I don't think the distinction between real news and that pseudo-kind of news is very clear in the public's mind."

 "If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world."
 - Ari Fleischer, December 2 2002

Patrick Lang, former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, accused Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld's personal intelligence team of having "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" to make it seem like the WMD threat in Iraq was real. Lang went on to say that the DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD."
Ahmad Chalabi, it should be noted, is the hand-picked-by-Don-Rumsfeld successor to power in Iraq. Chalabi was convicted in 1992 of 31 counts of bank fraud and embezzlement in Jordan and sentenced to 22 years hard labor in absentia.

a somewhat dim, plodding oil-man from Texas who can't get enough of red, white and blue splattered glory, to the extent that a shockingly self-righteous nationalism has developed which truly looks like the birth pangs of a Nazi-like Reich.
fascism is firmly here. It's not coming. It's not around the corner. It's already a tree in full bloom with fruit to bear.

There are totally unexplained periods in Bush's early adult life, an extraordinary thing for an American national public figure.

The support of German industrialists was an important part of Hitler's being able to sustain his slow rise to power. Many of these business people thought they would heavily profit from the success of the odd, theatrical little man they bankrolled. The one absolute certainty was that Germany under Hitler would rearm, massively and quickly, with lots of profitable contracts coming available.

With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media - he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe - at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.

No mystery in American history is ever solved because the actual facts of each case never reach the public for adequate examination and resolution. I mean, we still haven't solved the questions of who murdered Presidents Zachary Taylor and Abraham Lincoln, never mind who killed the Kennedy brothers or Martin Luther King.

That 9/11 was an inside job known and planned well in advance of this mind-crushing assault on the world's senses is no longer just a crazed conspiracy theory " it's a whole encyclopedia of provable facts, observable criminal behavior and stonewalled investigations ... it is a certainty."

While the accent is on punishment of those who dare to disagree, the leaders of friendly nations get the full charm treatment. They may be invited to a White House state dinner or to the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, where nearly a dozen world leaders have been hosted as a symbol of presidential appreciation that they are loyal members of the team.

 So if you're a vindictive American pResident like Bush, and you want to attack Europe's economy, then you allow the dollar to fall precipitaley and Europe is suddenly selling a lot less Mercedes products and everything else to Americans and the rest of the world that deals in U.S. dollars.


the president continues to respond to terror with his cowboy rhetoric: We will get Osama bin Laden. We will get the Mullah Omar. We will get the terrorists who blew the hole in the USS Cole. We will get the anthrax killer. We will get Saddam Hussein and his sons. Most recently, we will get the killers who attacked the compounds in Saudi Arabia.
The latter will be quite a trick since the killers were suicide bombers, and Bush will have to bring them back from the dead to haul them into court.

"He's an ideologist," one man in the spy world said of Mr. Rumsfeld. "He doesn't start with the facts, even though he's quite brainy. He has a bottom line, and then he gathers facts to support the bottom line."

Which brings us back to Senator Miller, and all those politicians and pundits who still imagine that there is room for compromise, that they can find some bipartisan middle ground. Mr. Norquist was recently quoted in The Denver Post with the answer to that: "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape."


"wASHINGTON, June 5 — The Senate voted overwhelmingly today to give an increased child tax credit to millions of low-income families who did not receive it in the new tax law, moving rapidly to quell an issue that Democrats had used to portray Republicans as brutish toward the poor"
(this sounds a lot like what they did with steel... taketh, giveth...)