Fake Opposition Democrats

Obama Has Vindicated the Heinous Bush/Cheney Policies

2011-01-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

Aside from the repressiveness of the policies themselves, there are three highly significant and enduring harms from Obama's behavior.

First, it creates the impression that Republicans were right all along in the Bush-era War on Terror debates and Democratic critics were wrong. The same theme is constantly sounded by conservatives who point out Obama's continuation of these policies: that he criticized those policies as a candidate out of ignorance and partisan advantage, but once he became President, he realized they were right as a result of accessing the relevant classified information and needing to keep the country safe from the Terrorist threat. (snip)

Second, Obama has single-handedly eliminated virtually all mainstream debate over these War on Terror policies. At least during the Bush years, we had one party which steadfastly supported them but one party which claimed (albeit not very persuasively) to vehemently oppose them. At least there was a pretense of vigorous debate over their legality, morality, efficacy, and compatibility with our national values.

Those debates are no more. Even the hardest-core right-wing polemicists -- Gen. Hayden, the Heritage Foundation, Dick Cheney -- now praise Obama's actions in these areas. Opposition from national Democrats has faded away to almost complete nonexistence now that it's a Democratic President doing these things. What was once viewed as the signature of Bush/Cheney radicalism is now official, bipartisan Washington consensus: the policies equally of both parties and all Serious people. Thanks to Barack Obama, this architecture is firmly embedded in place and invulnerable to meaningful political challenge.

Third, Obama's embrace of these policies has completely rehabilitated the reputations and standing of the Bush officials responsible for them. (snip)

Obama has won the War on Terror debate -- for the American Right. And as Dick Cheney's interview last night demonstrates, they're every bit as appreciative as they should be.

Depressing!

Steny Hoyer's Turnabout on Guantanamo

2010-07-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Uggh:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, today:

Gitmo shut-down not a priority, top Dem says

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer acknowledged Tuesday that closing down the Guantanamo Bay prison is not a top priority for congressional Democrats.

In response to a question from a reporter about where shutting down Gitmo stands, Hoyer said, "I think that's not an item, as you point out, of real current discussion. There's some very big issues confronting us - dealing with growing the economy and Iraq and Afghanistan."

Hoyer added, "I think you're not going to see it discussed very broadly in the near term."

How can it be that it's not a priority to end something which -- as Hoyer put it in 2007 -- "threatens the safety of U.S. citizens and military personnel detained abroad"? Why would Democrats like Hoyer be so willing to jeopardize the safety of American citizens and the lives of Our Troops abroad by de-prioritizing something which (at least if the 2007 Hoyer was to be believed) directly threatens them? Also, we had wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2007 along with a whole variety of other problems -- if those issues now justify de-prioritizing the closing of Guantanamo, why wasn't that also true in 2007 when Hoyer (and most other Democrats ) were vocally demanding that Bush close the camp?
This, needless to say, is par for the course: policies which establishment Democrats pretended to vehemently oppose when out of power magically transformed into policies they embrace when in power. Ironically, in response to the 2007 Hoyer letter, a Bush spokesperson "said the letter was received and noted that Bush has said he wants to close Guantanamo. 'A number of steps need to take place before that can happen, and we're continuing to work on those,' she said." Sound familiar?

Catering to the Evil Status Quo When They Don't Have To

2010-06-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

Obama blatantly supports "centrist" Rethuglican-lite candidate Blanche Lincoln, despite putative desire to have more liberal Democratic senators.

And still worth pointing out how Obama has completely blocked any justice for Bush administration war-crimes, and is certainly involved in his own war-crimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In a Worse Place with Obama

2010-04-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

Depressing:

...we've seen the powers of the president expand, with the Obama administration asserting the right to assassinate American citizens without any due process or finding of guilt whatsoever.

From a civil libertarian point of view, we're in a much worse place than we were during the Bush administration, when Democrats were willing to oppose Bush's expansive claims of executive authority. Now we have only muted criticism from Democratic legislators and hysterical cries from Republicans that Obama isn't going far enough.

Dems and the Health Care Reform "Public Option"

2010-03-13T13:33:00.001-08:00

This is very reminiscent of Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football-- i.e. the Dems are using the public option as a scam to lure liberals into supporting HCR-- but have long ago promised secretly not to enact it.

Matt Taibbi: Obama's Big Sellout

2009-12-11T18:03:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.

How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.

'Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."

Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama's election.

That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama's chief advisers during the campaign, didn't make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive "a Nobel Prize — for evil."

But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama's inner circle — and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president's new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama's biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters — chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).

Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama's economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat who happens to be Bob Rubin's son. At the time, Jamie's dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments...
(snip)

"The investment community feels very put-upon," Fass explained. "They feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown."

Which makes sense. Shit, who could blame the investment community for the meltdown? What kind of assholes are we to put any of this on them?

This is the kind of person who is working for the Obama administration, which makes it unsurprising that we're getting no real reform of the finance industry. There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a "moral hazard" creeping over his administration.

"The obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted," Volcker told Congress in September, expressing concerns about all the regulatory loopholes in Frank's bill. "Ultimately, the possibility of further crises — even greater crises — will increase."

What's most troubling is that we don't know if Obama has changed, or if the influence of Wall Street is simply a fundamental and ineradicable element of our electoral system. What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's our fault, for thinking he was different.

Bush's Third Term? You're Living It

2009-09-02T18:39:00.000-07:00

By David Swanson

September 02, 2009 "TomDispatch" --- It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture it?

There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

Etc.

"The Curious Case of the Establishment Liberal: Condemning Torture, Condoning Mass Murder"

2009-08-14T04:49:00.000-07:00

A peculiar notion has arisen of late, maintaining that things like torture, domestic spying and illegal wars are all attributable to the Right -- namely, the administration of President George W. Bush -- and are in fact historical anomalies, not at all in keeping with the traditions of these great United States. The idea that war crimes and civil liberties violations are strictly conservative affairs is particularly comforting to wide-eyed Democrats in awe of America’s First Black President ™, and it affords the heirs to the same liberal establishment which brought us Vietnam and Hiroshima another opportunity to grandstand about their commitment to human rights even as the noble humanitarian Barack Obama continues to extra-judicially murder foreigners with unmanned drones. Unfortunately for partisan Democrats – and even more so the victims of U.S. exceptionalism – American imperialism and its associated evils have long enjoyed bipartisan backing, though liberals tend to be somewhat more sheepish about their support for killing, torturing and maiming poor people overseas.

The torture debate has provided the liberals of the establishment punditocracy but the latest opportunity to claim human rights violations are an aberration -- a regrettable “mistake” in the words of Obama -- the use of which was relegated to an eight year span wherein ignoble right-wingers broke with past tradition and authorized a whole host of evils that would make their predecessors in power turn in their graves. Though abhorrent, the message is that these crimes are a departure from the past, when prisoners of war and others in the U.S. government's possession were presumably set up at the Four Seasons and given a lollipop and a court-appointed attorney.

While that take on history is at odds with reality – the U.S. government's torture school for Latin American human rights abusers in training, the School of the Americas, for instance, was started under the watch of liberal icon Harry Truman – it serves a useful purpose in allowing establishment liberals the opportunity to decry the crimes of their right-wing foes with a forceful moral indignation that would appear ridiculous if they acknowledged the long-running, bipartisan nature of the U.S. empire's many transgressions.

"[R]emember that a liberal's only passion is not to do good but to look good” writes Princeton University mathematics professor Bernard Chazelle. In a post at the blog A Tiny Revolution, Chazelle helpfully reminds liberals that the use of torture did not begin with George W. Bush's disastrous presidency and did not end with Barack Obama's glorious ascension to the White House, contrary to popular lore. Rather, Chazelle notes, committed humanitarians from LBJ to Ronald Reagan repeatedly sanctioned its use in places from Vietnam to El Salvador, though past sainted leaders at least had the courtesy to "always [make] sure we could blame a nonwhite guy with a funny accent," thus helping maintain the fictional-if-widespread belief that the American state really is a force for good in the world and at home, and not actually an imperial, cancerous impediment to progress.

Yet even after their best attempts to pretend crimes committed by self-styled progressive Democrats are excusable or never even happened, liberal denunciations of torture appear none the more credible in light of their general acceptance for other war crimes, such as the aforementioned Truman's brave decision to incinerate hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a decision, it should repeatedly be noted, that was opposed by Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, casting doubt on the oft-debunked claims it was necessary to stave off the deaths of even more American soldiers (as if that would justify the deliberate and repeated killing of civilians).

The PTB and their Op-Plans: Bush Op-Plan vs. Obama Op-Plan -- and The Future

2009-05-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

By The Anonymous Physicist

Bush is a Republican. Obama is a Democrat.

Bush is a moron, Obama is very intelligent.

Bush was a conservative, Obama is a liberal.

Bush only cared about the wealthy and elite. Obama cares about everyone.

Bush didn’t know/comprehend/care about the law. Obama is a Consitutional scholar—surely he will govern in a Constitutional manner.

Bush, and lackeys, OKed waterboarding, rape, sodomy. Obama says waterboarding is torture and he is banning it. (Note that I think it is possible that ALL the monstrosities perpetrated on e.g., Abu Ghraib prisoners, were OKed by the highest authorities in the Bush Administration, because of the following logic. In any jail, instances of such barbaric acts may occur, but how many times have you heard that the perpetrators felt safe enough to take pictures, and even post some of them on the internet? IMO, they were initially told that whatever foul acts they carried out were sanctioned by the highest American authorities.)

