for those of you busy watching Clarke on 60 minutes, check out a few of these:
a video of Eric Alterman (author of What Liberal Media?, The Book On Bush and Altercation) appearing on Dennis Miller’s soon to be doomed show. It speaks for itself. Can this guy get any more unprofessional?
Juan Cole says the initial plan for the Iraqi occupation was for sovereignty within 6 months, which was pushed back so the Bush administration could try a more heavy-handed approach to changing the fabric of the Iraqi economy. read here
Wow. Even AFTER the 9/11 attacks, the bush administration was slashing the FBI’s counter-terrorism budget. Bush: Weak on Terrorism.
Howard Stern continues to take on GWB and the republican establishment. Who thought taking a hard-right turn into the election (gay marriage amendment, FCC crackdowns…) would be smart, exactly?
Remember when a black reporter for the NY Times turned out to be fabricating quotes and stories? Now, let’s talk about how white evangelical christian reporters cannot be trusted and are there because of some special program…
The US National Guard is using a private security force for security detail because it’s so thin on forces with everyone in Iraq. This is disturbing enough from a force readiness standpoint, but is anybody else nervous that we’re privatizing our military this drastically? (link)
Two notes on clark. First, read this.
Bush approach to terrorism vs. Clinton.
Secondly, I tuned in Fox News (I can only take the orbital mind control lasers for a few minutes, but I tune it in once in a while to laugh at the buffoonery) tonight to see how they were covering Clarke. They did the typical left/right split, two no-name folks (it was a sunday night after all), and the anchor tried to hit the democrat with two variations on the classic “Isn’t saying that Bush is screwing up the war on terror an insult to our men and women in the armed forces?” Ironically, as the charges against Bush become more dramatic, the question gets closer and closer to that ultimately self-defeating phrasing. The fact of the matter is clear. Calling out Bush’s mistakes, whether his pre-9/11 errors (the most rediculous one to hang the “smearing the military” charge on), the non-essentiality of the war in iraq, the bungled occupations and post-war plans for iraq and afghanistan, or his Mars plan (I’m sure that calling that a political gambit is an insult to our proud ex-test-pilot astronauts) is not an insult to the military. Sending 125K american troops, 500 of them to die and 15000 of them to return injured, if done badly, isn’t that the real insult?