In a New York Times OP-ED (The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality) FRANK RICH Writes: There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce. The revisionist history peddled by Liz Cheney and Karl Rove must be aggressively refuted, and we must remember who really failed to keep America safe. [ READ FULL ARTICLE ]
Karl Rove, the former Bush Strategist’s book titled: Courage and Consequence – My life as a conservative in the fight, is packed with a TON of LIES, notably the distortion of a Senate report in order to claim that Bush didn’t “lie us into war.” The truth is that the moment the Iraq invasion commenced, Karl Rove, Bush, Cheney and cohorts began counting votes while the bombs dropped.
Media Matters For America: Karl Rove’s memoir Courage and Consequence purports to respond to critics by “putting the record straight,” but Media Matters has found that Rove’s book is full of falsehoods. Below is an ongoing list of Rove’s misinformation in the book, which Media Matters obtained in advance of its scheduled release. [ CLICK HERE TO READ THE FALSEHOODS:http://mediamatters.org/research/201003080030 ]
Even Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary for George W. Bush, said Wednesday that Karl Rove’s new book about the administration is based on pure “spin and manipulation.”
Karl rove, Bush’s Brain, and the man credited with making drunken Bush look presidential, is just as responsible as Bush and Cheney for the illegal destruction of Iraq and the murder of 1 million+ plus of its people; and the violent deaths of nearly 4000+ U.S. soldiers.
Rove also committed an act of High Treason, by helping the late Bob Novak — expose the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative working to stop the spread of WMD’s.
It is nauseating to witness this “roach-criminal” trotting around, thumbing his nose at everyone, while spewing lies left and right.
Rove is a bad, filthy, evil human being — a KILLER!.
His criminal and traitorous acts must not go unpunished — or else some other U.S. president will do exactly the same Bush did in future. He should be lined up against a wall and shot by firing squad — in Oklahoma, the one state in the U.S. in which execution by firing squad is legally available.
This blood-sucking, murdering cockroach should be prosecuted together with fellow war criminals George Bush and Dick Cheney. These three committed unspeakable and unforgivable evil acts against the Iraqi people — and should be prosecuted by the ICC (International Criminal Court). Saddam was a tyrant, but that was no excuse to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, based on absolutely malicious, fictitious and manufactured evidence of WMDs!.
Elsewhere, lawyers for the overthrown Iraqi leadership have asked England’s attorney general for consent to prosecute Tony Blair, claiming a new interview revealed offenses contrary to the Geneva Conventions.
Giovanni di Stefano, representing former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz, wrote to the British government’s chief legal adviser on Saturday with a “request for consent to prosecute” former British prime minister Blair.
Di Stefano’s Studio Legale Internazionale law firm represented Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who was deposed by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Britain, under Blair, backed the invasion.
In comments released from a BBC television interview due out last Sunday, Blair said he would have backed the invasion of Iraq even if he knew that it had no weapons of mass destruction, the main justification at the time.
“In summary the allegation against… Blair involves a violation of offences within the Geneva Conventions Act 1957 which without doubt and by his own admission can only but be deemed ‘not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly’,” said di Stefano’s letter, quoting the conventions.
Aziz “is but one in millions affected by the actions (taken by) Blair and others… whom we seek your leave to issue proceedings (against) as per above forthwith.”
The attorney general’s office was not immediately available for comment. [ REPORT BY AFP ]
Columnist – John Sammon Maybe Obama can undo the Bush Cheney years. I doubt he can on his own.
The Founding Fathers who talked about freedom and designing an egalitarian state were themselves elitist, racist and corporate (Alexander Hamilton called the public an ass). America has not lived up to its promise, for it was a promise only made, not intended to be kept. Basically, the system has been and still to this day is founded on the principle, the (white) cream, the privileged elite among us, rises to the top.
Obama remains something of an anomaly. Elected by a popular vote, how long he remains in office and is viewed with favor depends on the degree to which he attempts to change the corporate influence on American life and the unquestioning obedience to it of the American people.
