt!
Instead, how about: Nonsense!.."
Read the full, pretty powerful, statement here: One America Committee
At Wednesday, June 08, 2005 11:03:00 AM,
Anonymous said…
Dear Anonymous,
Thanks for directing me to Edwards' response to the reaction to his criticism of Dean. I agree with you that it's a powerful statement that gives me some hope that Edwards -- if he can hone this message and get people to listen -- could be a viable candidate in 2008 (assuming the Bush Crime Syndicate doesn't pull a Florida 2000/Ohio 2004 and make any Democratic candidacy irrelevant).
Edwards' problem, though, is that he hasn't learned something he should have discovered during the 2004 campaign. No Democrat should ever react immediately to a "gotcha" controversy that has been manufactured by the press (with the gleeful assistance of the Republican National Committee) over something that another Democrat has supposedly said.
Edwards didn't wait to find out if Dean was quoted accurately or if he had clarified his remarks. No, he immediately dissed Dean, and -- as any savvy politician should have known -- fueled the "controversy."
The "controversy" then takes the usual path: The headlines the next day blare: "Edwards says Dean doesn't speak for the Democratic Party" and the nauseating screamfests on the cable news networks bloviate about "chasms! splits! revolts!" A couple of days later Edwards issues a statement explaining himself. Do you think there will be headlines on the front pages giving Edwards' nuanced explanation of what he meant to say and how he agrees with Dean? Will Chris Matthews and Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly have calm and reasoned discussions about Edwards' agreement with Dean about issues that are important to the American people?
Right.
Edwards is supposed to be a smart politician. He just went through a low and unprincipled and dirty campaign in which every word he or Kerry spoke was parsed by the "gotcha" brigade of gasbags and bloviators and "liberal" reporters, and yet he still responded off the cuff when some reporter looking to create a controversy asked him to respond to an "outrageous" statement by another Democrat -- and not just another Democrat, but the head of the Democratic National Committee.
This is not the mark of a Democratic politician who understands what he's in for if he campaigns for President during the next three years. I'm glad that he's clarified what he meant, and if his statement is genuinely what he believes, I could happily support him in 2008, but not if he doesn't learn to keep his mouth shut in cases like this.
Post a Comment
<< Home