Bush and his lackeys, like Condoleeza Rice, claim if the President ordered a technique to be used, then it is legal, and not torture. Obama is now asking Congress to create a “legal regime” for the things he wishes to set in place things that are in fact unconstitutional. In other words--

Bush’s Op-Plan was that the “President’s ordering something, ipso facto makes it legal.”

The Obama Op-Plan now is to claim that if Congress-- or "if Congress PLUS the President-- orders something, that ipso facto makes it legal", regardless of what the Constitution says.

Obama wouldn’t have publicly cited this new Op-Plan if he didn’t have the Democrats/Traitors in Congress lined up to go along! Bush failed to obtain indefinite detention. Now BECAUSE OF THE ABOVE clever, SEQUENTIAL Double Op-Plan (a variation of good cop, bad cop), Obama seems to have Congress with him on this! Thus we are in the midst of a blatant, final, total destruction of the Constitution. Note— unlike many— I hold that the Constitution was always trampled upon in the USA, by the elite/PTB. This is demonstrated by the many acts of Presidential assassinations, poisoning of citizens, treatment of minorities, waging undeclared, unconstitutional wars, and interference in foreign countries-- and how the elite/PTB always got away with these murderous, unconstitutional acts. The difference between these last nine years-- with BOTH the Bush and Obama Op-Plans-- and the earlier history of this nation, is that the total destruction of Constitutonal rights and freedoms is now OPENLY proclaimed with the usual ruse of being done to “counter terrorism” and “safeguard the nation.”

Alas, the framers of the Constitution likely— being Freemasons etc.— put (at least) one fatal flaw in to the Constitution. They allowed Article I, Section 9, which states that “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Now “public safety” has morphed into “National Security.” And national security has become the excuse for not only terminating Habeas Corpus, but for shredding the entire Constitution. Again, behind the scenes-- in case they would be charged with treason-- I believe those who committed such acts as illegal wars and assassinations of Presidents, have always proclaimed that their acts were done in the interest of “national security” or “public safety.”

This article details a related and remarkable case in the federal courts right now. Here the Obama Justice Dept. is continuing an unconstitutional and anti-Constitutional claim against an Islamic group that was wiretapped illegally. First the history of this matter. After the Church Senate Committee, in the early 1970’s, uncovered massive, illegal spying on Americans by the CIA and other federal agencies, the Carter Administration saw the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. The Feds must apply to this Court for prior approval to wiretap any Americans it wants to. The Court is itself virtually totally corrupt in that its members have approved every single request that was sent to it. With the exception of but one judge who resigned from it, its members are all likely intel agents or assets themselves. The case before U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco, involves the revelation that the Bush Administration spied on the Islamic Group without applying to the FISA Court-- which is a serious violation of federal law. I assert this is commonplace! From my own experience, after I once spoke publicly showing how President Kennedy’s Secret Service driver, William Greer blew Kennedy’s brains out after he first accidentally shot Connally (all of which can be seen and heard on audio-added Zapruder film), I was heavily wiretapped and then assaulted, and my home broken into and a mercury compound placed all over it. I seriously doubt that the federal Gestapo agencies involved whether CIA, FBI, NSA, Secret Service, other, or all of the above, went through the FISA Court to ask to wiretap me, before they did, and are. The USA is a totally lawless land, and perhaps always has been. But the remarkable thing in the case before Judge Walker now is that the Obama Regime is actually claiming that since the wiretapping of the Islamic Group was found out accidentally, and since the Bush Regime did not officially admit to it, and did not apply through official channels (the FISA Court), the Justice System cannot adjudicate the matter! They are attempting to render impotent, or non-existent, the entire third branch of the Federal Gov’t-- which has always acted as an interpreter and counter to any attempted power grab by the other two branches of the Federal Govt. So the Obama Op in this matter is continuing the Bush Op of claiming a supreme executive branch with no oversight from the Judiciary-- when it cries “national security.” Here they are OPENLY claiming what I have asserted assassins and traitors, in control of the American federal regime, have always claimed. When they (illegally) kill a President or (illegally) wiretap, poison or kill a citizen, and then merely yell “national security,” they want not to be charged, tried, or judged for their crimes. And they want NOW TO MAKE THIS OPENLY “LEGAL” and NOT SUBJECT TO OVERSIGHT OR CRIMINAL CHARGES. In other words, the Bush-Obama Op is to have an openly, and admittedly, total Supreme Gestapo Regime.

Ultimately, as many have realized, we have had the same overall Op-Plan as Nazi Germany did. The Nazi Regime itself burned down their Reichstag [government] building as a ruse for “needing” to eradicate their constitution and “more effectively counter terrorism”; and officially blamed a patsy. In the USA, the Regime nuked the World Trade Center, had a China Syndrome Aftermath there for six months— until the radioactive fragments were carted away— and blamed members of an ethnic group and a world-wide religion, so as to have PERENNIAL war, and the destruction of constitutional rights and freedoms. There are several differences between the U.S. and German Nazi devolutions into mass torture, global war and loss of rights and freedoms for their citizenries. The American people have had the benefit of previously observing this, as recent German history. And the Nazi Regime only partook in these acts AFTER publicly creating mass concentration camps, and taking away the guns of the citizenry.

So in the U.S., despite having the benefit or observing the same Op-Plan just a few decades earlier in Germany, and despite still having the tools to effect change as the founders crucially created the second Amendment for the people to fight encroaching tyranny, the American people-- as nearly all Germans did-- do not act, they just wait and hope…

The Bush-Obama controllers-- and yes, I ask that we henceforth put these two Administrations together as one-- apparently still fear to try to get the 100 million legal guns, owned by the citizens, removed from them. This indicates they fear they might lose in a blatant confrontation this way. Ultimately it may come down to a mass uprising of the armed citizenry, and/or the people in the military/intel agencies acquiring some guts (perhaps for the first time), and acting on their oaths to defend the Constitution against all enemies-- especially the domestic terrorists, in seeming total control since their traitorous acts on November 22, 1963. All arbitrary laws recently enacted against terrorists could be employed against the Bush-Obama Cabal, and also against those in the Congress and Supreme Court who also are part of the treason against the American people and the Constitution. Citizens of other countries must try to get their own gov’ts to charge the Bush-Obama Cabal with: crimes against humanity, torture, waging aggressive war, genocide, and other crimes.

If the people of the USA ever wake up and act-- before it is too late-- and fight back and win, a new Constitution would need to be created that would not have any “exception clause” allowing for the negation of the rest of the Constitution for reasons of “public safety” or “national security.” INSTEAD, it would contain clauses that ENFORCED the AUTOMATIC examination, detention and trial-- for such acts as assassinations or “suicides” of high govt officials, seeming terrorist acts against the citizenry, even attacks from other nations (note the Pearl Harbor set-up)-- of the highest benefiting government officials themselves. Historically, false-flag Ops have virtually always been perpetrated by such regimes as the U.S., the U.K, and Nazi Germany. These regimes carried out terrorist acts themselves; and blamed innocent patsies to facilitate waging war on other innocents; and created a terror regime in their own land. Clauses and methods, to counter this common blueprint of the PTB, need to be incorporated into a new Constitution.

Doing nothing only emboldens our terrorist-rulers more, as the recent Obama plan to install a new “legal regime” to allow permanent detention proves. Note the clever paradox: the use of the word “regime,” and not e.g. “administration,” is flaunting the illegality of it; yet it is coupled with the word “legal”. Perhaps we all need to follow the example of Michael Collins of Ireland. Against all odds, he used great cunning and daring to devise methods to defeat the British terrorist regime who occupied his land, and mass-exterminated his people, for nearly 1000 years. I urge everyone to read up on him, see the movie, and do as he did-- ACT.

And, as he did, try to get people in the military and/or intel agencies to join you. Try to get these people to obey their oath and remove the present, terrorist regime that has assassinated our rightful Presidents, mass murdered our fellow citizens in false-flag operations, and who are now blatently removing the last vestiges of our innate rights and freedoms. The sequential Bush-Obama Op-Plan was likely thought up a long time ago. As I indicated recently, the likely, threatened shoot-down of Obama aboard Air Force One on April 27, signaled his total acquiescence, and the likelihood of him going all out to please his masters from now on. So, in a sense, this obscene, blatant, new tactic of trying to create a “legal regime,” in cahoots with the Congress, for indefinite detention of human beings— who may well be innocent patsies who could prove that Al-Qaeda is Al-CIA-duh— was predicted.

President Obama-- if he ever did-- will not likely ever publicly utter another word of truth. National leaders all over the world are not allowed to utter a public word of truth. BTW, if you haven’t seen it before, here is video proof of the alteration, by the BBC (MI5) of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto saying Omar Sheikh (likely Pakistani Intel asset— which means run by MI6) had killed Osama Bin Laden. This was two months before Bhutto herself was assassinated. And it appears that Bhutto was forced to retract this in her last two months; but perhaps the PTB saw that they could never trust her again not to speak some occasional truth.

