Monday, August 13, 2007

Paul Slansky: "Witness to History": The Karl Rove Quiz. 1) How did Karl Rove and George W. Bush meet? a) Rove was working as Republican National Committee Chairman George H.W. Bush's assistant and one day his duties involved delivering a set of car keys to his boss's eldest son. b) Rove was a star player on the Andover baseball team that Bush was a cheerleader for. c) They both attended a Houston bonfire of Beatles records after John Lennon said the group was more popular than Jesus. d) They sat next to each other on a plane, got to talking, and found that they both really loved to hurt people. 2) Which convicted Watergate conspirator was the young nerdy Karl Rove a protege of? a) Jeb Magruder. b) G. Gordon Liddy. c) H. R. (Bob) Haldeman. d) Donald Segretti. 3) Which of these is a George W. Bush nickname for Karl Rove? a) "My Brain." b) "Blubber Boy." c) "Turd Blossom." d) "Roveewade." 4) During his grotesque appearance on stage at a recent Washington dinner for sycophantic White House correspondents, what did Karl Rove say was one of his hobbies? a) Character assassination. b) Tearing the heads off of small animals. c) Watching snuff films. d) Stuffing his porcine face with greasy food. 5) How did Karl Rove recall his first impression of George W. Bush? a) "He was the kind of guy you'd sell your soul for if you were the kind of guy who had one to sell." b) "So drunk he could barely stand up, reeking of vomit, with a coke smudge under his nose, and with all that it was clear he was presidential timber." c) "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow!" d) "He was the kind of guy you'd want to give a blow job to if you were the kind of guy who knew you were gay." Answers: 1) a, 2) d, 3) c, 4) b, 5) c Paul Slansky's quizzes will be a regular feature on 23/6 (236.com), the new satiric news site coming soon to a computer screen near you. [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed] 12:40:32 PM    comment []

James Moore: The Rove Goes on Forever. "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt When I first started reporting on Karl Rove in the late 1970s, I was impressed by his singularity of purpose and his willingness to say or do whatever was necessary to succeed. This amorality, a complete lack of concern for right or wrong or harm done, will be his legacy in the American political process. Lives and careers might be destroyed, great institutions compromised, the truth sullied until it is unrecognizable, but all of that will be acceptable collateral damage to Karl as long as he and his party and candidates have won the day. Nothing has ever mattered to Karl Rove beyond the accumulation of political power. And every move he has made during the political ascension of George W. Bush has been about gathering the kind of influence that is necessary to build a political dynasty. While it is too easy to call him a liar and a cheat, the narrative evidence and the facts leave the conclusion unavoidable. If we were to stipulate that Rove did not conduct the purge of US attorneys or organize and execute the leak of Valerie Plame's name to his old friend Robert Novak, we are left with the question of who in Washington might have put together those schemes. Isn't he the most likely suspect? The latest suspicions that Rove wasn't just dumping politically incorrect US attorneys but was also indulging in selective prosecutions like the one of former Alabama Governor Don Seligman prompted memories of what happened here in Texas late in 1980s. Two employees of the Texas Department of Agriculture, Pete McRae and Mike Moeller, were drawn into a federal court because a contractor they had hired was, unknown to them, raising political money at the end of his work day while traveling at the state's expense. Of course, that only happens about a thousand times a day in Texas and every other state in the union and nobody has done a better job than Karl Rove of arranging to have his candidates and officeholders travel on taxpayer money for government work and then turn the trip into a fundraiser. Is there a better tool for churning up donations than Air Force One? Although he has thus far managed to avoid charges, Rove will always be connected with the treasonous act of leaking the name of a CIA agent. People who buy into the notion that it was an accidental slip by Richard Armitage in a conversation with Novak are perpetuating the kind of naivet[radical]© that makes Rove's work easier. Armitage had the expertise, political convictions, connections to Novak, and the separation from the White House to make him the perfect person to deliver the information about Ms. Plame. Rove developed the plan and used the zealousness of Vice President Dick Cheney, his myopic attorney David Addington, and Scooter Libby to execute the scheme. While our nation is in a war that is largely a product of Rove-designed deceptions, he leaked the name of an agent who has put her life at risk to protect our country from weapons of mass destruction and he did so for no other reason than silence future critics of the administration and exact revenge. The fact that Karl Rove has not