Krugman rocks

In Media Res The political agenda of Fox News, to take the most important example, is hardly obscure. Roger Ailes, the network's chairman, has been advising the Bush administration. Fox's Brit Hume even claimed credit for the midterm election. "It was because of our coverage that it happened," he told Don Imus. "People watch us and take their electoral cues from us. No one should doubt the influence of Fox News in these matters." (This remark may have been tongue in cheek, but imagine the reaction if the Democrats had won and Dan Rather, even jokingly, had later claimed credit.)

Independent Argument

Independent ArgumentBut let's move to one side for a moment. Has anyone spotted something amiss about the latest episode in the "war on terror"? Has it dawned on any of the chickenhawks in the US administration or in Downing Street that they are losing the initiative? Has anyone noticed that Mr bin Laden is writing the script? Al-Qa'ida attacks New York so we attack Afghanistan. Al-Qa'ida attacks in Bali and the Australian government re-pledges its support for America. Al-Qa'ida threatens America and so we murder four of its members in Yemen. And our governments – even the Irish last week – respond not by protecting us, not by uniting in a new, inspiring system of international justice, but by producing laws that will diminish our freedoms, our rights and our liberty. Under attack by al-Qa'ida? Let's tap into the telephones and emails of our innocent citizens. Let's frisk every Muslim who goes through our airports. Let's spy on our own people. How Mr bin Laden – hardly a man of humour, as I can personally attest – must be smiling.

CNN.com - Source: U.S. had intelligence about possible Kenya attacks - Nov. 30, 2002

CNN.com - Source: U.S. had intelligence about possible Kenya attacks - Nov. 30, 2002 The U.S. government received intelligence information from the Australian government about the possibility of terrorist actions in Kenya before the attacks that left 16 dead in Mombasa this week, a senior U.S. government official told CNN Saturday.

The information, according to the source, was of a general nature and was not considered specific or credible and therefore did not lead the U.S. to take any action based on that information.

Australian officials said Friday they had issued a warning November 12 for Australians to avoid Mombassa because of intelligence that "warned of possible terrorist attacks against Western interests in Mombasa."

Thirteen people were killed Thursday when three suicide bombers crashed a vehicle packed with explosives through the gates of an Israeli-owned Mombasa hotel.

TOMPAINE.com - The Perils Of Court Reporting

TOMPAINE.com - The Perils Of Court Reporting But access is not an end in itself. To say that nobody has access like Bob Woodward is only a promotional tool for Woodward’s publisher. What matters is what a reporter does with that access. For Woodward, however, the situation is reversed. His aura of having an all-access pass is so commercially valuable that he can’t afford to lose it; Woodward’s access keeps him from writing the truth. And his ego -- even I was waking up at night -- compels him to insist that he is not bound by the rules that the vast majority of reporters swear by. In his own mind, Woodward stands alone.

You have to give George Bush credit for one thing. He was smart enough to figure out how to play Bob Woodward like a maestro, and now he has the hagiography to show for it.

TheStar.com - Bush anything but moronic, according to author

TheStar.com - Bush anything but moronic, according to author "Bush is not an imbecile. He's not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he's incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he's a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss."

Miller's judgment, that the president might suffer from a bona fide personality disorder, almost makes one long for the less menacing notion currently making the rounds: that the White House's current occupant is, in fact, simply an idiot.

If only. Miller's rendering of the president is bleaker than that. In studying Bush's various adventures in oration, he started to see a pattern emerging.

"He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he's speaking punitively, when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about revenge.

"When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine," Miller said.

"It's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes."

Interesting essay on the state of the London theatre

I don't agree with him on everything, but Toby Young is a workig theatre critic who is thinking about the decline of the West End. What he has to say has implications for American theatre as well.

The Spectator.co.ukWriters such as Noël Coward, J.B. Priestley and Terence Rattigan were much derided by their successors for placing too much emphasis on such ‘middlebrow’ devices as plotting and suspense, but the fact that they had mastered the art of storytelling meant they could rely on a loyal audience. The mistake that most contemporary British playwrights make is to assume that if a play is well constructed, if it connects with the mass audience, it’s incapable of transmitting any new ideas. No such inextricable link between form and content exists. A set of storytelling techniques doesn’t have to be discarded simply because they were used by the previous generation. Constructing a play is a little like building a boat: if it’s put together properly it can carry any cargo, however unorthodox.