Whether Dick Cheney ordered the Bhutto hit-- as some claimed Seymour Hersh said and then retracted-- or more likely the hit was ordered by London, is not the point here. Her stating that the alleged leader of the (fictional) terror group Al-Qaeda [Al-CIA-duh] had been dead for some time, likely got her killed by British (or American) controlled assets in place. America’s, and Britain’s, bogus, perennial wars on terror would be untenable if the alleged leader of the alleged main terrorist group is acknowledged to be dead. And if the entire, alleged, foreign, bogeyman group is acknowledged to be fictional, or COMPOSED ENTIRELY OF DEAD PEOPLE, the “terrorist” acts committed on American or British soil would be realized, by their citizenries, to have been committed by their own regimes.

Obama’s “second chance” of not getting shot out of the air, and subsequent total cave-in is similar to Reagan’s acquiescence to GHW Bush’s controlling the Presidency, after Reagan was allowed to survive his attempted assassination. President Kennedy, on the other hand, did not cave in after the Bay of Pigs set-up, and paid the ultimate price. We are seeing Obama’s true colors, and the puppet strings behind them. Things may be far worse now, because-- we have had a bunch of mostly traitorous, fellow Democrats take over the Congress, who will now try to give Obama, and his masters, this new coveted “legal regime.” Unless the people, or the state gov’ts, or the military, step up and refuse to go along, and instead fight back.

Life won’t be worth living in this coming total Gestapo-land. Neither can an honest or moral person allow his/her “Govt” to continue to mass murder his/her fellow citizens in more false-flag operations, or to wantonly rape, plunder and mass murder around the world in his/her name. The German Nazi Regime was terminated by the British-American Regime-- that actually created, and emplaced it. Terminating the terrorist British-American regime itself can only come from within.

(Originally posted here)

Democrats Offer Weak Support to Dawn Johnsen, Stronger Support to Grotesque Men Like Spector, Hayden, Mukasey and Gonzales

2009-05-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

Greenwald again:

One of the best things Barack Obama has done since being elected President was selecting Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Counsel -- the office of Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Stephen Bradbury, torture memos, and theories of presidential omnipotence. Johnsen expressed outrage over the extremism and lawlessness of the Bush administration not (like most political and media elites) in the last few weeks when doing so was easy and irrelevant, but did so loudly and continuously while those crimes were actually taking place. Her arguments were grounded in one simple belief: that the duty of the OLC is to tell the President when his desired policies are unconstitutional or otherwise illegal. But as a vivid reflection of how perverse Washington culture is, those attributes -- outrage over high-level government extremism and criminality, and a belief in the rule of law -- are apparently disqualifying....

It's unclear what the White House or the Democratic leadership have done, if anything, to support Johnsen's nomination (Christy Hardin Smith suggests that the answer is "nothing"), but what's not unclear is that they have lent their absolute, unconditional support for Arlen Specter's re-election in a blue-state Senate seat that could easily be filled by someone infinitely better than Specter. It's rather irrational to repeatedly complain about one's inability to "get 60 votes" when one simultaneously does everything possible to ensure the continuous re-election of the alleged obstructionists. It's almost enough to make one believe that the inability to "get 60 votes" to support their claimed agenda is a desired, rather than lamentable, state of affairs.

The Senate that is refusing to confirm Dawn Johnsen is the same Senate that confirmed Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA Director -- with overwhelming Democratic support -- even after it was revealed that he oversaw Bush's illegal NSA spying program. It's the same Senate that confirmed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General -- with substantial Democratic support -- even once everyone knew that he had played a key role in Bush's torture program. It's the same Senate that -- thanks to Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer -- confirmed Michael Mukasey as Attorney General even after he refused to say whether waterboarding was torture and endorsed some of the most extremist presidential powers ever asserted in the U.S.

Obama Continues Bush Policies on Terrorism

2009-05-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

Greenwald:

In his New Republic article today, Goldsmith reviews what he calls the "eleven essential elements" of "the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy" and documents how -- with only a couple of minor exceptions -- Obama has embraced all of them. In those cases where Obama has purported to "change" these elements, those changes are almost all symbolic and ceremonial, and the few changes that have any substance to them (banning the already-empty CIA black sites and prohibiting no-longer-authorized torture techniques) are far less substantial than Obama officials purport. None of Goldsmith's analysis is grounded in the proposition that Obama hasn't yet acted to change Bush policies, thus rendering a nonsequitur the response that "Obama needs more time; it's only been 4 months." Goldsmith is describing affirmative steps Obama has already announced to adopt the core Bush "terrorism" policies.

The Arlen Spector Switch

2009-04-30T05:10:00.000-07:00

Greenwald:

(2) Democrats will understandably celebrate today’s announcement, but beyond the questions of raw political power, it is mystifying why they would want to build their majority by embracing politicians who reject most of their ostensible views.
Reports today suggest that Democratic officials promised Specter that the party establishment would support him, rather than a real Democrat, in a primary. If true, few events more vividly illustrate the complete lack of core beliefs of Democratic leaders, as well as the rapidly diminishing differences between the parties. Why would Democrats want a full-blooded Republican representing them in the blue state of Pennsylvania? Specter is highly likely to reprise the Joe Lieberman role for Democrats: a “Democrat” who leads the way in criticizing and blocking Democratic initiatives, forcing the party still further towards Republican policies.
(3) Arlen Specter is one of the worst, most soul-less, most belief-free individuals in politics. The moment most vividly illustrating what Specter is: prior to the vote on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, he went to the floor of the Senate and said what the bill "seeks to do is set back basic rights by some 900 years" and is "patently unconstitutional on its face." He then proceeded to vote YES on the bill's passage.
(4) Today is the best day to watch Fox News since the election -- mass grieving flavored by impotent bitterness.

Stonewalling Torture Investigation

2009-04-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

April 24, 2009
Obama Resisting Push for Interrogation Panel
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — The White House and the Democratic leadership in the Senate signaled on Thursday that they would block for now any effort to establish an independent commission to investigate the Bush administration’s approval of harsh interrogation techniques.

In doing so, they sought to reduce pressure for a full inquiry — from, among others, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi — that has grown more intense since President Obama suggested on Tuesday that he would be open to such an investigation. While the White House has contended that Mr. Obama never actively supported an inquiry, his firmer opposition to the possibility, communicated to Congressional leaders in meetings on Wednesday night and Thursday, represented a shift in emphasis.

Meeting with the Democratic leadership on Wednesday night, Mr. Obama said a special inquiry would steal time and energy from his policy agenda, and could mushroom into a wider distraction looking back at the Bush years, people briefed on the discussion said. Mr. Obama, they said, repeated much the same message on Thursday at a bipartisan meeting with Congressional leaders.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and other top Senate Democrats endorsed Mr. Obama’s view on Thursday, telling reporters at a news conference at the Capitol that they preferred to wait for the results of an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee expected late this year

“I think it would be very unwise, from my perspective, to start having commissions, boards, tribunals, until we find out what the facts are,” Mr. Reid said. “And I don’t know a better way of getting the facts than through the Intelligence Committee. I think that’s a pretty good way to do it.”

At the White House, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said that it was “not a time for retribution” and that “we’re all best suited looking forward.”

Glenn Greenwald has the definitive rundown on this.

The Lieberman Outrage

2008-11-13T05:53:00.000-08:00

Greenwald:

Though it hasn't happened yet, it is appearing increasingly likely that Senate Democrats -- led by Barack Obama (who seems to be playing a much more active role in all of this than his spokesperson yesterday suggested) -- are going to choose Joe Lieberman to serve as their Chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the next Congress. If that happens, there will be one important silver lining: it will remind many people, who have understandably forgotten due to the euphoria last week, exactly what most Beltway Democrats are, what their priorities and beliefs are, and to whose opinions and concerns they do and do not pay attention.
It is worth remembering that the Democrats who are going to exert dominant political control are the same ones who have provoked so much scorn -- rightfully so -- over the last several years, and particularly since 2006. This is the same Democratic Party leadership which funded the Iraq War without conditions (and voted to authorize it in the first place); massively expanded the President's warrantless eavesdropping powers; immunized lawbreaking telecoms; enacted the Patriot Act and then renewed it with virtually no changes; didn't even bother to mount a filibuster to stop the Military Commissions Act; refrained from pursuing any meaningful investigations of Bush lawbreaking; confirmed every last extremist Bush nominee, from Michael McConnell to Michael Mukasey; acquiesced to even the worst and most lawless Bush policies when they were briefed on them; and on and on and on. None of that has changed. That is still who they are.
Joe Lieberman didn't merely campaign against Barack Obama and several other Democrats. That's the least of his sins. He was not only among the most vocal supporters of the Iraq War, but at least as bad, has endorsed and supported every last radical Bush policy to expand executive power and surveillance activities while destroying core constitutional liberties and checks and balances. He used his Chairmanship for only one purpose: to block oversight into Bush scandals and corruption. He has spouted the most defamatory attacks, not only against Barack Obama, but against war opponents generally. More significantly still, Democrats in his own state -- his own constituents -- booted him out of the party, no longer wanting to be represented by him.
That is who Senate Democrats appear well on their way to selecting to serve as their Chairman of Homeland Security, of all committees. That's because nothing that Lieberman has done really bothers them. Endorsing the Iraq War and the full panoply of radical Bush policies isn't disqualifying in the least because so many of them also endorsed that and support it, or, at the very least, it's not a priority for them. They care even less what their "base" thinks, what the so-called "Left" wants. Few things in this world are less likely than them ever taking even a mild stand -- such as stripping Lieberman of his Chair -- in order to defend some sort of political principle, or to punish ineptitude, or to announce that there are certain lines to the Right that can't be crossed. They don't do that. They never have. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that they won't now.