Here are 10 reasons why:
1. Look at the numerous wars we’ve fought or instigated, always in the name of righteousness. Look at the list of our opponents. A few were evil, corporate and powerful, for example, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, developing dictatorial states who attempted to copy the imperialism of England and the United States. Remember, Japan was a hermit kingdom that simply wanted to be left alone until we forced her to open her doors for exploitation and she began to modernize at a rapid rate. But many wars have been dynastic in nature, colonial, undertaken against impoverished Third World nations for natural resources, from the Philippines in 1900 to gain a colony in Asia, to Iraq, deposing a dictator we had equipped and encouraged because he wouldn’t act like a proper puppet, and we wanted his oil.
2. Capitol Hill is ruled by corporate lobbyists, whose loyalty is not to the country, but to their respective corporations and the profit margins they gain by not only exploiting you as a customer, artificially jacking up the price of oil, or skyrocketing the price of medicines, or developing overseas markets to take advantage of cheap or slave labor even if it means eroding jobs here at home and promoting unethical, obscene regimes abroad. China for example. Thus, it’s not the government and the people of the United States. It’s the government, the lobbyists and the people in order of influence, with the people a distant third. Dynastic and monetary power rules.
3.The American people, many of them, it sounds harsh to say, are fairly stupid, and docile, fertile ground for manipulators. Many of them get their filtered news from corporate controlled television conglomerates or hate radio. Stupidity is not a matter of simply not knowing. It’s not wanting to know, not caring that you don’t know. Tuning out. Never doubting. Not reading. Not learning.
4.THE PRESIDENT IS ABOVE THE LAW. They, the powers that be, love to say it isn’t so. But time and again it’s been proven. Nixon should have done jail time. Bush and Cheney should be prosecuted for lying America into a war over false weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Always, the reasons for not doing it are the same, it’s inconvenient, it makes us look bad, we need to move ahead. The problem with excusing wrongdoing because it was allegedly patriotically motivated is that it encourages future wrongdoing. It also creates two separate classes of accountability, us, and them.
5. The United States is truly a Roman Empire-style colossus, stockpiling every kind of weapon imaginable, arming much of the world with these weapons, but castigating countries we don’t like for trying to acquire the same weapons.
6. There is a developing disturbing psychological quirk only I report. American military officers and soldiers have taken to posing with the bodies of defeated foes for photos, such as the dead sons of Saddam Hussein. Or, the still-living wretches thrown into Abu Ghraib Prison, tied up and photographed often in bondage, pseudo-sexual positions. Wanting to project power by using bodies as perverse propaganda props makes me doubt the sanity of people who, like Frankenstein’s monster, have been sent out in the world to do good in our name.
7. Our former president loved posing in uniform like Benito Mussolini, even though he was only a Vietnam-dodging, National Guard week-end warrior who skipped meetings.
8. In the reactionary hysteria after 9-11, everybody drove around town displaying flags from car antennas in a tacky display as though they were bumper stickers. This was new. Misuse of the flag in a cheap football pep rally-like attempt to stifle dissent and to glorify solidarity for government policy is perhaps the most basic of all fascist tendencies.
9. To a corporate democraphobe (dislikes democracy), the following rating system applies, war, good, weapons, good, profits from outrageous prices, good, spend on schools, bad, help people in need with training, bad, shared health care, bad, immigration, bad.
10. A McCarthy-style climate of fear, of enemies, traitors, subversives, Islam, even though we love Saudi Arabia, has been promoted.
The United States was until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and still is, in some important respects, a pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and lack of social solidarity. Its religiosity is overt, aggressive, virulent and ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized "enemies", both political and cultural. The United States of America started out as a series of loosely connected, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of these settlements were former victims of religious persecution, indentured servants, lapsed nobility, and other refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin list of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain.