The rot began with Samuel Beckett. He, more than any other playwright, was responsible for the idea that in order to be considered ‘art’, a play has to be difficult and inaccessible. Never mind that Shakespeare constantly threw in bits of business designed to appeal to the groundlings, or that Ibsen and Chekhov knew everything there is to know about keeping an audience on its toes, Beckett was applauded for refusing to compromise, for being resolutely non-commercial. After Beckett, any concession to the popular audience was regarded as ‘selling out’.

John Rawls, Theorist on Justice, Is Dead at 82

John Rawls, Theorist on Justice, Is Dead at 82
ohn Rawls, the American political theorist whose work gave new meaning and resonance to the concepts of justice and liberalism, died on Sunday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, his wife, Margaret, said. She said he had been incapacitated in varying degrees since suffering a stroke in 1995.
Advertisement


The publication of his book "A Theory of Justice" in 1971 was perceived as a watershed moment in modern philosophy and came at a time of furious national debate over the Vietnam War and the fight for racial equality. Not only did it veer from the main current of philosophical thought, which was then logic and linguistic analysis, it also stimulated a revival of attention to moral philosophy. Dr. Rawls made a sophisticated argument for a new concept of justice, based on simple fairness.

Makes you proud of the old alma mater

Salon.com News | Fraternities suspended for blackface incident Two predominantly white fraternities at the University of Virginia were suspended by their national organizations after students showed up at a Halloween frat party in blackface.

According to news reports, fraternity members were dressed as tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

The feudalization of America continues.

Free Web Research Link Closed Under Pressure From Pay Sites (TechNews.com) The Energy Department has shut down a popular Internet site that catalogued government and academic science research, in response to corporate complaints that it competed with similar commercial services.

Department officials said abandoning PubScience, an electronic service that cross-indexed and searched roughly 2 million government reports and academic articles, will save the government $200,000 a year because two equivalent services exist in the private sector.

Privatizing war -- one other thing that's wrong with what the Administrations is doing

We use private military contractors in a wide variety of roles -- from support services to Karzai's bodyguards. Among other major drawbacks of using mercenaries, is that they are not subject to American civil or military justice.

The New Republic Online: Out of Service
In practice, then, America's freelance warriors are free to misbehave--and to escape the consequences. When a number of DynCorp employees working in Bosnia were recently found to be running a sex-slavery ring, the Army's Criminal Investigation Division dropped its inquiry after determining the men fell outside of its jurisdiction. U.S. courts proved to be similarly impotent, and the fragile, corrupt Bosnian legal system did no better. Similarly, if Karzai's new bodyguards decide to flout the law in Afghanistan, a nation with ample opportunity for profiteering and corruption, there is very little that anyone--Karzai, the Pentagon, or U.S. courts--will be able to do about it.

A small step toward the twenty-first century.

Judge Ordered to Remove Ten Commandments Monument A Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of Alabama's judicial building violates the constitution's ban on government promotion of religion, a federal judge ruled Monday.

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson gave Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who had had the 5,300-pound granite monument installed in the state building, 30 days to remove it.

Moore testified during the trial that the commandments are the moral foundation of American law. He said the monument acknowledges God, but does not force anyone to follow his conservative Christian religious beliefs.

Stop the Fatherland Security Bill

From MoveOn.Org

Senator Tom Daschle, under great pressure to pass this bill,
is trying to amend the worst provisions. If the bill
is amended it is likely it will be stalled until the next
Congressional session, so compatible House legislation can be
passed. This will at least give time for the bill to be read
and for Congress to come to an informed decision.

What's wrong with this legislation?

Although couched as a "reorganization," this legislation
is fundamentally a direct attack on federal workers'
rights to organize. The Bush administration is using the
fear of terrorism to essentially break the federal employees'
unions. It's a transparent and cynical maneuver, but it's
working. In a separate announcement last week, the Bush
administration outlined plans to also contract out nearly a
million federal jobs -- another way to convert a huge number
of middle class jobs into unprotected, minimum wage jobs, and
to reward the Bush administration's corporate benefactors.