Democrats Intent on NOT Impeaching Bush

2008-07-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

After spending long hours, sometimes late into the night, making his case for impeachment before a nearly barren House chamber, Rep. Dennis Kucinich finally got more of an audience for his case against President Bush Friday.

Even though Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers insisted early on that the panel's evaluation of Bush's "imperial presidency" was decidedly not an impeachment hearing, the prospect was not far from many minds during the six hours of testimony.

Kucinich formally introduced his articles of impeachment into the record of the committees proceedings -- although he did not utter the dreaded I-word, instead referring to the resolutions by their more legalistic titles "H. Res. 333, H. Res. 1258 and H. Res. 1345."

A committee aide tells RAW STORY that members were cautioned to abide by the Rules of the House, which prohibit lawmakers from "impugning" the president's character during official debate. Some apparently took this to mean they could not explicitly call for Bush' impeachment. None of this would stop Republicans from accusing the committee's majority of seeking just that.

The prepared text of Conyers opening remarks referred to Congress's "power to impeach." When he spoke before the committee, Conyers modified that line to the "power to remove through the constitutional process" officials who abused their powers.

(snip)

"Based on all of the things this administration has done, it is probably the most impeachable administration in the history of America,” said Hinchey, who appeared alongside Kucinich and North Carolina Reps. Walter Jones and Brad Miller.

The New York lawmaker even accused the administration of deliberately letting America's No. 1 enemy escape after 9/11.

"I think it is very clear they did not want to capture bin Laden," Hinchey told the committee.

That Hinchey referred to "they" was no accident. House rules forbid direct attacks on the president's individual character or motives, so most of the witnesses were sure to couch their criticisms as aimed at members of the administration generally.

If Today’s Congress Presided During Watergate

2008-07-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

Mike Luckovich:

The Wonderful Progress of the Democratic Congress

2008-07-15T16:50:00.000-07:00

In the 2006 mid-term elections, Americans handed The Democratic Party a sweeping, staggering, and historic victory -- as the GOP was removed from power and Democrats given control over both the House and Senate. It marked only the third time in the last 60 years that there was a change in control of the Congress. The Democrats defeated six GOP Senators, and picked up 31 House seats. Six Governorships switched from the GOP to the Democrats. Not one single Democratic incumbent in Congress and not one Democratic Governor lost -- only the second time in U.S. history in which one of the major parties failed to defeat even a single Congressional incumbent from the other party.

Since that overwhelming Democratic victory, this is what the Democratic-led Congress has done:

* Repeatedly funded -- at the White House's insistence -- the Iraq War without conditions;

* Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- Jim Webb's bill to increase the intervals between deployments for U.S. troops;

* Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- a bill to restore habeas corpus, which had been abolished by the Military Commissions Act, enacted before the 2006 election with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support;

* Enacted -- at the White House's insistence and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous Republican support
-- the so-called Protect America Act, vesting the President with extreme new warrantless eavesdropping powers;

* Overwhelmingly approved the Senate's Kyl-Lieberman Resolution, to declare parts of the Iranian Government a "terrorist organization," an extremely belligerent resolution modeled after those which made "regime change" the official U.S. Government position towards Iraq;

* Deleted from a pending bill -- at the direction of the House Democratic leadership and at the insistence of the White House -- a provision merely to require Congressional approval before the Bush administration can attack Iran;

* Overwhelmingly enacted -- at the White House's insistence, and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support -- the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008," to vest the President with broad new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, all but putting an end to any chance for a real investigation and judicial adjudication of the Bush administration's illegal NSA spying program;

* Confirmed, with the indispensable support of two key Democratic Senators, Bush's nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, despite his support for radical Bush theories of executive power and his refusal to oppose torture;

* Stood by passively and impotently while Bush officials flagrantly ignored their Subpoenas and refused to comply with their investigations.

Big Big Day for the Fake Opposition Dems

2008-06-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Jun 19, 2008 19:48 EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House Thursday approved enough new money to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for another year, while abandoning attempts to set deadlines opposed by President Bush for withdrawing American combat troops.

By a vote of 268-155, the House approved the funding for the two wars. Most of the $161.8 billion the Pentagon will get, which is slightly less than Bush requested, will be used to fight in Iraq.

Published: June 20, 2008

WASHINGTON — After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s program of eavesdropping without warrants after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The deal, expanding the government’s powers to spy on terrorism suspects in some major respects, would strengthen the ability of intelligence officials to eavesdrop on foreign targets. It would also allow them to conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined that important national security information would otherwise be lost. If approved, as appears likely, the agreement would be the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years.

Glenzilla has more here and here on the disgusting wiretapping and telecom immunity deal and the outrageous capitulation to Bush and the Republicans.

Pelosi Is Evil

2008-06-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is proving to be the surprise O. Henry ending to last November's elections. The American voters gave Democrats clear control of Congress, rebuked President George W. Bush, and voiced an unequivocal public craving to trade in customary narrow-minded politics for something more inspiring. Yet motivated by partisan concerns over the 2008 elections, the new speaker is following President Bush around like a sheep while he solidifies an imperial presidency and diminishes the Congress into irrelevancy. Just look at the latest ACLU advertisement targeting Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The only thing Pelosi has retained for the Congress is small-minded earmarks to attract political contributions.

If Pelosi persists in her imperious, mean-spirited, and myopic thinking in disregard of her oath to support and defend the Constitution, members of the House should replace her with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

According to public opinion polling, the percentage of voters supporting the impeachments of both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are now approximately 45 and 54 percent, respectively. Most Americans instinctively feel the president is an untrustworthy steward of the Constitution's checks and balances because, among other things, he flouts laws, prohibits White House aides from testifying before Congress, consistently defends an attorney general who is an inveterate liar, and detains citizens and noncitizens indefinitely as enemy combatants on his say-so alone. The prevailing barometer of acute public dissatisfaction with the White House surpasses the corresponding disaffection with President Richard M. Nixon when the Senate Watergate hearings began in May 1973. And Mr. Nixon had recently trounced Sen. George McGovern in the 1972 elections, winning 49 states.

Fake Opposition Democrats: Once More-- with Even More Feeling

2008-04-10T10:16:00.001-07:00

Chris Floyd:

If you have some kind of problem with the President of the United States being able to order his flunkies to throw acid on a naked, chained-up captive -- who might have been sold into custody by a bounty hunter or rounded up in a random sweep or denounced by a business rival or snatched off a city street for having the wrong name, the wrong religion, the wrong skin; if for some reason it bothers your delicate liberal sensibilities that the President of the United States claims the power to hold any person on earth for as long as he likes, on no evidence or charges at all, and then slit the captive's ear or piss down his throat -- or grind the testicles of prisoner's five-year-old child under a bootheel; if you're such a big girl's blouse that you get all wiggly at the thought of the President of the United States claiming the arbitrary, unchecked power to kill any person on earth that he -- or his designated agents -- declares an "enemy combatant" or even a "suspected terrorist" -- then don't blame John C. Yoo. For God's sake, have the balls to put the responsibility squarely where it belongs: on the President of the United States, George Walker Bush, and the Vice President of the United States, Richard Bruce Cheney. Have the guts to demand their impeachment, now -- yes, now, right in the middle of a presidential election campaign, right in the middle of their last year in office -- for the capital crime (by U.S. law) of torture.

If you believe that what the Bush Administration has done is torture, then you have no other choice. And any elected officials in the national government -- including Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- who do not call for the immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney on these charges, and the subsequent prosecution of their myriad minions who carried out their orders, are implicity condoning these crimes and acting as willing accomplices for them.

But as we see, no Democratic leaders are calling for impeachment; in fact, time and again, they specifically and adamantly rule it out. What's more, they are not even launching any formal, full-scale, high-profile investigations of the "torture memos" and the entire apparatus of enhanced interrogation, indefinite imprisonment and rendition that the leftist jihadis liken to the gulag -- even though they control both houses of Congress and could make life a living hell for the Bush Administration and John McCain, the loyal little lapdog who hopes to follow in the Leader's footsteps. But it is obvious that, deep down, the Democratic leaders agree with the President's actions and policies; they recognize the deep wisdom behind the aggression in the name of liberty in Iraq, the surveillance in the name of freedom at home, and the torture in the name of civilization that the Leader has made a hallmark of our enlightened age.

How then do they differ from the honorable John Yoo? They too are countenancing, assisting and following the arbitrary will of the Leader. They too look at the murder of a million innocent civilians in Iraq and refuse to treat it as a crime. They too look at the torture of helpless, uncharged, unprotected captives and refuse to treat it as a crime. Oh, they may preen and posture, they may lay some hot and heavy rhetoric on the rubes out there; but they DO nothing. And these are crimes which they actually have the power to investigate and prosecute.

Planned Obsolescence?

2008-03-03T19:50:00.000-08:00

There's very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented and established at this point to be worth spending any time discussing. They were never going to take a stand against warrantless eavesdropping or the destruction of the rule of law via telecom amnesty for one simple reason: many of them don't actually oppose those things, and many who claim to oppose them don't actually care about any of it. That's all a given.

