it's all in the words

This is a really good summation of what is wrong with our commander in chief and his minions in regards to COMMUNICATION.

They want to be at war...

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Say What?
Four bewildering remarks from the Bush administration.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, at 6:19 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2160225/

The world might be less stressful if the president of the most powerful nation didn't so frequently convey the impression that he has no idea what's going on.

Here are three recent examples of his bewildering remarks, plus one from his secretary of state.

1. "If we leave [Iraq] before the mission is complete, if we withdraw, the enemy will follow us home."

This was from a speech by George W. Bush in Lancaster, Pa., last Aug. 16. That's not so recent, but the comment was repeated just this month by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by Ohio Republican Rep. John Boehner; so someone up high still seems to think it's true or at least catchy.

In fact, it makes no sense whatever. First, it assumes that "the enemy" in Iraq consists entirely of al-Qaida terrorists, when they comprise only a small segment of the forces attacking U.S. troops. Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias are not likely to "follow us home."

Second, if terrorists wanted to attack American territory again (and maybe they do), their ability to do so is unaffected by whether we stay in or pull out of Iraq. It's not as if they're all holed up in Baghdad and Anbar province, just waiting for the fighting to stop so they can climb out of their foxholes and go blow up New York. If al-Qaida is a global network, its agents can fight in both places.

Third, this is a hell of a thing to say in front of the allies. It's a crudely selfish message, suggesting that we're getting a lot of people killed over there in order that nobody gets killed back here. What leader of a beleaguered nation, reading this remark, would seek America's protection?

2. "What we do know is that the Quds force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq. … And we also know that the Quds force is a part of the Iranian government. … What we don't know is whether or not the head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds force to do what they did. But here's my point: Either they knew or didn't know, and what matters is, is that they're there. What's worse—that the government knew or that the government didn't know?

There are two things worse—that the U.S. government doesn't know whether the Iranian government knew, and that the American president doesn't seem to care.

This may be unfair; he probably does care. So, what's really worse—judging from this passage from Bush's Feb. 14 press conference—is that he doesn't seem to be doing much to find out.

One way to find out might be to open up talks with Iran. Many former officials, of both parties, have urged the Bush administration to engage with Iran on a number of issues, for a number of reasons affecting national security. Here's one more. If these particularly lethal IEDs known as "explosively formed penetrators" are being supplied with the Iranian government's knowledge, maybe a deal can be struck to stop the flow; if they're being supplied without high officials' knowledge, maybe a deal can be struck to crack down jointly on the rogue agents.

One thing is clear from this: The Bush administration doesn't want to talk with the Iranians on principle. Maybe the Iranians don't want to talk with us, either. It wouldn't kill us to find out. (It didn't kill us to find out, finally, with the North Koreans.)

3. Speaking of not talking to nasty regimes, here's a remark by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at House hearings on Feb. 16:

"We don't have an ideological problem with talking to Syria. … [T]here just isn't any evidence that they're trying to change their behavior."

Rice was responding to a heartfelt plea from Republican Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia. "I beg of you," he said, "if we're going to ask a young man or woman in our military to go to Iraq three different times, it's not asking too much … to send somebody to engage with … the Syrians."

The secretary's response was a replay of Bush's response to a similar question at a press conference last August: "We've been in touch with Syria," he replied. "Colin Powell sent a message to Syria in person. Dick Armitage talked to Syria. … Syria knows what we think. … The problem is that their response hasn't been very positive."

He was referring to a trip that his former secretary of state took to the Middle East back in 2003—and, though Bush didn't mention this, Syria's response was positive. Ariel Sharon, then Israel's prime minister, had asked Powell to get Syrian President Bashar Assad to crack down on Hezbollah—and Assad did, for a little while, anyway.

Then, as now, a follow-up question might have been: How do you know what the Syrians are willing to do until you talk with them and offer them some incentives?

Again, maybe the Syrians don't want to talk with Bush. Maybe they figure that this lame-duck American president shows no sign of changing his behavior, that he has nothing useful to offer them.

4. "George Washington's long struggle for freedom has also inspired generations of Americans to stand for freedom in their own time. Today, we're fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life."

On Feb. 19, to celebrate George Washington's birthday, President Bush gave a speech at Mount Vernon comparing himself to the father of our country and the Iraqi war to the Revolutionary War.