What you probably haven't heard is that the bill contains
provisions that directly attack our civil liberties, giving
government immense new powers to invade our privacy.
Conservative columnist William Safire highlights these points
in a recent New York Times column we've attached below.

Just to top it off, this bill also contains last minute riders.
They've even included a provision to ensure that our government
can do business with the companies that avoid paying their fair
share of taxes by renting a post office box in Bermuda or
another offshore tax haven.

Who knows what else lurks in these 500 pages? Senator Byrd
gave an impassioned speech last week to ask the Senate to
at least slow down this bill so it could be fully understood.

Of course, what this all goes to prove is that when the radical
right feels it's on a winning streak, bipartisanship goes out
the window. It's time for Senators to draw the line. This can
be stopped in the Senate.

Please make your calls first thing Monday morning.

Thank you,

-Wes Boyd
President, MoveOn.org
November 18, 2002
________________

You Are a Suspect
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html

WASHINGTON - If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before
passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine
subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every
Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every
academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make,
every trip you book and every event you attend -- all these
transactions and communications will go into what the Defense
Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial
sources, add every piece of information that government has
about you -- passport application, driver's license and bridge
toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from
nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus
the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and you have the supersnoop's
dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen
to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter
gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the
Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to
national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this
brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom
for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support
contras in Nicaragua...

Sobering words from Robert Fisk

Independent Argument
The message to us -- the West -- is simple and repeated three times. If we want to back George Bush, the "pharaoh of the age" -- and "pharaoh" is what Anwar Sadat's killers called the Egyptian president after his murder more than two decades ago -- we will pay a price. "What business do your governments have in allying themselves with the gang of criminals in the White House against Muslims...?" I have heard Bin Laden use that Arabic expression ifarbatu al-idjran twice before in conversation with me. "Gang of criminals". Which is what the West has called "al-Qa'ida".

So what comes next? A few weeks ago, I was asked by a member of an American university audience where I thought the next blow would come. The two words I thought of were "oil tanker". This came under the label "total speculation". But I didn't want to give anyone any ideas. So I said nothing. The following week, al-Qa'ida struck the supertanker Limburg off Yemen. Now I search my mind for worse thoughts. And I prefer to end my story.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian Weekly | Bush triumph fires a dynastic fantasy Republicans have another scenario in mind. A quick victory in Iraq produces a cheap oil bonanza for US companies, turbo-charging the economy in time for the 2004 elections. The president wins, and runs again with the ailing Dick Cheney, leaving no strong Republican challenger in 2008, when it will be the turn of Jeb Bush, the Florida governor who also pulled off a big win last week, to take up the dynastic mantle.

Joe Conason On Osama

Salon.com Politics | He's ba-a-ck!
Sorry, but Osama bin Laden is not merely "any one man." He is the self-proclaimed mass murderer of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, at large, presumably armed, and extremely dangerous. To pretend that Saddam Hussein poses the greater threat -- when he has been contained for a decade -? is to foster a truly monumental delusion.

Everything you think you know is wrong, Part XXXIII -- Police Sketches are Worthless

Police Sketches Rarely Look Like Suspects The media love sketches. Especially computer-generated composites handed out at press briefings. Never mind that those sketches barely resemble the perps the police are looking for. Ignore the fact DNA testing has proven the sketches wrong again and again. Forget the walking proof as one man after another is released from prison after being mistakenly arrested and convicted based on distorted descriptions from victims and eyewitnesses.

"Composite sketches have very limited value," said retired Chicago Police Detective Sgt. Paul Carroll from his home in Big Pine Key, Fla. "We use them a lot to put it on the street that we're trying to do something. It's good public relations. The sketches are often someone's imagination."

Link via Altercation.

My comment on Osama Bin Laden's audiotape:

Anybody know what happened to the dollar bills American kids were supposed to send W. to help the Afghan kids? What should we do to help Iraqi children? Prosthetics?

Good news -- wine is good for you!!!

Independent News A couple of glasses of red wine a day can lower the chances of senile dementia in later life but drinking beer increases the risk, a long-term study suggests. While regular but moderate wine drinkers were half as likely as non-drinkers to suffer from degenerative brain disorders such as Alzheimer's, the risk for beer drinkers doubled.