But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is. If the plan all along was to give Bush everything he wanted, as it obviously was, why not just do it at the beginning? Instead, they picked a very dramatic fight that received substantial media attention. They exposed their freshmen and other swing-district members to attack ads. They caused their base and their allies to spend substantial energy and resources defending them from these attacks.

And now, after picking this fight and letting it rage for weeks, they are going to do what they always do -- just meekly give in to the President, yet again generating a tidal wave of headlines trumpeting how they bowed, surrendered, caved in, and lost to the President. They're going to cast the appearance that they engaged this battle and once again got crushed, that they ran away in fear because of the fear-mongering ads that were run and the attacks from the President. They further demoralize their own base and increase the contempt in which their base justifiably holds them (if that's possible). It's almost as though they purposely picked the path that imposed on themselves all of the political costs with no benefits.

Even with their ultimate, total compliance with the President's orders, they're still going to be attacked as having Made Us Less Safe -- by waiting weeks to capitulate, rather than doing so immediately, they opened up critical intelligence gaps, caused us to lose vital intelligence, made us less safe, etc. But now, they have no way to defend themselves against those accusations because, at the end of the day, they are admitting that the President was right all along, that telecom amnesty and warrantless eavesdropping are good and important things that the President should have had all along. So why didn't they just give it to him before the law expired? It was a loss for them on every level.

I doubt there are very many Americans who expect at this point that the Democratic leadership will take a stand against the President due to any actual beliefs. But shouldn't politicians be at least a little bit shrewd about their own political self-interest? As craven and ugly as their capitulation will be, the political "strategy" they chose is actually just more self-destructive than it is anything else. Obviously, they have no real political principles, but don't they have any strategic instinct at all?

Thanks for Nothing, Harry and Nancy

2008-02-07T06:28:00.000-08:00

Pretty much what this guy said:

I’m so angry at what those 2 so called "leaders" have said, done, not said, not done and allowed to happen that I can just spit.

By declaring that impeachment is off the table, by allowing right wing extremists such as Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell to dictate what gets done in the Senate, by enabling the destruction of the Constitution by Jay Rockefeller and only standing up to Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and the entire progressive movement, by not enforcing subpoenas that have been ignored, Reid and Pelosi and a good number of other Congressional democrats (sorry, no big "D" there) are, as so eloquently put by MichiganGirl just as guilty when it comes to being responsible for the crimes perpetuated by this administration.

And no, I’m not just talking about torture, although frankly, the fact that Senator Durbin has to call for an investigation into whether something that is pretty much universally known as torture was done with the knowledge and approval by the President of the United States is beyond disgraceful. The parsing of whether waterboarding is or isn’t torture because the lying and not-yet-convicted felon Alberto Gonzales (or John Ashcroft if he had anything to do with this) said that it wasn’t torture is one of the most cowardly and shameless assertions I have ever heard.

Reid allowed subpoenas to be ignored by administration members and didn’t follow up with any call for accountability. Pelosi allowed subpoenas to be ignored by administration members and didn’t follow up with any call for accountability. The PR battle over the nonsensical "surge working" hasn’t only been lost by the Democrats, it wasn’t even fought all that much by leadership – which could be another lie that leads to a President McCain.

Reid allowed a vote to condemn MoveOn – an entity that has been entirely supportive of the Democratic Party over the years, and then inexplicably had Rush Limbaugh praised officially on the Senate floor by republicans when his comments insulted the troops who were actually fighting this clusterfuck in Iraq. As for Iraq itself, well how many tens of billions were pledged under Reid and Pelosi’s leadership over the past year? And what kind of constraints were put on these blank checks? On a similar note, how does an inflammatory bill like Kyl/Lieberman get to the Senate floor, let alone pass – especially since we now know from the NIE how much of a threat Iran isn’t to us?

A FISA law needed a technical correction, and yet, we now are faced with expanded and illegal powers by this administration to continue breaking the law. And on top of that, when two bills are prepared that would fix the technical issue, one allowing for retroactive immunity for telecom companies that willfully broke the law to help this administration break the law and one without such immunity, what bill does Reid bring to the floor? The one that allows for retroactive immunity, and a kick in the teeth to the fourth amendment, not to mention We the People.

Harry Reid-- Traitor

2008-01-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald:

Harry Reid -- who has (a) done more than any other individual to ensure that Bush's demands for telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers will be met in full and (b) allowed the Republicans all year to block virtually every bill without having to bother to actually filibuster -- went to the Senate floor yesterday and, with the scripted assistance of Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy, warned Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others that they would be selfishly wreaking havoc on the schedules of their fellow Senators (making them work over the weekend, ruining their planned "retreat," and even preventing them from going to Davos!) if they bothered everyone with their annoying, pointless little filibuster.

To do so, Reid announced that, unlike for the multiple filibusters from Republican colleagues, he would actually force Dodd and company to engage in a real filibuster. This is what Reid said:
[I]f people think they are going to talk this to death, we are going to be in here all night. This is not something we are going to have a silent filibuster on. If someone wants to filibuster this bill, they are going to do it in the openness of the Senate.
That is what Democrats have been urging Reid to do to the filibustering Republicans all year -- in order to dramatize their obstructionism -- but he has refused to make them actually filibuster anything, generously agreeing instead that every bill requires 60 votes. Instead, he reserves such punishment only for the members of his own caucus trying to take a stand for the rule of law and the Constitution, those who are trying finally to bring some accountability to this administration.
As I noted in my post yesterday, Reid had the audacity to send his spokesman, Jim Manley, to falsely claim to the New York Times that "Senator Reid intends to do everything he can to strip immunity from the bill" -- even though the exact opposite is true. Reid is engaged in at least as much maneuvering to ensure that Bush and Cheney get what they want here as McConnell would be willing to do if he were the Majority Leader.

Here's the obviously scripted dialogue Reid had yesterday with McConnell and Leahy on the Senate floor, all in a transparent attempt to shame Dodd, Feingold and others out of filibustering or otherwise trying to prevent the Senate from complying in full -- and without delay -- with the latest orders handed down to them by the Commander-in-Chief. This is the real character of Harry Reid and the Democratic Senate leadership on full display (h/t Pow wow):
Mr. REID. Mr. President, I am glad we have a large number of Senators here today. I want to go over the schedule for this week.
First of all, I am going to ask unanimous consent, and I will do that now, that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. 2541, which is a 30-day extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act we are going to be dealing with; that the bill be read three times, passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table [etc.]...

The reason I ask consent on this legislation is that this bill expires on February 1. The House has not acted on this bill yet, so when we pass this bill, the House has to pass their bill, and there has to be a conference. I hope we could have this extension. I need not belabor the point. I asked this consent before we left; I ask it again.

etc...

Read it and weep.

Fake Opposition on Insane Levels of Military Spending

2008-01-02T09:34:00.001-08:00

Glenn Greenwald.

Expert: Both parties cooperate to keep administration crimes secret

2007-12-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

The Bush administration has made widespread use of the so-called state secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits that seek to challenge its domestic wiretaps and other illegal activities. Now two veteran senators, Arlen Spector (R-PA) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA), are teaming up to craft legislation that would direct judges to evaluate the government's state secrets claims rather than accepting them uncritically.

Keith Olbermann described this proposed legislation with a high degree of skepticism, saying sardonically, "The bill may end up as part of the Senate's wiretapping law, due for a vote next month -- after which the president will sign it and monkeys will fly out of his butt."

He then turned to constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley, asking him why there isn't already such a law, as most Americans would assume there would be.

"It actually is the law," Turley replied. "This has been a distortion, or a mutation of the law. The privilege has become something that I think the Supreme Court never imagined when it first created it."

"Today, the privilege is used primarily not to keep something secret, but to keep something from being used against the government," Turley went on. "I was in a courtroom when people laughed when the government counsel argued that they could use the privilege to claim as secret something that was published on the cover of the New York Times."

Turley said that some judges are already scrutinizing government claims under the state secret privilege but suggested that those who do not are merely "lazy." He pointed out that even the original case which established the privilege was eventually found to have been based on a lie, "and the Supreme Court refused to reexamine the case."

Perhaps Turley's most telling observation was that members of both parties are happy to see these cases dismissed because they are determined to keep impeachment off the table. "There's a lot of people, both Democrats and Republicans, that ... don't want a court to say that the president did something that is a federal crime. That's why they're trying to get all these cases thrown out of court. ... When a federal judge says the president committed a crime, it's pretty darn hard to ignore that."

However, he agreed with Olbermann that it would still be important to have such a law in place for after Bush leaves office, saying, "The privilege is now a tool used to protect the government from its own crimes."

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast on November 27, 2007.

More from Turley on a similar note here.

Dem Anti-War Position a Fraud

2007-11-25T06:01:00.000-08:00

Kucinich blasts Democratic leadership, says the vow from his party's leadership in Congress to stand up to President Bush on ending the war in Iraq amounts to a "total fraud".

Mukasey Confirmed

2007-11-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

Granted 40 Dems voted against, but they were damn close to blocking the damn thing and didn't do it!

Senate passes intelligence bill after Democrats back down on presidential briefings, CIA jails

2007-10-05T10:43:00.000-07:00

After a stalemate of over two years, the Senate passed the 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill Wednesday, with Democrats ceding a key provision regarding pre-war Iraq intelligence that Republicans had decried.