been tried for sedition and treason ought to trouble every American who still believes in those things that have long been held to be good and right and true about our country. Rove's great mind might have been put to great use. Instead, he has decided to view as an enemy any fellow citizen who doesn't think like him and his party. All of the institutions of our government, like our judicial system, which used to be considered politically sacrosanct, have now been polluted by his political ambitions. Changes in environmental regulations allowing the clear-cutting of forests have been renamed The Healthy Forests Initiative while deregulation of factories discharging dangerous particulates into the air has taken on the Roverian brand of The Blue Skies Initiative. He hides our own complicity in his disgusting work through the manipulation of language and we are comforted and less resistant. We all ought to be ashamed; not just Karl. People wonder what his future will be and I'd like to think there will be a moment of atonement for Karl but he has not shown a shadow of conscience. He will command great fees for public speaking and is likely to be on retainers to dozens of corporations seeking his influence and insights. Of course, he will write a book and offer his perspective on the Bush administration; he cannot stop himself from spinning. I, however, still believe in the truth and its survivability and am confident history will condemn Rove and view him as a man who divided his own country to win and cared not a scintilla about the consequences of his actions beyond political victory. I have been accused for more than 25 years of overstating Karl's importance and his influence but I am certain history will judge him the most profoundly disturbing political force our country has seen in almost 100 years. The image I see of Karl Rove as he leaves Washington is of a man carrying a gas can and a box of matches as the city burns behind him and yet no one has thought to blame him for the great blaze sundering our democracy. In his parting news conference with the president, Rove readily invoked the name of an Almighty but even this act was hypocritical. He told his friend Bill Israel years ago that he was agnostic and that "he wished he could believe, but he cannot." Karl Rove, though, can turn even religious agnosticism into a political advantage. Were he to eventually confront a judgmental deity, that may be the one place where he will finally discover the justice he has long managed to avoid. [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed] 12:03:00 PM    comment []

Jeremy Scahill: Bush's Mercenary Revolution. If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again. With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness, the Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S. occupation through the use of private war companies. There are now almost 200,000 private "contractors" deployed in Iraq by Washington. This means that U.S. military forces in Iraq are now outsized by a coalition of billing corporations whose actions go largely unmonitored and whose crimes are virtually unpunished. In essence, the Bush administration has created a shadow army that can be used to wage wars unpopular with the American public but extremely profitable for a few unaccountable private companies. Since the launch of the "global war on terror," the administration has systematically funneled billions of dollars in public money to corporations like Blackwater USA , DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Erinys and ArmorGroup. They have in turn used their lucrative government pay-outs to build up the infrastructure and reach of private armies so powerful that they rival or outgun some nation's militaries. "I think it's extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its foreign policy or national security objectives," says veteran U.S . Diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, Wilson argues, "makes of them a very powerful interest group within the American body politic and an interest group that is in fact armed. And the question will arise at some time: to whom do they owe their loyalty?" During the 1991 Gulf War, the ratio of troops to private contractors was about 60 to 1. Today, it is the contractors who outnumber U.S. forces in Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 war contracting companies working in Iraq for the United States. Composed of some 180,000 individual personnel drawn from more than 100 countries, the army of contractors surpasses the official U.S. military presence of 160,000 troops. In all, the United States may have as many as 400,000 personnel occupying Iraq, not including allied nations' militaries. The statistics on contractors do not account for all armed contractors. Last year, a U.S. government report estimated there were 48,000 people working for more than 170 private military companies in Iraq. "It masks the true level of American involvement," says Ambassador Wilson. This revolution also means the United States no longer needs to rely on its own citizens to fight its wars, nor does it need to implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq war politically untenable. The Iraq war has ushered in a new system. Wealthy nations can recruit the world's poor, from countries that have no direct stake in the conflict, and use them as cannon fodder to conquer weaker nations. This allows the conquering power to hold down domestic casualties -- the single-greatest impediment to waging wars like the one in Iraq. Indeed, in Iraq, more than 1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation have been killed with another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American citizens, and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by casualties. In many ways, it is the same corporate model of relying on cheap labor in destitute nations to staff their uber-profitable operations. The giant multinationals also argue they are helping the economy by hiring locals, even if it's at starvation wages. "Donald Rumsfeld's masterstroke, and his most enduring legacy, was to bring the corporate branding revolution of the 1990s into the heart of the most powerful military in the world," says Naomi Klein, whose upcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, explores these themes. "We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army. Much as with so-called hollow corporations like Nike, billions are spent on military technology and design in rich countries while the manual labor and sweat work of invasion and occupation is increasingly outsourced to contractors who compete with each other to fill the work order for the lowest price. Just as this model breeds rampant abuse in the manufacturing sector -- with the big-name brands always able to plead ignorance about the actions of their suppliers -- so it does in the military, though with stakes that are immeasurably higher." To read my latest report, published today by The Indypendent newspaper, go here. -- [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed] 11:50:55 AM    comment []

This is a link to Bill Moyers[base '] discussion with Brian Fishman, a counter-terrorism expert/instructor at West Point. Fishman all but calls the Bush-Cheney version of the enemy and the nature of the conflict in Iraq delusional. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07272007/watch2.html Any cadet taking a class from Fishman knows that Bush-Cheney are peddling a line of complete bullshit. If every cadet graduating from West Point knows it[base ']s bullshit, so must the entire CIA, the State Department, the Defense Department, the Pentagon and Republican Party leaders. Yet they all continue to play along with the fiction. May they all rot in hell. 9:24:12 AM    comment []

David Bender: Joie de Merv. Merv Griffin has died. In 2002, I had the great privilege and joy of helping him to write his last memoir, Merv: Making the Good Life Last. I don't use the word "joy" casually here, because the good life he exemplified was more than one of riches and material achievement, although he certainly earned his share of those. No, what I'm talking about is the pure joy he found in living -- what I called his "joie de Merv." It was that same infectious quality he shared with American audiences for 23 years on The Merv Griffin Show. Today he is being remembered as many things: a boy singer with the big bands, an avuncular talk show host, a prolific creator of game shows like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, and an enormously successful businessman and hotelier. But here's what you don't know about Merv Griffin and what you absolutely should: he was a man who had a profound and significant impact on our country and our culture in ways that are still being felt today. What? Merv Griffin? The perennially wide-eyed talk show host whose supposed refrain of "ooooh" to his guests was widely parodied back in the day as proof of his insubstantiality? Could someone whose own sidekick (the redoubtable Arthur Treacher) dubbed him "that dear boy" possibly have had an important and lasting effect on our society? As Merv was fond of saying: "You betcha!" Let me tell you why. * In 1962, while guest-hosting for Jack Paar, he gave a little known comedy writer and struggling stand-up comic named Woody Allen his first break on national television. Over the next two decades he did the same thing for George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, John Denver, Diane Keaton, Whitney Houston and Jerry Seinfeld -- again it was Merv, not Johnny Carson, who first put every one of them on the air. * In 1965, when virtually no public opposition to the war in Vietnam was being seen on American television, Merv interviewed 93 year old British Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell who stunned him by declaring that America needed to "give up the habit of invading peaceful countries and torturing them." In the firestorm of criticism that followed the Russell interview, Merv stood his ground: "...nothing would be easier for me than to book this show with people who have ideas that are carbon copies of my own, or no ideas at all. But I don't think it's an easy world or that my primary responsibility on this program is to