Spinsanity says that Bush is a liar.

Spinsanity - Making Bush tell the truth Facing a transformed political landscape, with a newly invigorated president and a war with Iraq looming, it's time to ask a crucial question: Will the media finally hold the president and his staff accountable for their repeated evasions and dissembling?

In Washington, the maxim used to be that you get in trouble not by lying, but by trying to cover up the lie when you get caught. Bush has turned this tired piece of conventional wisdom on its head, running an administration that almost always tries to cover its tracks with misinformation rather than admit to an error or a lie -- and often gets away with it.

Will reporters let the president continue this strategy in the second half of his term, especially when it comes to war with Iraq? The evidence isn't reassuring.

Krugman. He's smarter and a better writer than you or me.

Into the Wilderness
Clearly, we're going to have an extended sojourn in the political wilderness. Even criticizing the Bush administration's policies will become far more difficult. It will be hard even to find out what it's up to; the most secretive administration in the nation's history will now be even less forthcoming. And anyone who criticizes the administration, even on purely domestic issues, will be accused of lacking patriotism. After all, that strategy worked even against Senator Max Cleland, a genuine war hero who lost three limbs in his country's service.

What hasn't changed is the fundamental wrongness of this administration's direction. Too many pundits, confusing politics with policy — or engaging in sheer power worship — imagine that a party that wins a battle must be doing something right. But it ain't necessarily so. Political victory doesn't make a bad policy good; it doesn't make a lie the truth.

President George W. Bush -- Lying Sack of Shit

I agree completely with Eric Alterman. I have been blogging examples of the President's lying, and that of his administration. Does anyone remember the Al Qaed-Iraq Prague meeting? If teh case for war is so strong, why do they lie?

Bush Lies, Media Swallows
President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won't. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice. In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush's consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush's statements represented "embroidering key assertions" and were clearly "dubious, if not wrong." The President's "rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy," he has "taken some liberties," "omitted qualifiers" and "simply outpace[d] the facts." But "Bush lied"? Never.

Harry Potter -- fraud!!

Harry Potter - Pampered jock, patsy, fraud. By Chris Suellentrop
Harry Potter is a fraud, and the cult that has risen around him is based on a lie. Potter's claim to fame, his central accomplishment in life, is surviving a curse placed on him as an infant by the evil wizard Voldemort. As a result, the wizarding world celebrates the young Harry as "The Boy Who Lived." It's a curiously passive accomplishment, akin to "The Boy Who Showed Up," or "The Boy Who Never Took a Sick Day." And sure enough, just as none of us do anything special by slogging through yet another day, the infant Harry didn't do anything special by living. It was his mother who saved him, sacrificing her life for his.

The Independent on the "cost of the Democrats' failure"

Independent Argument But the Republicans' victories, sweet as they may be for them, are no cause for wider celebration. Suddenly all sorts of measures that could have been blocked in Congress can be pursued by the White House. As well as his tax cuts for the wealthy, Mr Bush can hope to see his conservative slate of judges for the Supreme Court approved and legislation to allow drilling for oil in Alaska's wildlife refuge. He might try to relax business regulation, although in the light of Enron and other scandals that remains problematic. And his so-called Homeland Security programme will continue to assault the civil liberties of American citizens.

Most dangerous of all, however, is what these elections mean for Mr Bush's foreign policy. This can be overstated, because few Democrats would in any case oppose the President at a time of war. But these results will undoubtedly embolden Mr Bush as he pushes the United Nations towards backing his plans for a war on Iraq. The incalculable damage that such a conflict would do to peace throughout the world, rather than the tally of governorships and Congressional seats, represents the true scale, and the real price, of the Democrats' failure.

After the election, it's like Festivus has come early!!

Festivus During the last few weeks in December when Festivus takes place, families and friends get together at the dinner table and have something called "the Airing of Grievances". Durning this time, we share with family and friends all the ways they had disappointed over the past year.