Sources close to the Senate Intelligence Committee say one of the compromises Democrats made to ensure the bill’s passage was to remove language demanding the White House turn over all Presidential Daily Briefings on Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Democrats are said to have been hoping to establish whether President Bush mischaracterized intelligence in the lead-up to the conflict.

“The provision on the PDBs was dropped because Republicans objected and were blocking consideration of the bill,” a Senate source said Wednesday.

The request for the PDBs, which also included briefings for President Clinton on Iraq, was part of what is known as Phase II of the Senate investigation into Iraq prewar intelligence, the source added.

What a disgrace.

Democrats Legitimizing a Rogue President

2007-09-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

This is just so painfully bad:

Are Democrats planning still worse FISA capitulations?

(updated below - Update II)

The enactment in August by the Democratic Congress of new eavesdropping powers for the President was one of the worst, if not the single worst, acts of capitulation to the Bush White House. The only comparable disgrace was the Democrats' complete failure even to attempt a filibuster of the Military Commissions Act, largely due to their decision to allow John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham to speak for them so that they did not have to participate in the debate. Once those three GOP Senators predictably blessed the MCA, Democrats had no strategy and thus actively enabled the abolition of habeas corpus along with the other abuses that Act legalized.

The FISA capitulation, though, was probably even worse. It occurred when they supposedly control the Congress. They enlarged the President's powers under the very law that he has been violating for years. They gave the Bush White House what it demanded even though the White House continues to provide them with no meaningful information about what was done during all those years when they eavesdropped on Americans in secret. And Democrats passed the law in a frenzy, under the crassest and most transparent exploitation of the Terrorist Threat ("a Terrorist attack is about to happen in DC and the blood will be on your hands unless you pass the bill we dictate").

Ever since that debacle, many Democrats have clung to the illusion that all of this will be fixed because the bill was passed with a six-month sunset provision and, some hope, the next time things will be different. But far, far more likely than the Democrats reversing what they have done when re-visiting FISA is the prospect that they will make it worse still, by giving the Bush administration even more of what it wants.

Specifically, almost immediately after the Democrats enacted the new FISA, the Bush White House and DNI Mike McConnell began demanding that Congress quickly go further by providing retroactive immunity to telecom companies who participated in warrantless eavesdropping by shielding them from the consequences of having broken the law. Once it had what it wanted on FISA, the White House decreed (bolded commands in original):
Our Work Is Not Done -- This Act Is A Temporary, Narrowly Focused Statute To Deal With The Most Immediate Needs Of The Intelligence Community To Protect The Country. When Congress returns in September, the Intelligence Committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, including the important issues of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Buried within an article in the New York Times this morning from James Risen is this passage, strongly suggesting that Congressional Democrats are ready, as always, to do what they are told:
Mr. McConnell argued on Tuesday that the expanded surveillance powers granted under the temporary measure should be made permanent.
He also pushed for a provision that would grant legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that secretly cooperated with the N.S.A. on the warrantless program. Those companies, now facing lawsuits, have never been officially identified.

Democratic Congressional aides say they believe that a deal is likely to provide protection for the companies.
Granting retroactive immunity to telecom companies for past lawbreaking is so plainly unjustifiable, even dangerous, that it ought to require no real debate. That Congressional Democrats are even considering submitting to this demand, let alone that they are likely to do so, dispels any doubt about what they really are.

Far Too Conciliatory on Iraq

2007-09-06T10:52:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 — With a mixed picture emerging about progress in Iraq, Senate Democratic leaders are showing a new openness to compromise as they try to attract Republican support for forcing at least modest troop withdrawals in the coming months.

This is just F#$%ed UP!!!!!!!!!!!!

More on the Spying Bill

2007-08-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

From the Poorman:

The NY Times is shrill:

It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress — now led by Democrats — caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush’s powers, this time to spy on Americans in violation of basic constitutional rights. Many of the 16 Democrats in the Senate and 41 in the House who voted for the bill said that they had acted in the name of national security, but the only security at play was their job security.

The following 41 Democratic Representatives voted for it:

Jason Altmire (4th Pennsylvania)
John Barrow (12th Georgia)
Melissa Bean (8th Illinois)
Dan Boren (2nd Oklahoma)
Leonard Boswell (3rd Iowa)
Allen Boyd (2nd Florida)
Christopher Carney (10th Pennsylvania)
Ben Chandler (6th Kentucky)
Rep. Jim Cooper (5th Tennessee)
Jim Costa (20th California)
Bud Cramer (5th Alabama)
Henry Cuellar (28th Texas)
Artur Davis (7th Alabama)
Lincoln Davis (4th Tennessee)
Joe Donnelly (2nd Indiana)
Chet Edwards (17th Texas)
Brad Ellsworth (8th Indiana)
Bob Etheridge (North Carolina)
Bart Gordon (6th Tennessee)
Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (South Dakota)
Brian Higgins (27th New York)
Baron Hill (9th Indiana)
Nick Lampson (23rd Texas)
Daniel Lipinski (3rd Illinois)
Jim Marshall (8th Georgia)
Jim Matheson (2nd Utah)
Mike McIntyre (7th North Carolina)
Charlie Melancon (3rd Louisiana)
Harry Mitchell (5th Arizona)
Colin Peterson (7th Minnesota)
Earl Pomeroy (North Dakota)
Ciro Rodriguez (23rd Texas)
Mike Ross (4th Arkansas)
John Salazar (3rd Colorado)
Heath Shuler (11th North Carolina)
Vic Snyder (2nd Arkansas)
Zachary Space (18th Ohio)
John Tanner (8th Tennessee)
Gene Taylor (4th Mississippi)
Timothy Walz (1st Minnesota)
Charles A. Wilson (6th Ohio)

Those in boldface were also among the 59 Dems who voted against HR 2237, allowing Bush to get no-strings attached funding to continue the war. A lot of overlap here. These folks might find new reasons to worry about their job security.

… Also:

Ike Skelton (4th Missouri)

Voted for the war and abstained from voting either way on the FISA bill Bush demanded. Another useless person.

… Two-time loser Lipinski has a primary opponent, one Mark Pera. Everyone on this list should get one - exactly one - primary challenger.

The New FISA Law

2007-08-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

Here's what we do know. We know that the Democratic leadership rightly conceded to Adm. Michael McConnell, the once widely respected director of National Intelligence, to allow eavesdropping on foreigner-to-foreigner communications routed through American phone companies (no biggie; we've always spied on foreigners). We know that the Democrats thought they had a deal until McConnell, who is supposed to be nonpartisan, went back to the White House and got fresh marching orders to squelch reasonable judicial oversight by the FISA court. And we know that the administration's new position was that the attorney general (the disgraced Alberto Gonzales) should have the sole authority to spy without a warrant on any American talking to a foreigner, even if it's you and the guy from Mumbai fixing your printer.

Then the Democrats said: "Wait a minute! That's unconstitutional!" Right? Actually, no, they didn't. Even liberals like Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, argued in two heated, closed-door meetings on Aug. 3 that the Democrats might as well cave. Otherwise, they would be pounded during the August recess for ignoring national security and destroyed as a party if the country were actually attacked. Even though the leadership and 82 percent of House Democrats voted against the bill, they did not block it, delay the recess and hold the Congress in session. The private excuse was that the liberal base wouldn't be satisfied no matter what they did, and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn't make the more conservative Senate go along anyway. Apparently, there's always an excuse for leaving for vacation on time.

Afterward, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said publicly that many provisions were "unacceptable" and the House would revisit the newly signed legislation "as soon as possible." Democrats obtained a sunset clause that requires the whole thing to be reauthorized in six months. But real damage has been done.

The Capitulation Bill: "Obviously it's a good move"

2007-05-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

The crazy thing about the fight is that Democratic insiders are convinced that capitulation is the right strategy. They actually believe that this will put pressure on the Republicans in the fall, and that standing up to Bush is a bad idea. For instance, there's this.

Democrats said this week they would have jeopardized their fall bargaining position if they had insisted on keeping withdrawal timelines in the current supplemental spending bill (HR 2206). Persisting now would likely have resulted in another veto and would have handed Republicans talking points for the Memorial Day recess about which party supports the troops in the field.

Democrats were particularly worried about the prospect of Bush declaring at wreath-laying ceremonies that "Democrats have stopped resources for the troops," said Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala.

"The problem is that we have to provide money for the troops, and if we don't, the Democrats will be blamed," added Rep. James P. Moran, D-Va., a war opponent. "Bush has the bully pulpit, so he will define who is responsible."

"Obviously it's a good move," said Democratic pollster Fred Yang. "It gives President Bush and Republicans one less thing to shoot at" during the upcoming recess week.

Bush has the bully pulpit. Obviously it's a good move.

These are the attitudes of Democratic members and pollsters. There's no evidence that Bush moves numbers anymore. In fact, when he talks he becomes less popular. He has no credibility, which means that his access to the bully pulpit is severely diminished. Yet Democrats are afraid of him. More than that, Democratic members think that by capitulating to him that Republicans will stop saying that Democrats won't fund the troops. It's crazy.

Betrayed: Spineless Democrats give Bush complete authority on Iraq

2007-05-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

Democrats also gave up for now on their plan requiring Bush to certify U.S. troops sent to combat are adequately trained, rested and equipped, as Pentagon rules require. That provision could have put serious constraints on the military. Instead, the new war funding bill will require only that Bush certify the Iraqi government's progress in stabilizing the country.

