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Friday, April 28, 2006

My Letter to John Kerry in 2002

I recently re-read the letter I sent my two Senators from Massachusetts before the Iraq War. It rekindled the feeling of disgust I had at the time for John Kerry. Thousands of citizens of Massachusetts sent such letters, yet he ignored his constituents' position on the matter and decided to vote in the manner he felt would be most politically advantageous to him. After his vote, I voted against him in his Senate re-election campaign, and I voted against him in the presidential primary. It was only in the general election that I grudgingly hopped on the Kerry bandwagon and began supporting him. As recently as Feb. I gave his PAC money to help other Democratic candidates. Today I'm officially severing the ties. Anyone who can willfully ignore our national interests, who is willing to sacrifice our country for their own political ends, does not deserve my support, no matter how furiously they backpedal. I'm going to lend my support only to candidates who have demonstrated a willingness to put principals before politics. So, I guess I'm never going to vote again in my life.

Seriously, I'm going to come out now in support of Barack Obama. The political consultants, the image consultants, they all say he's unelectable due to his skin color and ethnicity. I'm sick of the pessimistic cynicism that has infested this party. It's a cancer, and I know what it takes to beat cancer. You can't hide your head in the sand and hope it goes away. You need to poison it, and the process is extremely painful. Eating vegetables, consulting acupuncturists, all that hippie bullshit, it does NOTHING. This is a battle for the soul of our party, and there will be casualties. In the end, however, the parts of the body that were lost are regained, and come back to a healthy whole. John Kerry and all those who support the current machine are the cancer. The therapy is an overdose of truth and optimism. America can be better than a silent majority held captive to James Dobson's hatred. The 60% of Americans who don't vote are infected with the disease. We need to bring them back, to kill the diseased cells that have choked them into submission.

I wrote that letter to Kerry on September 20, 2002. If your interested, it's available here.

Know Peace

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Colin Powell Returns!

So, fresh evidence that once again, our African American Secretary of State has been ostracized from the Bush Administration's Inner Circle, proving conclusively that the Trinity is Protestant (no celibate woman can claim to be part of the godhead). Yes, as you may have heard, Rummy rolled his eyes as Condi spoke. It took our intrepid godhead a tad longer to finish their favorite game of "marginalize the minority" this time, perhaps because she's a minority squared, but make no bones about it: when Condi says, "Iran is not Iraq" you can safely ignore her. That's just typical State Department coddling of terrorists. You won't hear any such nonsense coming from the lips of any member of the Trinity. To us mere mortals, we see two words separated by differing final consonants, but in the divine language of kings, both are spelled with a single three letter word, and it rhymes with the material my hat is made of.

And by the way, shame on you reporters who insinuated the word "tactical" had something to do with the military. Dr. Rice explained clearly that when she referred to "thousands of tactical errors", not only had she meant the comment figuratively, she was using the word "not in the military sense." I'll leave it to my astute readers to determine how else one can interpret that word.

God Bless.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Road to the Iranian War

Many have been postulating that this new war the US is getting ready to wage will provide political cover for the Administration and the Republican Party. The rationale is that after the coming mid-term elections, if the Democrats take control of the Congress, they will have subpoena authority and begin investigations into the myriad scandals/crimes the Republicans have been committing. If Bush can get us into a war before then, he can renew his title of "war-time" President and more effectively deflect criticism/impeachment.

The obvious question, however, is how could he possibly get us into a new conflict? The latest leak from Britain of his discussions with Tony Blair pre-Iraq indicate that he considers Gulf of Tonkin-like measures to be fair game, so it is possible he could manufacture a military action by Iran and therefore justify military strikes. Or, he could simply roll new air-strikes into his existing mandate to fight the "global war on terror." He believes his current war-time authority gives him the ability to nullify existing US law (NSA wiretapping), so it stands to reason that he could cite any number of Iranian transgressions (their support of Iraqi "insurgents") as reason to extend the global war on terror to Iranian soil. I see this last option as the most realistic, because it seems reasonable to assume that any attempt to manufacture a reason would be heavily scrutinized (CIA attempts to silence whistle-blowers notwithstanding).

In addition, if the action consists solely of air-strikes, it becomes much easier to justify, since one can assume American casualties from such an action will be limited. He can talk-up the merits of our "smart bombs" and how we are doing everything possible to minimize collateral damage. There are several inconsistencies with these theories I'm expounding upon, however, and I'd like to address why I don't believe they impinge the credibility of my argument.