Our shift to the right.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Where America has elected to go, no one will follow Even if the process was messy, the outcome is unambiguous. Now that he controls all the political institutions - House, Senate, White House - Bush can move to infiltrate the judiciary. Dozens of conservative federal judges with lifetime tenure await confirmation they can now expect to get. This will permanently reorient constitutional trends. The slashing of forests and the drilling of wilderness, by timber and oil interests newly let loose, will be still less reversible. The rich men's tax cuts of 2001 will be secured against revision, and other tax cuts added. The 40 million Americans without health insurance can expect to remain that way. Axioms of inequality will be engraved deeper into the pillars of American society.

Eric Alterman on what went wrong.

Eric Alterman: Altercation Let us note as well, that the roll-over-and-play-dead DLC strategy for the Democrats was a total dud. They lost the South and lost the Senate. Speaking of yesterday, let’s quote Paul Krugman again: “Of course, some pundits tell you that not much is at stake in this particular election, that the parties aren’t really very different on the issues. I don’t know what planet they are living on: in reality, the parties are further apart than they have been since the 1930’s. The fact that anyone imagines otherwise is a tribute to the timidity of the Democrats, who are afraid to say what they really think, and the subterfuge of the Republicans, who show a disciplined willingness to pretend to hold positions they actually abhor.” The reason for this, which I don’t think Krugman explained, are two
* 1. Money
* 2. The so-called liberal media is actually in the pocket of conservatives.

Lean Left on what went wrong.

Lean Left
By not offering an alternative to Bush's horrible economic policy, by not offering an explicit condemnation of the laisze fair business practices that have resulted in so much corruption, by not attacking Bush as the partisan hack is he truly is, the Democrats were essentially waiting for a miracle to save them. You cannot get people to vote for you if you do not give them a reason to. Waiting for Bush to self-destruct is wishful thinking - the media in this country is simply too conservative to go after a conservative president on their own. Someone must beat the drum.

Now, for the little bit of good news. The Democrats have not yet begun to fight. Bush has essentially been handed a walk for the first two years of his presidency. More than likely, this disaster ends that walk. The process started with Iraq. More House Dems voted against the measure than for it, because we made it clear to them that principled opposition could work. The individual members have realized that appeasement is not working. Last night should have convinced the holdouts. If nothing else, the fact that Bush campaigned against every single Democrat who voted for his signature tax cut should make it perfectly clear that there is no point in going along with the President. "Me too, but nicer" did not work, and will not work. A blind man can see that, now.

Harold Meyerson on what went wrong

TAP: Web Feature: Debacle. by Harold Meyerson. November 6, 2002.
On what should have been the Democrats' defining issues, they endeavored to be indistinct. They could never bring themselves to oppose Bush's tax cut, his trillion-dollar handout to the rich, though that made it impossible for them to advocate any significant programs of their own. Nor could they bring themselves to oppose the White House's headlong charge into Iraq, though polling showed over two-thirds of the American people oppose a unilateral war. So Missouri's Jean Carnahan, Colorado's Tom Strickland, New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen, Georgia's Max Cleland and South Dakota's Tim Johnson -- Democratic Senate candidates in close races -- backed the president. All of them lost (though as I write, the South Dakota race may go to a recount).

Joe Conason on what went wrong.

Salon.com Politics | Joe Conason's Journal
A party that will not criticize the incumbent president cannot defeat him, now or two years from now. A party that has nothing to say about unfair tax breaks, a vanishing surplus and a looted economy cannot expect anyone to listen when it asks for votes. A party without passion or vision is hardly a political party at all. Even in their righteous defense of Social Security, Democrats too often sounded as if their chief concern was to preserve their own institutional position. Today the future looks grim for them because they blurred the purposes of their partisanship.

Daily Kos on what went wrong.

Daily Kos: Political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation
The Dems adopted a strategy of appeasement, and then watched Bush stab all of those Democrats that supported him on the tax cut, or on the Iraq war. All early indications are that the Dem base did not turn out. In NH, Shaheen couldn't even win Manchester! Gov. Barnes of Georgia -- often talked about as a future VP nominee -- lost what seemed like a safe seat to his GOP rival.

And why should the base turn out? Many on this site (not me) were concerned about the Dems' reliance on GOTV. There was no message, many Dems were falling over themselves attempting to appear friendly to Bush's agenda. So the question was, why would the Democratic base -- those most likely to turn out in a midterm election -- go out to vote if their party's candidate was doing his (or her) best to wear Republican stripes?

