From True Blue Liberal
By Lawrence R. Velvel

Yesterday, at our faculty lunch table, I was marveling at the fact that a person as stupid and incompetent as George Bush has regularly shown himself to be, could appear so personable, charming and even intelligent as he was when speaking about (and to) the Boston Red Sox before the White House news media. (Even discounting for the possible aid of speech writers, Bush really wasn’t half bad.) A colleague responded with a remark that triggered a thought: what we were seeing is an example of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. There is not just one form of intelligence, as psychologists long claimed. There are many kinds, says Gardner in a now widely accepted view. There is verbal/logical intelligence (the kind lawyers need), musical intelligence, kinetic or physical/athletic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, artistic intelligence, and so forth. A person can have one kind in high degree and be deficient, or even wholly lacking, in others.

Upon reflection, it is obvious that this is the story of Bush. His amiable, good old boy persona reflects a certain kind of interpersonal intelligence, sometimes in high degree. But he is totally lacking in the kind of analytical, logical, thoughtful intelligence needed by a leader, much less a President. Americans, often being fools who vote for the more personally attractive guy, elected Bush twice. They have learned to rue the day they did so, since he lacks the kind of intelligence that is more needed for a presidency.

This is relevant in the 2008 campaign. I shall concede biases in what I am about to write, biases in some ways inconsistent with my generally highly antielitest views (a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds, I think Emerson said). Obama seems to have shown tremendous interpersonal and organizational intelligence in this campaign. Not yet fully plumbed, many pundits say, is his analytical intelligence in the form of substantive ideas, plans, programs, etc. I find it hard, however, to doubt his analytical intelligence. Here is why (and here comes a bias that in a way is inconsistent with my generally antielitist views): Obama was President of – - was the top guy on – - the Harvard Law Review. In my day, anyone who was President of the Harvard Law Review inevitably was hugely bright as an analytical, verbal/logical matter, possibly (or probably) was even a genius. Until somebody tells me it was different in Obama’s day (about 20 or 25 years later), I have to believe that the same still held true then (and now too I would imagine). So I don’t have any doubts about Obama’s analytical intelligence, the kind a President needs. Read the rest of this entry »

From Information Clearing House
By Zbigniew Brzezinski

The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a “war on terror” did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that “a nation at war” does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being “at war.”

To justify the “war on terror,” the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By claiming that its war is similar to earlier U.S. struggles against Nazism and then Stalinism (while ignoring the fact that both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were first-rate military powers, a status al-Qaeda neither has nor can achieve), the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran. Such war would then plunge America into a protracted conflict spanning Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and perhaps also Pakistan.

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From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

In his Press Conference yesterday, Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush candidly explained why he was so eager to have Congress grant amnesty to telecoms:

Allowing the lawsuits to proceed could aid our enemies, because the litigation process could lead to the disclosure of information about how we conduct surveillance.

The bit about Helping the Enemies is purely false, just standard Bush fear-mongering. Federal courts receive and rule on highly classified information with great regularity without any public “disclosure.” FISA (in 50 USC 1806(f)) specifically provides that secret information can be submitted to the Judge without even the other side having access to it. If — as the President suggested — courts can’t be trusted with national security secrets, then it would mean, just as he intends and just as much of the press has accepted, government officials are free to break the law in secret by claiming that national security concerns prevent courts from ruling on what they did. In a Super Scary World, the need for secrecy outweighs all.

But on a more important level, Bush is finally being candid about the real reason the administration is so desperate to have these surveillance lawsuits dismissed. It’s because those lawsuits are the absolute last hope for ever learning what the administration did when they spied on Americans for years in violation of the law. Dismissal via amnesty would ensure that their spying behavior stays permanently concealed, buried forever, and as importantly, that no court ever rules on the legality of what they did. Isn’t it striking how that implication of telecom amnesty is never discussed, and how little interest it generates among journalists — whose role, theoretically, is to uncover secret government actions?

There was an explosion of press interest for a couple of days last May when former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified about the melodramatic hospital scene where John Ashcroft refused the demands of Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card to authorize whatever it was the President’s domestic spying program entailed, but the most significant revelation from Comey’s testimony was — and still is — that the administration was engaged in spying activities back then so patently illegal and unconscionable that the entire top level of the DOJ threatened to resign if they continued

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From The Washington Post
By Dan Froomkin

Timothy S. Goeglein, a top White House aide who is President Bush’s chief liaison to religious groups, has admitted to plagiarizing a column he wrote for his hometown paper, the Fort Wayne (Ind.) News-Sentinel.

Goeglein is a special assistant to the president and deputy director of public liaison. He previously worked closely with Karl Rove and during the 2004 election was Bush’s chief emissary to conservative political groups.