Title and summary via HinesSight.

Fake Opposition Democrats Keep the War Going

2007-05-23T05:05:00.001-07:00

Democrats Drop Withdrawal Dates From Iraq Bill

By CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON, May 22 — Congressional Democrats relented today on their insistence that a war spending measure sought by President Bush also set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq. The decision to back down, described by senior lawmakers and aides, , was a wrenching reversal for some Democrats, who saw their election triumph as a call to force an end to the war. A Democratic effort to include timelines prompted Mr. Bush’s veto of the original bill last month, producing a political impasse.

“We don’t have a veto-proof Congress,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader.

"The First 100 Hours"-- Fake Opposition Democrats Or Not?

2007-01-05T06:54:00.000-08:00

Really doesn't look promising on the really pressing issues such as the Iraq war and Bush administration crimes.

Fake...War...Opposition...

2006-12-09T10:05:00.000-08:00

Aaron Glantz at Antiwar.com:

I wish I could say that the Democratic takeover of Congress gives me hope for an end to the war in Iraq. But it doesn't. Since winning an overwhelming victory at the polls this November, the Democrats have done nothing to engender optimism in the peace camp.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has ruled out any attempt to cut funding for the war. In the confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense designate Robert Gates this week, the Democrats failed to ask a single tough question.

No Senator, for example, asked Robert Gates about Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, habeas corpus, torture, military tribunals, extraordinary rendition (sending prisoners without charge to third countries like Syria and Jordan to be tortured). No one asked him why the US military continues to hold an estimated 15,000 prisoners without charge in Iraq. No one asked him about a Red Cross report saying 90 percent of those held are innocent.

No Senator asked Robert Gates about civilian casualties in Iraq. No one asked him about the Lancet report out this fall showing 655,000 Iraqis have died since the US invasion and that one of the leading causes of death, according to the report, was US air-strikes.

No Senator asked Robert Gates about a plan he wrote for President Reagan for an invasion of Lybia to "redraw the map of Northern Africa." No one asked him about his record of falsifying intelligence during the Cold War and his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.

No Senator asked Robert Gates about his claim, in written testimony given before his public hearing, that he believes in the doctrine of preemptive strikes on other countries, the policy position that got us in the mess in Iraq.

No Senator asked Robert Gates about his claim, in written testimony given before his public hearing, that he believes Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction and that he still – even in hindsight – thought the invasion was a good thing. What evidence did he have to support that?

No Senator asked Robert Gates about conflicts of interest stemming from his service on the corporate boards of defense companies, including San Diego-based SAIC which has a won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts connected to the US occupation in Iraq, including a major contract to train the Iraqi police and military and another contract to set up a new Iraqi state TV network after the fall of Saddam. Gates has also served on the board of Parker Drilling of Houston, Texas which works in partnership with Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton. No one asked him about that.

No Senator asked Robert Gates to respond to reports from inside the Pentagon that show at least 152,669 veterans have filed disability claims after fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Of the more than 100,000 claims granted, Veterans Administration records show at least 1,502 veterans have been compensated as 100 percent disabled. No Senator asked Gates about reports from inside the Pentagon that veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are not getting the care they need.

These are just a few, very obvious, questions that Senators could have asked Robert Gates before confirming him. The fact that they didn't ask even one of them, but instead talked ad nauseam about "bipartisanship" should be a wake-up call to antiwar voters that they'll need to hold the Democrats' feet to the fire if they want to accomplish anything in the coming years.

The vote to confirm Robert Gates was 95-2. The only Senators to vote "no" were Republicans Rick Santorum (who said Gates was too soft on "Islamic fascism") and Jim Bunning (because he opposes any negotiations with Syria and Iran).

Not a single Democrat voted against Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense. Not a single one asked him a tough question.

FOD's

2006-12-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

in the Armed Services Committee approved Gates for Sec. Defense.

There's no report that anyone on the committee asked him about his connections to the Iran-Contra scandal-- or that Gates was instrumental in helping create Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Heck, this last point may be why Gates was selected in the first place...

UPDATE: Fake opposition Democrats strike again! Gates is confirmed with only two votes in opposition-- both from Repugs (Santorum and Bunning).

Sad. Really sad.

UPDATE 2: Fake opposition Democrats strike again!!!

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a stepped up effort to “dismantle the militias.”

Jane Harman-- One of the Worst FODs

2006-11-27T08:14:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald lays out the case.

The 12 Democrats Who Voted for Bush's Evil Military Commissions Act

2006-10-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

Carper (Del.), Johnson (S.D.), Landrieu (La.), Lautenberg (N.J.), Lieberman (Conn.), Menendez (N.J), Pryor (Ark.), Rockefeller (W. Va.), Salazar (Co.), Stabenow (Mich.), Nelson (Fla.), Nelson (Neb.)

(source 1, source 2)

Someone Could Have Filibustered the Damn Thing

2006-09-28T19:58:00.000-07:00

Senate approves Bush's "detainee bill"-- the "worst law ever".

THE SILENT PARTY

2006-09-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

You worthless passel of cowards. They're laughing at you. You know that, right?

The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party, the latter best exemplified by John McCain, who keeps fashioning his apparently fathomless ambition into a pair of clown shoes with which he can do the monkey dance across the national stage. They're laughing at him, too.

The New York Times has the right of it here, limning the pathetic gullibility at the heart of the "compromise." There is nothing in this bill that President Thumbscrews can't ignore. There is nothing in this bill that reins in his feckless and dangerous reinterpretation of the powers of his office. There is nothing in this bill that requires him to take it -- or its congressional authors -- seriously. Two weeks ago, John Yoo set down in The New York Times the precise philosophical basis on which the administration will sign this bill and then ignore it. The president will decide what a "lesser breach" of the Geneva Conventions is? How can anyone over the age of five give this president that power? And wait until you see the atrocity that I guarantee you is coming down the tracks concerning the fact that the president committed at least 40 impeachable offenses with regard to illegal wiretapping.

And the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives -- "Aggressive interrogation techniques" -- the Democratic Party had…no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

This was as tactically idiotic as it was morally blind. On the subject of what kind of a nation we are, and to what extent we will live up to the best of our ideals, the Democratic Party was as mute and neutral as a stone. Human rights no longer have a viable political constituency in the United States of America. Be enough of a coward, though, and cable news will fit you for a toga.

However, because I know it is vital for the Democrats to "recapture" the good Christian folks, there's a passage from Scripture that seems apropos: "When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it."

-- Charles P. Pierce

Message to Dems: "Put Down the Economy Crack Pipe"

2006-09-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

Arianna:

In poll after poll, voters place Iraq well above the economy when asked which issue will most affect their vote this year. And when you combine concerns about the war with concerns about terrorism/national security, it's the economy that is "a distant reality."

Yet Democrats keep returning to the same domestic-issues-uber-alles thinking that cost them the elections in 2002 and 2004. They can't really believe that people are more interested in raising the minimum wage, middle class tax relief, and college affordability than they are in who's going to keep them from being blown up, can they? The Dems are like a bunch of crack addicts who know that the stuff is killing them, but keep reaching for the pipe. The closer they get to Election Day, the more they desperately crave a hit of "It's the economy, stupid!"

Or maybe they have fallen prey to the war fatigue Chris Matthews thinks is responsible for the appalling lack of Iraq coverage on TV -- and the smile on Karl Rove's face.

This is a crying shame. The 2006 election -- and with it control of the House and the power to investigate the Bush administration's abundant outrages -- is there for the taking... if only Democrats would put down the economy crack pipe and put their energy into hammering Bush and the GOP for their many tragic foreign policy and national security failures, which have combined to make America far less safe.

Basically, the Dems seem to be capitulating in every possible way to the evil machinations of the Bush regime's empire building, and are playing as soft opposition on domestic politics.

Fake Opposition (Actually, NO Opposition) on War Crimes

2006-09-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Sadly NO!--

Why are Republican Senators the only people taking a visible public stand against Bush’s attempt to create kangroo courts? Check it:

Several Republican senators are stepping up their opposition to the Bush administration’s plan to authorize military trials for suspected terrorists, with one calling a key part of the bill “ill-advised.” […]

Among other provisions, the administration’s bill would redefine the U.S. interpretation of part of the Geneva Conventions — a move Graham called “ill-advised.”

“I’m begging we don’t cross that line, because we need not to,” said Graham, who serves as a judge in the Air Force Reserve.

McCain’s office also released a letter from retired Army Gen. John Vessey, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Reagan administration, opposing the administration bill. Vessey told McCain the measure “would undermine the moral basis which has generally guided our conduct in war throughout our history.”

“In my short 46 years in the armed forces, Americans confronted the horrors of the prison camps of the Japanese during World War II, the North Koreans in 1950-53 and the North Vietnamese in the long years of the Vietnam War, as well as knowledge of the Nazis’ Holocaust depredations in World War II,” he wrote. “Though those years, we held to our own values. We should continue to do so.”

Say, it’d be nice if a Democrat could forcefully make this exact same argument and stick to it. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

P.S.- I don’t want to hear any excuses from you guys about not wanting to look “weak on terror.” Y’know what makes you guys look really weak? Letting Republicans take the lead in keeping Bush in check. That is pathetic. Grow a pair and stand up for your beliefs.