take it easy. You'll continue on this show to see people of every persuasion who have hard things to say, and I don't think you can get at any truth without hammering out on the anvil of everyone's right to disagree." * In addition to launching the career of Richard Pryor, Merv was unique (and way ahead of his time) in providing a national platform for black artists and activists including Dick Gregory, Harry Belafonte, Godfrey Cambridge, Mahalia Jackson, Muhammad Ali (when he was still Cassius Clay) and, famously, to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1967, the year before his death. * Although it seems impossible to believe in an era when Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith can dominate the airwaves and when an "in-depth" interview is 5-7 minutes long, Merv gave countless hours of airtime to writers and thinkers who had nothing to promote other than their own ideas. The list reads like a "Who's Who" of arts, science and literature: John Lennon, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, James Jones, James Michener, Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, Will & Ariel Durant, Irwin Shaw, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, Buckminster Fuller, Jimmy Breslin, Jerzy Kosinski, Alex Haley, Buckminster Fuller, et al. * Merv's interviews with politicians were remarkable for their breadth and scope, from Robert F. Kennedy wrestling with his opposition to the war yet still reluctant to challenge a sitting Democratic president, to disgraced former Vice President Spiro Agnew, who criticized his old boss (the similarly disgraced Richard Nixon) for being "wrong" in leaving "the battlefield in Vietnam when we should have accomplished a victory." Although his political guests included Nixon (whom he never liked), Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (who, along with his wife Nancy, was a close friend), Merv was deeply and justifiably proud of the fact that audiences never knew what his own political beliefs really were. * When CBS put him up against Johnny Carson in 1969, Merv's instinctual resistance to petty authority (he was always happiest when he was his own boss) was tested constantly. He bristled when CBS censors put a black box over Abbie Hoffman's red, white & blue shirt during their entire 35 minute interview and, a week later, he tweaked the network on the by putting a similar black box over his own monologue as he said, "It has just been agreed that I am to be the sole judge of censorship problems on my show, if they should occur in the future." As he kept talking, the box kept expanding, until Merv, now on his hands and knees peering out from under it said, "I think I have some power to regulate and control what is to be shown and what isn't." On the word "power," Merv's crew made the whole screen go black and all that could be heard was his disembodied voice saying, "That's all I have to say. May I have the network back please?" As he did throughout his life, Merv used his Irish humor like a surgeon's scalpel, deftly and with a minimum of blood. * It was during the run of his CBS show (1969-1972) that opposition to the Vietnam War reached its highest point. Merv continued to book controversial guests like Jane Fonda and Muhammad Ali, despite the network's constant pressure on him to remain "balanced." He received a memo that said, "In the past six weeks, thirty-four antiwar statements have been made on your show and only one pro-war statement, by John Wayne." Merv fired back immediately, "Find me someone as famous as John Wayne who supports the war and I'll book him." He was a man of principle and purpose who, when he had a national platform, used it to make a real difference in the life of his country. And he did it all with style, grace and wit -- qualities that, sadly, are in short supply in public life today. For those of us who were lucky enough to know him off camera, it was that "joie de Merv" -- the twinkle in his eye, the warmth of his smile, the generosity of his spirit -- that we will miss the most. I mourn him today as a friend and I'm sad that we won't see his like again. But he wouldn't want this to end on a downbeat note, so let me share with you what Merv wrote at the end of "Making the Good Life Last": "...I've never been afraid of death. If you live your life in fear of dying, you might as well be dead already. So lately, in idle moments, I've been toying with what I'd like my headstone to read. (You don't think I'm going to let anybody else write my last line, do you?) There's always the hypochondriac's epitaph: "I told you I was sick." Or perhaps the talk show host's final exit line would be more appropriate: "I will not be right back after this message." Hey, you know what? I've just figured out what I want it to say: STAY TUNED Joie de Merv. [The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed] 8:23:25 AM    comment []

Watch This…. YouTube - Dick Cheney ‘94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire … and tell me what you think. [Rolling Stone : National Affairs Daily] 7:52:10 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2007 Patricia Thurston.