To the rational observer, if one were to try to gain political cover from a new campaign (to "Wag the Dog"), it seems reasonable to assert that a bombing campaign will only provide cover for a short period of time, after which it'd be back to business as usual. That's why it seems likely the war will begin in late August. Many people are on vacation, so few are paying much attention to politics. By the time the campaign is well underway in September, Republicans can make a big deal of "standing behind our Commander in Chief" and not backing down for the sake of our troops' morale. We don't want to switch horses in mid-stream. This action will provide cover for just long enough to eke out a marginal victory and keep a tiny majority in Congress, stripping the Dems of any opportunity for punitive measures. The Dems, consulting their political consultants, image consultants, pollsters, and inside the beltway out-of-touch colleagues, will once again fail to stand up and have courage to speak the truth and broaden the dialog. They'll be successfully painted as unpatriotic flip-flopping wimps, and Americans will once again be sold a bill of goods by opportunistic Republicans.

And that's the how/why America will enter Iran. Hoo-ah.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Nuclear Ambitions

If you haven't read Seymour Hersh's article on the Administration's plans regarding how they're going to conduct the military strikes on Iran, you need to. The use of nuclear weapons is a live option. Generals asking for this option to be removed are being rebuffed. Quoting a "former senior intelligence official" Seymour writes:

"Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout--we're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don't have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out"--remove the nuclear option--"they're shouted down."


Look, I'm no fan of Iran. And if this were a different administration we were talking about this would be a different discussion entirely. Unfortunately we seem to be on the precipice of the most dangerous time our country has ever known, and I don't make that comment lightly. The newly crowned Trinity of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are not friends of America. Leaders who care about our great country would show contrition for their actions that have so irreparably harmed her. Instead, they continue blindly down the same paths they set out upon six years ago. Time and catastrophic failures have not deterred them. Lets be crystal clear: No American should vote for ANY Republican this coming year, because any Republican, no matter how moderate, will come under the leadership of a party hell-bent on taking our country to the brink of disaster. We know, that is, we have empirical evidence of their contempt for diplomacy and multi-lateralism. We have proof of their gross ineptitude when it comes to foreign policy. Americans must understand that our leaders' actions have direct consequences on our lives. If we pre-emptively use nuclear weapons, voters in other nations around the world, friend and foe, will step away from us. Why should we care? Because they have the power to elect governments hostile to America. We've seen this happen already in this President's term. South America is quickly turning into an adversary. We need access to their resources, but we're driving them into the arms of China with our bluster and hostile rhetoric.

The bottom line is, Americans cannot trust this Administration. At all. We know that they have messianic ideals. They have, as Richard Clarke so aptly put it, "received knowledge." It's as if they are the Judas of the newfound Gospel. We all know them to be Satan incarnate, but they insist to actually be doing the Lord's will on the down-low.

If Americans want regime change in Iran, they need to be willing to use conventional military tactics. We should be willing to sacrifice our men and women in a cause we feel merits it. This Administration is comprised entirely of cowards. Hersh quotes a "government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon" as describing Bush's ambitions thusly: "the President believes that he must do 'what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,' and 'that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.'" As usual, Bush is in his own private fairy tale land. We know from other sources that he is preoccupied with his legacy, that he has been studying past President's legacies and how some left office looking bad but in the end were justified by history. We heard the Secretary of State repeat this nonsense last week. This man is determined to do SOMETHING right, despite his complete inability even to discern hostility from kindredness when face to face with another (remember how he "looked into Putin's soul" or some such nonesense, right before Putin began dismantling Russian democracy? Oh wait, maybe Putin was his inspiration...). This man genuinely has no clue, and this Trinity LACKS the COURAGE to do the job properly. If you want to overthrow a regime, we should have learned in Iraq that you can't do it by flipping switches. Sending "smart" nukes does not guarantee there won't be scores of innocent Iranians killed, Iranians who as of right now lean pro-America. Start raining nuclear fallout on them and they'll strap a bomb to their chest and run into a crowd of westerners faster than a Dane can draw Mohammed doing the same.

If America wants to dismantle the Iranian regime, heaven knows there are many rational reasons one can list to support such a decision. The new Trinity we have in the White House are not the people we want running such a campaign, however. Democrats need to completely retake the House and Senate and impeach this President before he can cause our nation any more trauma. God help us.