The Forkes Report

Tim's Favorite Blogs

The Weather
Ruffle Your Shuffle
Eschew Obfuscation
IM Earthling
Silk Road
The Huffington Post
Talking Points Memo
American Progress
Citizens For Ethics
Crooks And Liars
Common Cause

Media Matters

Blog Directories

Monday, April 30. 2007

Transition

Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia

It’s hard to be productive when life is handing you lemons. Much of this malaise can be laid at my feet. Where it belongs really. Things are tough all over.

Just dropped some Grateful Dead into my ears, Dick’s Pick #32, recorded August 2nd, 1982 at Alpine Valley Music Theater. I was there.

“Just one thing I ask of you, just one thing for me
please forget you know my name, My darling Sugaree.”

Can’t have lemonade — too much sugar. What are you gonna do! How easy it is to say put one foot in front of the other, take it one day at a time, do the next indicated thing … sometimes I just wanna park on the couch and watch the curling championships. But, it’s time to move on.

•••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• •••• ••••

Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty

Richard Gere has an arrest warrant — in India. Well, he won’t be visiting the Dalai Lama any time soon. Some Hindu faithful called his kissing of the Indian movie star, Shilpa Shetty, obscene.

Ségolène Royal

The French may have their first female president in history — and she’s a hottie! Ségolène Royal! She’s a Socialist — Mitterand is a conservative — and Royal has a better than excellent chance of becoming that Nation’s first president. The primary plank in her platform: education.

As of today, Alberto Gonzales is still the Attorney General. The president has a lot of confidence in ole Alberto! Senator Harry Reid of Nevada said the president is in a state of denial over Iraq. Dana Perino, the acting press secretary while Tony Snow is out for cancer therapy, fumbled a really, really good rebuke: “One thing that concerned me today is I heard that Senator Reid said that the President is in denial about the war. And I think that any quick glance in the mirror would show him that he's in denial on several things — that Senator Reid is.”

Okay, it wasn’t a really good rebuttal, but it provided a lot of grist for the comedians and other talk show gabbers. “I’m rubber, you’re glue, what you say bounces off me and sticks to you!”

Dana Perino

She looked rather flustered too. But Dana has a little connection here; first of all, she was born in Wyoming and graduated from Ponderosa High School in Parker, CO, which is the home of my brother, the techie who got me started on this blog thing. She graduated from the University of Southern Colorado and went to work for some Colorado politicos in Washington before moving to England to marry some guy, then moving to Sunny Sandy Eggo — before taking her first job in the White House in 2001.

She seems to have a nice personality and a good sense of humor — but she’s on the wrong team. I’ll cut her some slack. I have a weak spot for cute blondes.

Can hardly wait to get a copy of George Tenet’s new book, Center of the Storm. He explains his “slam dunk” comment, when, in 2002, the president asked him if they would find WMD in Iraq. According to Tenet, “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat.” No kidding …

George Tenet

Apparently, if Tenet is being honest, the Vice President and Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and their minkies in the White House were determined to invade Iraq long before September 11, 2001. Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, the usual suspects.

His interview on 60 Minutes was quite animated! The guy was bouncing around like he had to rush to the toilet. He stood by the C.I.A.’s prewar assessment of Iraq — that Saddam had WMD — but that his “slam dunk” comment wasn’t for finding WMD in Iraq, but for selling the war to the American people based on the threat of WMD.

The decision to invade Iraq was made on September 12, 2001. According to Tenet, Richard Perle told him that Saddam Hussein had to pay for what happened on September 11, 2001. On this point, Tenet said he was surprised since he had the intelligence in hand that indicated it was al Qa’ida that was responsible for 9/11.

Condoleeza Rice

Secretary of State Condi Rice was on This Week and she tried to rebut Tenet’s claims, trotting out the old message that a decision to invade Iraq wasn’t made until all other avenues had been exhausted. Here’s how Rice defined “imminent threat”: Did “we” have the capability to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. In other words, the U.S. was the imminent threat, not Saddam Hussein. Oh, she justified it by saying, once again, that Saddam was not complying with U.N. demands on disarmament.

Here’s what was baffling about her appearance: George Stephanopoulos didn’t challenge her on that twisted definition of imminent threat. Bush’s war in Iraq was predicated on Hussein being an imminent threat to the United States and here she was, almost admitting that Hussein wasn’t an imminent threat but that what was imminent was the administration’s desire to go to war and they were just waiting for the most advantageous moment to start the invasion.

Stephanopoulos didn’t ask Rice about her contradicting comments; from her February 2001 claim that Saddam was not a threat and that U.N. and U.S. sanctions had Hussein boxed in and ineffectual as a threat to his neighbors and the world as compared to her saber-rattling pronouncements of mushroom clouds over America if we didn’t attack Saddam Hussein. She’s never fully explained that when asked about having to testify before the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives about the rush to invade Iraq, claimed she had answered all those questions before in previous hearings. And she is willing to be cited for contempt of Congress rather than answer before a committee again.

Back to 9/11, Tenet, on 60 Minutes, talked of the C.I.A. “connecting the dots” before the attack and strongly pushing an attack on Usama bin Laden in July, 2001 — he brought his intelligence to Rice, the National Security Advisor, who blew him off. Obviously.

Back to Iraq: Here’s what I find so fascinating about Bush’s war and the apologists — like Senator John McCain — who support this continuation of the Bush strategy of stay the course. Okay, they call it a “surge,” when in reality it is just an escalation to continue the war as it has been fought for the past 4 years. No one who pushed this war wants to go back and examine who is responsible for starting this mess, how it was started and why it was started. Their refrain, “This is where we are at today.”

And this is getting tiresome: “A time-table for withdrawal will tie the hands of the generals on the ground.” Someone please explain how that would tie the hands of the generals? There is no credible answer because it’s a statement that doesn’t make any sense. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Patraeus, the commanding general for all forces in Iraq, have said the U.S. military cannot win this war, that it can only be stopped with a political solution inside Iraq.

Last week 25 more American soldiers and Marines were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them in Iraq. The dragging out of this war until the next president is in the White House is a crime. Our troops should be home — they should never have been sent to Iraq in the first place. The president and his administration need to be held accountable — including George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld — and Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, et al. — to answer for this, the most tragic foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

Posted by Tim Forkes in NEWS and POLITICS at 08:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

(Page 1 of 1, totaling 1 entries)