In the past, George W. Bush has likened himself to Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.

He should stay away from historical analogies. The crises and wars that he's invoked don't really correspond to his predicaments, or to the extent that they do, the comparisons tend not to flatter him. Washington is particularly ill-cast as a Bush stand-in.

"On the field of battle," Bush said at Mount Vernon, "Washington's forces were facing a mighty empire, and the odds against them were overwhelming. The ragged Continental Army lost more battles than it won" and "stood on the brink of disaster many times. Yet George Washington's calm hand and determination kept the cause of independence and the principles of our Declaration alive. … In the end, General Washington understood that the Revolutionary War was a test of wills, and his will was unbreakable."

Sound familiar? It's obviously meant to, but it shouldn't. Here's an awkward question: By Bush's own description, which side in the Iraq war most resembles the "ragged Continental Army" and which side the "mighty empire"? I don't mean to draw moral (or any other sort of) equivalences, because there is nothing at all equivalent about those two wars, or these two presidents, and it degrades the serious study of history to pretend there is.

But dragging Washington into Iraq is especially perverse because it's hard to imagine a war that he would have found more dreadful. Bush quotes him as having once said, "My best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever in any country I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom."

Yet Bush leaves out the context in which Washington made this remark. It was when the French foreign minister presented him with France's new tricolor flag. That is, it was in celebration of the French Revolution.

It was not, in any way, an endorsement of going to war to "spread freedom" around the world. To the contrary, in 1793, during France's subsequent war with much of Europe, Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, forbidding American citizens from taking any action that would help one side or another.

Nor did Bush say anything about Washington's Farewell Address of 1796, in which the first president, stepping down from two terms, elaborated his views still further. Washington urged his fellow citizens to avoid "overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty." He cautioned against "excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another." And he advised, "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible."

At the conclusion of his Mount Vernon speech, Bush said of Washington, "His example guided us in his time; it guides us in our time; and it will guide us for all time."

Does Bush really believe that, or was he just yakking? And, as he might put it, what's worse?
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2160225/

Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Right Wing Christianity v. Fascism...

Got this doozy from alternet.org
Since my early musings with the Catholic Church (albeit a very very liberal group within that group) i've always been weary of religion and it's morality and rules. Through my historical journeys in high school and at university, the rise of power in Nazi Germany was something that always fascinated me.

We read the book Badenheim, 1939 in one of my Holocaust classes and it was a piece that always stuck with me, as did a question; "How could a people blindly throw their fellow man into the jaws of the Holocaust?"

Badenheim attempts to paint that portion of the portrait, telling the tail of the beginnings of the Jewish purge under Nazi rule. It drifts into it...It doesn't plop 3,000 residents onto a train for Birkenau after a declaration of war on an ethnic people...It creeps up on the reader, as it did to those poor people in life and in this piece of fiction. Read the book if you haven't.

Why do i bring up Badenheim, 1939? Well, this article by Chris Hedges really reminds me of the feeling I got as I learned more and more about the BEGINNING of the Holocaust. The much publicized 'end' of the Holocaust everyone knows...Trains, camps, showers, ovens, graves, crematorium...But before that, there was fear. Before that there was anguish and hardship that fed fear...That poverty and economic fall of Germany help seed what would eventually grow into the Holocaust.

And here we are in America. From what I hear from a lot of the Right Wing Bobbleheads, America is a "Christian Nation"...And the masses that flood evangelicals like my main man Ted "Crystal Meth" Haggard think that we're in a Christian America. This article vocalizes a lot of what I've been thinking about the heart of this malcontent that rests on the shoulders of this great country of ours...

So take a read and repost if you can...
jp

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The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on February 8, 2007, Printed on February 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/47679/

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" were stories of this failure -- personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers -- those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding.

The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic -- to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.

We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in "The Cycles of American History," wrote that "the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense -- not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide."

Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me, I suspect half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute." But this too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.

Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups -- the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right.

Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck -- who also used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched "Kulturkampf," the word from which we get culture wars, against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck's attacks, which split Germany and made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis' more virulent racism and repression.

The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" -- where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens -- awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement -- the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance.

The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.

Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/47679/