Falling Down on Diplomacy-- Big Time

2006-08-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

This focuses attention on the role of Democrats as the nation’s “loyal opposition” and whether the party can articulate a “return to realism” in U.S. foreign policy. The party has little to be proud of in the way it has discharged its role on foreign-policy issues. It has endorsed (or acquiesced to) all of the fundamental tenets of Bush’s revisionist approach to the Middle East. Broad support for the Iraq War among congressional Democrats was intellectually legitimated by “experts” like Kenneth Pollack, who wrote a best-selling book using an analytically flawed assessment of the Iraqi WMD threat to argue that going to war against Saddam was the “conservative” option. Similarly, Democrats have not posed a significant challenge to the administration’s emphasis on democratization in its strategy for the war on terrorism or its non-historical approach to the Palestinian issue.

Democrats have fallen into a “soft neconservatism” that has dulled the party’s voice on foreign policy.

Hayden for CIA Director

2006-05-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

say the Fake Opposition Democrats.

Arrgghh

2006-03-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

Why can't the Dems get some fricking balls?

Democrats slash Feingold move on censure, as Feingold says party 'cowering'

While mainstream media outlets have pounced on the fact that Democrats blocked an effort by one of their own to censure President Bush over his warrantless wiretapping program, RAW STORY has found that Senate Democratic offices are fuming. The proposal to censure the President was introduced on a Sunday talk show by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI).

(snip)

“Feingold’s grandstanding screwed the pooch and played into Bill Frist’s hands," the aide said. "Thank God Dems punted this down the field. Frist was going to force Democrats to vote on a resolution Feingold had kept a big secret and he would’ve split the caucus on an issue that needed time to get the whole caucus to support. Russ Feingold had only one persons’ interests in mind with his Sunday bombshell, and those were his own. He practically handed a victory to a Bush White House that desperately needs a win.”

Feingold, defending his censure plan today on Fox News, said: “I’m amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president’s numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide…too many Democrats are going to do the same thing they did in 2000 and 2004. In the face of this, they’ll say we’d better just focus on domestic issues…[Democrats shouldn’t] cower to the argument, that whatever you do, if you question administration, you’re helping the terrorists.”

(snip)

“Democrats had decided that public hearings were needed on the wiretapping to educate the public before considering a censure,” one staffer quipped. “Hearings would’ve forced Arlen Specter and Lindsay Graham to continue to criticize the Administration. Everyone knew that was the gameplan. Feingold just wanted to hog the spotlight. If he were interested in holding George Bush accountable he would’ve made his pitch in the Democratic caucus behind closed doors.”

Jesus. Fucking losers. They simply DON'T GET IT.

Why wouldn't they be jumping up and down in joy over what Feingold is doing? They worry too much about perceptions and much too little about doing what is right and speaking truth to power.

Dammit.

The Fake Opposition Strikes Again

2006-02-08T08:07:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 — Democrats are heading into this year's elections in a position weaker than they had hoped for, party leaders say, stirring concern that they are letting pass an opportunity to exploit what they see as widespread Republican vulnerabilities.

Fucking losers.

I Hesitate Sometimes Calling Lieberman a Democrat, But In Any Case

2006-02-02T07:02:00.000-08:00

this is more hilarious than anything else:

Okay, I had a chance to go back and take a look at the Lieberman footage from last night and I have to revise my eariler statement.

It seems like a very small handful of moderate Democrats stood up along with Lieberman when Bush made his "we're winning the Iraq war" comment and I now understand how I missed it.

You see, what I saw before I spilled all of my food on myself was Joe Lieberman (acting like some rock star groupie) jumping out of his seat in applause to Bush's rhetoric. If you look at the image, you'll see that Joe jumped up faster than ANY OTHER PERSON IN THE AUDIENCE including all of the Republicans.

It's Over

2006-01-31T07:55:00.000-08:00

While nice, generally reasonable, people like Digby think it's great that the Democrats got even 25 votes to filibuster Alito, what they don't realize is that it is over.

Alito was their last possible stand.

With Alito on the court, the Bush regime can pretty much do what they want and get away with it. They can steal elections from here to eternity and the Democrats will be powerless to stop it.

It's not just about abortion, though that right is important.

It is about EXECUTIVE POWER AND KEEPING BUSH IN POWER.

We're so screwed.

Screwed by the "right" and the "left".

MacGowan Gets It

2006-01-31T07:43:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, it’s not such an unlikely partnership after all, since one of the two ‘liberals’ – Robert Kennedy, Jr., that most prototypical of Washington ‘ultra-liberals’ – is actually “a longtime personal friend of Ailes,” who has played a major role in shaping the decidedly right-wing voices of both Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. This would, of course, be a rather surprising revelation – if there were any actual substantive differences between the nominal ‘liberals’ and the nominal ‘conservatives’ in Washington, but there isn’t.

I am reminded here, for no particular reason, that I had a rather humbling experience the other day whilst visiting my local supermarket. As it turns out, grocery shopping in my neighborhood can often be a humbling experience. You wouldn’t think it would be, but it is – primarily because a local cadre of dedicated LaRouchians seems to have adopted the front entrance to the store as their primary base of operations. So doing the grocery shopping now means running the risk of being accosted by one or more enthusiastic, but hopelessly confused, young men and women who feel compelled to lecture me on my obvious lack of knowledge about national and world affairs.

My latest encounter involved my being chastised for not knowing that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid deserves my full support as he works diligently to impeach and remove the evil Dick Cheney. Reid is working, you see, from a blueprint provided by Mr. Lyndon LaRouche himself, so we know that his is a sincere effort. The fact that I did not recognize Reid as a knight-in-shining-armor was a dead giveaway that I am not up to speed on what’s happening in Washington.

Here I was thinking that Reid was just another fully complicit puppet who unapologetically supports illegal wars abroad and massive repression here at home, but it turns out I was wrong. Now I can hardly wait to find out what other knowledge the local supermarket has to offer. Will I learn that Patrick Fitzgerald poses an actual threat to the Bush administration? Or that John McCain is a legitimate critic of the regime? Or that, as many people seem to think, Ahhnuld is really a closet Democrat (he is, after all, married to Maria “I’m a Kennedy, so I’m obviously a liberal” Shriver)? Or that Hillary Clinton is a foe of the Bush crowd, even though her husband’s primary job these days seems to involve working hand-in-hand with George, Sr. to do damage control for George, Jr.?

But wait! That can’t be right, because Bill Clinton is a hero to the LaRouchians (at least he used to be; I haven’t really kept up on my readings from the master in recent years). Why, he’s practically the anti-Bush! I assume then that he must have perfectly good reasons for spinning the Bush response to Katrina, and the necessity of continuing the illegal slaughter in Iraq, and the importance of renewing and expanding legislation like the Patriot Act. I have no idea what those good reasons might be, but apparently Lyndon does, because his disciples appear to be convinced that the Democratic Party, and prominent individuals within that party, offers some sort of real alternative to the direction this country is currently heading.

And that, my friends, is simply not the case. If the Democrats were truly an opposition party, and if they had any desire to wrest power from the Republicans, the Democratic Party platform for the upcoming 2006 midterm elections would be aggressively and unapologetically anti-war, to capitalize on the fact that a sizable majority of the American people now oppose the occupation of Iraq. Indeed, if the American political system was at all legitimate, Democratic politicians, and the purportedly liberal press, would speak the truth about the conquest of Iraq – the real goals being pursued, the true human cost, the blatant illegality of the invasion and occupation, the use of illegal chemical and radioactive weaponry, the use of death squads and torture, the illegitimacy of the puppet government – and the American people, already inclined to oppose the war, would quickly run the war-mongers out of Washington.

That is how a democracy is supposed to work: a politician gets elected to office by voicing support for policies favored by the majority of the voting public, and he then takes action as an elected official to implement those policies. The question then that some of us need to ask ourselves is: if we live in a country in which a clear majority of the people oppose an illegal military occupation, and yet not a single elected official will take a principled stand against that illegal occupation, do we really live in a democracy? And does anyone really think that the Democratic Party’s 2006 platform will be anything but aggressively pro-war?

I've HAD it with the Democrats: The Alito Betrayal

2006-01-31T03:53:00.000-08:00

I've always voted Democratic. Their general values of tolerance, caring, social responsibility and social equity have always resonated with me. At their best, they represent the best of America to me.

But the last five years have been a wake-up call.

From 9/11 to Iraq to stolen elections to the Supreme Court, the Dems have rolled over every time for the brutish, backwards and unconstitutional Bush agenda. Yes, Democrats often SAY the right thing. But it comes to action, they can't or won't get their act together.

The Alito confirmation was the final straw. This guy is as far as we can tell, another right-wing ideologue who will turn the court in the radical right direction for years to come.

And the Democrats could have stopped it but failed miserably.

Vichy Democrats has more.

Are the Democrats a real opposition party or a fake opposition party?

More and more, it seems the latter.

The Democrats are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem.

Here are the Democratic Alito TRAITORS:
Akaka (HI), Baucus (MT), Bingaman (NM), Byrd (WV), Cantwell (WA), Carper (DE), Dorgan (ND), Inouye (HI), Johnson (SD), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Lieberman (CT), Lincoln (AR), Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Pryor (AR), Rockefeller (WV), Salazar (CO).

They have BETRAYED the country.