The Sky Is Falling

Only this time it doesn't look like a false alarm. In "What Ever Happened to Congress?" Tom Engelhardt interviews Chalmers Johnson on Antiwar.com. It's one of the scariest things I've ever read.

In it, they discuss

1. the lunacy of the 2007 Pentagon budget
2. the out of control military
3. the huge expansion of executive branch powers
4. the failure of Congress to do its job
5. the collapse of the American economy
6. the fall of the Roman Empire

I don't see the obvious way out of our problems. The political system has failed. You could elect the opposition party, but it can't bring the CIA under control; it can't bring the military-industrial complex under control; it can't reinvigorate the Congress. It would be just another holding operation as conditions got worse.

The Worst President In History

James Buchanan, the 15th president, is generally considered to be the worst president in American history. A recent informal poll of historians indicates that 338 believe Bush is failing, while 77 say he's succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.I just had to highlight that. It gives me hope.

This is what those historians said -- and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came fromself-identified conservatives -- about the Bush record:

• He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process.
• He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich.
• He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state.
• He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign.
• He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign ( Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida).
• He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity.
• He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress.
• He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

Another Argument Down The Tubes

As Bush supporters desperately defend his disastrous presidency, they scramble to find scraps from his crumbling regime. Lately they've been charging that Congress was privy to the same intelligence as Bush, and yet the Democrats voted for war. They deny that Bush skewed intelligence to serve his nefarious purposes. Oh yeah?

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

There's so much more detailed in this National Journal article, Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel.

Lawrence Wilkerson Takes Aim

AnneGearan, AP Diplomatic Writer, reports:

A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that "the president of the United States is all-powerful" and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant.

In an Associated Press interview, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of postwar planning. Underlings exploited Bush's detachment and made poor decisions, Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. He said Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."

No matter how many times I read reports of this type, as officials continue to come forward and confirm the rumors, it's still extremely disturbing. The noted Israeli military historian, Martin Van Creveld, has written in the US Jewish newspaper Forward that,

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

Operation Restore Mojo

James Wolcott dissects the last throes of neocon support for the worst presidency in this country's history in an article entitled "Windbags of War Give It One Last Wheeze". Clever with words, that Wolcott. After citing the same old tired rhetoric of Bush apologists, he comments,

No one better embodies the creamy elitism of the neocons than does [Bill] Kristol, who believes that the American people are a lumpy mass easily manipulated and are incapable of arriving at judgements of their own. But they can, they do, and they have. They have turned against this war and slowly come to the conclusion that they were deliberately misled. Questioning the patriotism of the war's critics isn't going to work because a majority of Americans now share that criticism and don't think of themselves as unpatriotic. Bush's counteroffensives are no longer effective because he's lost the confidence of the American people: they've had it with this guy.

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, sums it up.

"What a sorry, sorry, unfortunate president -- caught in his lies, his half-truths, his reckless disregard ... caught with, well ... caught with time. Time has finally caught up to him. And now he doesn't have the popularity to beat back all the people trying to call him to account. He could; but now he can't. So he's caught. And his best play is to accuse his critics of rewriting history, of playing fast and loose with the truth -- a sad, pathetic man.

[snip]

"In the president's new angle that his critics are trying to 'rewrite history', those critics might want to point out that his charge would be more timely after he stopped putting so much effort into obstructing any independent inquiry that could allow an accurate first draft of the history to be written. In any case, he must sense now that he's blowing into a fierce wind. The judgement of history hangs over this guy like a sharp, heavy knife. His desperation betrays him. He knows it too."

It's his blogger allies who don't.

The Spanish Civil War

"The war was a civil war and a revolution. It could not finish until the country had been transformed either into a Fascist or into a socialist state." -Arturo Barea

This interesting site from UCSD has an introduction, Images of Revolution and War, by Alexander Vergara, a chronology of the war, and an incredible Index of Posters from the Visual Front catalogue, many with historical explanations.