Even mega-states are typically founded by a small nucleus of pioneers, visionaries, and activists. The United States is a relatively recent example. The character of the collective of Founding Fathers has a profound effect on the nature of the polity that they create: nations spawned by warriors tend to be belligerent and to nurture and cherish military might throughout their history (e.g., Rome); When traders and businessman establish a country, it is likely to cultivate capitalistic values and thrive on commerce and shipping (e.g., Netherlands); The denizens of countries formed by lawyers are likely to be litigious.The influence of the Founding Fathers does not wane with time. On the very contrary: the mold that they have forged for their successors tends to rigidify and be sanctified. It is buttressed by an appropriate ethos, code of conduct, and set of values. Subsequent and massive waves of immigrants conform with these norms and adapt themselves to local traditions, lores, and mores.
The "American Dream" in itself is benign. It involves materialistic self-realization, the belief in the ideal of equal opportunities and equal access to the system, and in just rewards for hard work, merit, and natural gifts. But the Dream has been rendered nightmarish by the confluence with America’s narcissistic traits.
America’s internal ethos is universally-accepted by all Americans. It incorporates the American Dream and the conviction that America stands for everything that is good and right. Consequently, as the reification of goodness, the United States is in constant battle with evil and its ever-changing demonic emissaries – from Hitler to Saddam Hussein.
There is no national consensus about America’s external ethos. Some Americans are isolationists, others interventionists. Both groups are hypervigilant, paranoid, and self-righteous – but isolationists are introverted and schizoid. Theirs is siege mentality. Interventionists are missionary. They feel omnipotent and invincible. They are extroverted and psychopathic.
This pathology can be traced back and attributed to a confluence of historical events and processes, the equivalents of trauma and abuse in an individual’s early childhood.
The United States of America started out as a series of loosely connected, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of these settlements were former victims of religious persecution, indentured servants, lapsed nobility, and other refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin list of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain.
The inhabitants of the colonies defended against their perceived helplessness and very real inferiority with compensatory, imagined, and feigned superiority and fantasies of omnipotence. Victims frequently internalize their abusers and themselves become bullies. Hence the rough, immutable kernel of American narcissism.
The United States was (until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s) and still is, in some important respects, a pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and lack of social solidarity. Its religiosity is overt, aggressive, virulent and ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized "enemies", both political and cultural.
The Civil War was fought between 2 America’s: the South, a perverted rendition of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the North, a harbinger of modern, multicultural immigrant societies. The North and the American Dream prevailed, the slaves were freed, and the Southern way of life, that of "gentlemen with leisure", was replaced by a workaholic society where everyone is a slave to money and leisure is an ever rarer commodity.
Americans’ religion is a manifestation of their "Chosen People Syndrome". They are missionary, messianic, zealous, fanatical, and nauseatingly self-righteous, bigoted, and hypocritical. This is especially discernible in the double-speak and double-standard that underlies American foreign policy.
American altruism is misanthropic and compulsive. They often give merely in order to control, manipulate, and sadistically humiliate the recipients.
Narcissism is frequently comorbid with paranoia. Americans cultivate and nurture a siege mentality which leads to violent acting out and unbridled jingoism. Their persecutory delusions sit well with their adherence to social Darwinism (natural selection of the fittest, let the weaker fall by the wayside, might is right, etc.).
Consequently, the United States always finds itself in company with the least palatable regimes in the world: together with Nazi Germany it had a working eugenics program (the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws and the Nazi sterilization law were modeled after American anti-miscegenation and sterilization statutes), together with the likes of Saudi Arabia it executes its prisoners, it was the last developed nation to abolish slavery, alone with South Africa it had instituted official apartheid in a vast swathe of its territory.
Add to this volatile mix an ethos of malignant individualism, racism both latent and overt, a trampling, "no holds barred" ambitiousness, competitiveness, frontier violence-based morality, and proud simple-mindedness – and an ominous portrait of the United States as a deeply disturbed polity emerges.
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