Sylvia A. Smith writes in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette: “A Fort Wayne native and White House official acknowledged Friday he copied large portions of an essay that appeared in a Dartmouth College publication and presented them as his own in a News-Sentinel column.

“‘It is true,’ Tim Goeglein wrote to The Journal Gazette in an email. ‘I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses.’

“He said he wrote to the author of the essay, Jeffrey Hart ‘to apologize, and do so categorically and without exception.’

” Nancy Nall, a former News-Sentinel columnist who writes a blog from her home in Michigan, detailed the nearly word-for-word similarities of eight paragraphs of Goeglein’s 16-paragraph essay about college education, which appeared in the News-Sentinel Thursday, and Hart’s column, which was written about a decade ago.

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From Salon
By Joe Conason

Irritated Democrats — and everyone else who feels that we have heard more than enough from Ralph Nader — cannot help wondering why he would be running for president yet again, at the risk of becoming a permanent national joke. Is he stroking his own ego, as some critics complain? Is he motivated by principle to offer voters a different choice, as he will insist? Both those explanations may still be plausible, although between 2000 and 2004 his support fell from 3 percent to 0.3 percent, which is not exactly an ego boost nor an endorsement of third-party politics. Even in 2000, when he made his strongest (and most disastrous) showing, he fell far short of his own 5 percent target.

But the evidence suggests another possible motive for Nader to run this year — namely, that he hopes to help his longtime ally John McCain, to whom he owes at least one big favor. Nader is already focusing his fire on the Democrats, with his Web site featuring dozens of press releases attacking Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while none voice the slightest criticism of McCain. In his latest round of television appearances, Nader trained his fire directly on Obama.

Nader’s proclivity to boost Republicans and blast Democrats has been a matter of historical record ever since the Florida debacle eight years ago, when his 97,000 votes probably deprived Al Gore of victory in that crucial state. Although the consumer advocate and his supporters continue to deny any such culpability, Republicans clearly feel that his presence on the ballot works to their advantage. As Mike Huckabee noted on hearing of Nader’s impending announcement last week, a Nader candidacy tends to siphon votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee. “So naturally,” said Huckabee bluntly, “Republicans would welcome his entry into the race.”

Actually, Republicans have learned to do more than merely “welcome” Nader. Four years ago, Republican officials and activists in certain swing states helped gather signatures to gain ballot access for Nader, while several major Republican donors sent generous checks to his campaign. And no Republican spoke out more forthrightly on his behalf than McCain, who in 2004 urged the authorities in Florida to put Nader on the ballot there despite his failure to qualify — and who sent his own lawyer down to the Sunshine State to fight for Nader in court.

Read more Love

From The Dissident Voice
By Greg Palast

Nineteen goddamn years is enough. I’m sorry if you don’t like my language, but when I think about what they did to Paul Kompkoff, I’m in no mood to nicey-nice words.

Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon’s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega’s food supply.

While cameras rolled, Exxon executives promised they’d compensate everyone. Today, before the US Supreme Court, the big oil company’s lawyers argued that they shouldn’t have to pay Paul or other fishermen the damages ordered by the courts.

They can’t pay Paul anyway. He’s dead.

That was part of Exxon’s plan. They told me that. In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the Chenega and Chugach Natives of Alaska on trying to get Exxon to pay up to save the remote villages of the Sound. Exxon’s response was, “We can hold out in court until you’re all dead.”

Nice guys. But, hell, they were right, weren’t they?

But Exxon didn’t do it alone. They had enablers. One was a failed oil driller named “Dubya.” Exxon was the largest contributor to George W. Bush’s political career after Enron. They were a team, Exxon and Enron. The Chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent Natives, consumers and defrauded stockholders from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.

Read more Exxon Suxx

From Crooks and Liars
By Nicole Belle

Welcome to BushWorld, an Orwellian nightmare of epic proportions. As has been so astutely pointed out, facts have a liberal bias, so the press conference that Bush held yesterday was completely devoid of any liberal bias. As Keith Olbermann says:

1984 had new-speak. We have Bush-speak. Rhetoric designed to obfuscate reality and to quell dissent. [..] The country was treated to a full 45 minute dosage of it this morning. The President holding a news conference to once again reiterate his own version of events: the surge in Iraq is working, the Iraqi government is making progress, America is not heading towards a recession, and of course, Democrats are trying to kill us all by not giving telecom companies immunity.

Watch how truly bizarre the press conference was to anyone who has two braincells to rub together. Note too that while Bill Plante and David Gregory asked the kind of questions we should see from a press corps, few–if any–media outlets took the time that Olbermann did to show how contradictory and without substance the President’s words were.