What kind of world do we live in where the governor of Virginia is a Democrat and the governor of Maryland is a Republican?

Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

But I repeat myself.

Is there any good news? I don't think so.
The Democrats in the Senate -- who I think need a new Minority Leader -- had better be the best obstructionists in the history of the place. It's time to play real hardball. Did the Repubs roll over for Clinton just because he won re-election in 1996? Not hardly. Obstruct, delay, fight. Make the bastards struggle for every wacko judge, handout to business, or insane tax cut. No compromises.
Look at what voting for the tax cut did for Cleland. Expect no gratitude, give no quarter.

Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

If there was a race that could be lost, the Democrats lost it. A Republican governor of Maryland? Impossible. Coleman beating Mondale. Unbelievable. The Republicans sweeping in South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Missouri. We have to have a Republican (Hutchinson) who shoots himself in the foot to lose.

Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.

Allies Find No Links Between Iraq, Al Qaeda
Saudi Arabia, officially a U.S. ally, has been deeply involved in the worldwide funding mechanism that helps sustain Al Qaeda operations as well as fundamentalist ideologues active in recruitment of terrorists and the theology of violence, European investigators said.

"If connections to a country are going to be the rationale, the Americans would have to bomb Saudi Arabia," a Spanish official said sarcastically.

More proof of the perversity of the universe.

Salon.com People | Mouthing off
What kind of person would want to remake a film like "Porky's"? A person like Howard Stern, apparently.

Stern has announced his intention to remake "Porky's" and -- perhaps even more alarmingly, though for different reasons -- "Rock 'n' Roll High School" under the heading "Howard Stern Presents ..."

"I think I represent what National Lampoon once meant to the teen audience," Stern tells Variety.

It is a sobering thought that Walter Mondale could be Strom Thurmond's son.

Everyone should immediately go to Eschaton and read his take on an interview of John Stewart by Howie Kurtz, The Washington Post and CNN's Republican apologist, I mean, media critic.

I'm on a new server. No frames!

Ibrahim is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (about as mainstream and establishment an institution as there is) and a former reporter for the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

IHT Article Print Page
President George W. Bush's war is fueled by two things: bolstering the president's popularity as he attempts to ride on the natural wave of American patriotism unleashed by the criminal attacks of Sept. 11; and a misguided temptation to get more oil out of the Middle East by turning a ''friendly" Iraq into a private American oil pumping station.

Both will backfire and may indeed cost this president and his warmongering cabinet their sought-after second term. ...


The fact that Saddam Hussein tortures, jails and oppresses his people, which Bush keeps repeating in every speech, has been going on for 30 years without disturbing Americans. Many countries, including the Russians in Chechnya , the Chinese in Tibet and elsewhere, and scores of American friends and allies including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, to mention just a few, repress their people's freedom.

When Saddam took on Iran in 1980 the United States joined in attacking the Iranian navy and destroyed Iranian off-shore oil platforms, crippling Iran's economy and making sure he survived the war he started. In 1991, the first President Bush saved Saddam again when the uprising against him turned into an uncontrolled civil war.

So all the talk about spreading democracy and changing the whole Middle East, starting with Iraq, does not hold water. The United States, obsessed with oil and something called "regime change," wants to create a totally pro-American Middle East. The problem is that it will not work. You don't impose democracy by installing an occupying power in a region that has no tradition for it.

One more reason not to go to war.

What a stagnant economy doesn't need is higher oil prices. But that is the inevitable result of the rush to war. Don't believe me? Read this article from Strategic Forecasting, LLC.

Strategic Forecasting, LLC
While the global energy picture has changed much since 1990, one thing is certain: Once it becomes apparent that Washington will settle for nothing less than the ouster of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, oil prices will spike.

During Desert Shield, Brent crude shot up more than $20 from its levels on Aug. 1, 1990 -- the day before Iraq invaded Kuwait. And in February 2002, just before the Bush administration commenced its warmongering against Iraq and suicide bombings began to surge in the Middle East, Brent prices were clustered around the $20 mark. A return to $40 per barrel is highly likely considering Washington's steady march back toward the Middle East.