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From The St.L Post Dispatch
By Andrew P. Napolitano

President Bush addressed the nation in December 2005, a day after The New York Times revealed that for several years he had been authorizing illegal wire taps on the telephones and computers of thousands of Americans believed to be communicating with foreigners who might wish us ill. Bush’s attempted justification, however, was as legally baseless as President Richard M. Nixon’s when he similarly was caught. Asked, years after his resignation, to justify his actions, Nixon crudely stated, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

In his address, Bush said he had “authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaida and related terrorist organizations.” Sadly, the president was wrong.

There was and is no U.S. law, and there is nothing in the Constitution, that authorizes warrantless wiretaps on Americans in the United States, no matter with whom they speak or e-mail. In fact, both the law and the Constitution prohibit such surveillance without a search warrant.

The governing law in 2005 was and still is today the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Enacted in 1978 in response to Nixon’s use of the FBI and the CIA to spy on Americans, FISA makes it clear that no surveillance of any American in this country may be authorized or conducted by anyone in the government for any reason at any time under any circumstances, except in accordance with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. And the Fourth Amendment requires that no surveillance of an American may occur without a warrant issued by a judge after the judge has found probable cause that a crime has been committed.

FISA, on the other hand, permits surveillance of foreigners, here or abroad, without a warrant for three days; then a warrant, based on probable cause that the target is a foreigner, must be sought.

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From CounterPunch
By Anthony DiMaggio

In a refreshing investigative series in the Boston Globe from 2006, journalist Charlie Savage dropped a bombshell on the Bush administration. Reporting on Bush’s use of “signing statements,” Savage highlighted the president’s long-standing contempt for Legislative authority. Since then, the story has generally been overlooked although it recently resurfaced when Bush issued another statement that he would disregard Congress’s prohibition of permanent military bases in Iraq. The President’s issuance of this signing statement is just one of hundreds of challenges he’s made to national laws.

A signing statement, simply put, is an official announcement from the Executive–an attempt to alter the intent of a law by allowing the President to interpret its execution in any way he sees fit. While signing statements hold no official legal standing, the president acts as if they grant him the power to disregard segments of bills with which he disagrees. Since taking office, the Bush administration has issued over 150 signing statements, containing over 500 constitutional challenges, and questioning more than 1,100 provisions of national laws. This is a significant increase from years past. Former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton issued over 300 such statements combined, while only 75 signing statements were issued in total from the early 1800s through the Carter Presidency.

Interpretive signing statements have received support from some legal scholars and officials associated with the administration, such as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and John Yoo of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council. The American Bar Association, the ACLU, and other legal scholars, however, have challenged the signing statements as unconstitutional and a violation of the principles of checks and balances and separation of powers. In response to Bush’s circumvention of the military bases ban, Harvard Law Professor David Barron questioned the administration for “continuing to assert the same extremely aggressive conception of the president’s unilateral power to determine how and when US force will be used abroad.”

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From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

With a viral campaign underway via email, right-wing radio, and on the street suggesting that Barack Obama is a black “Manchurian Candidate,” secretly trained as a Muslim fanatic who will insinuate himself into the White House, thence to undermine all that we hold dear, perhaps it is time to look at the Manchurian Candidate we already have in the White House, who, together with his handler over in Blair House, has pretty much done all the damage already.

George Bush came to office in 2001 promising a new era of integrity, civility and “compassionate conservatism,” an era of humble American foreign policy, and a bi-partisan approach to government.

What did we actually get?

Once in office, this chameleon president almost immediately set out to embroil the country in a major war in the Middle East against the nation of Iraq. The game plan was laid out at the president’s first National Security Council meeting, attended by Vice President Dick Cheney (the man holding Bush’s controller), Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neal (who later spilled the beans about the session).

Bush also famously ignored all warnings about the imminent attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How much he and the rest of the administration knew about that attack in advance, or whether elements within the administration may have even helped it along, remains the subject of considerable interest and investigation and may never be answered, but it is clear that there were ample warnings about it, and he did nothing—even rudely blowing off a briefer who tried to alert him to the danger. Moreover, it is known that Israeli Mossad agents (who we know have close ties to both the US intelligence apparatus and to the Neocons who infest the Bush White House) did indeed have advance knowledge, and were set up across New York Harbor with a video camera to tape the attack on the Twin Towers (they were subsequently arrested by New Jersey police, only to be later released and sent back to Israel, through intercession by the US government). As well, we know that unidentified people made a killing by placing negative bets, called “puts,” on the stocks, several days before 9-11, of the two airlines that were hijacked, American and United, and of two investment banks that would be seriously hurt by the building collapses, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. (The puts were placed through an investment bank, Alex Brown, which until a year earlier had been headed by a man who moved over to become the number three person in the CIA.) It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Bush/Cheney administration, at a minimum, wanted an attack on American soil, and a national disaster that would put the country on a war footing.

Read more Manchurian Candidate