connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by Eleventh Earl of Mar)

Colin Powell (.pdf):

[…] “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism” […]

White House reporter last Friday:

Mr. President, former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, says “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

If the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State feels this way, don’t you feel that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you’re following a flawed strategy?

President Bush:

“If there’s any comparrison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed, flawed logic. It’s just, it’s just, I simply can’t accept that. It’s unnaceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparrison between the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children and to understand, to ah, to achieve an objective.” […]

Don’t you love how President Bush hides behind the compassion and decency of us, the American people, in order to segue into a defense of his administration? I love how he says that it’s unnaceptable to think that we are fighting a flawed and immoral fight against terrorism, as if we have any say in the matter whatsoever.

As for his administration’s war, here are the facts:

• > 50,000 dead Iraqi citizens
• Abu Ghraib
• Secret torture facilities
• Guantanamo Bay

Man, those are some seriously evil, rhetorical skills President Bush is flexin’ about. People really need to stop calling this man an idiot. He’s not. He’s an evil genius. Too bad for him and his neo-con buddies we’re all starting to call him on this type of shit.

Keith Olbermann wasn’t enunciating as clearly in October of 2002 — when President Bush urged us, the American people, to call our congressmen to back the invasion of Iraq — as he has these past few weeks. Thankfully, he seems to have found his groove:

This president has no shame, whatsoever.

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and — as I discovered from those “missing posters” seared still into my soul — two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are “soft,”or have “forgotten” the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast — of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds — none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country’s wound is still open.

Five years later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial — barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field — Mr. Lincoln said, “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. “We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground.” So we won’t.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party — tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election — ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications — forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President — and those around him — did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, “bi-partisanship” meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, “validate the strategy of the terrorists.”

They promised protection, and then showed that to them “protection” meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do’ with 9/11 is “lying by implication.”

The impolite phrase is “impeachable offense.”

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you — or those around you — ever “spin” 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney’s continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called “The Twilight Zone” broadcast a riveting episode entitled “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An “alien” is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, “they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.”

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

“For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.”

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have “forgotten the lessons of 9/11″… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Keep bringing the truth Keith, hard and fast — no matter what you’re called.

While you’re finding enunciating your voice, do know that you’re speaking for many of us in the process; people that don’t believe that a hundred thousand dead Iraqi’s will ever bring back our dead and our shallow innocence lost of five-years past and will only give birth to the repeat cycle of violence.

You’re speaking for a people who want justice, first and foremost, with bin Laden put away in a cell or a pine box, his choice.

Most importantly, the people you speak for don’t buy into the much marketed fear of the future, because we refuse to climb aboard a self-fulfilling prophesy to live in such a state.

The people you speak for are Americans, and we are not afraid.

Get us to 2008, Keith. We’ll take care of the rest.

Donald Rumsfeld spoke at The American Legion National Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah the other day (full transcript), attempting to solidify the position of this administration’s war on terror; that we are fighting an enemy similar to Adolf Hitler — an Islamofascist.

Analogies to the attitudes years prior to WWII ebbed and flowed with the greatest of ease from Rumsfeld, all pointing to the absolute righteousness of this administration in their self-assigned task to rid the world of the threat of terrorism.

As a resident of New York City on 9/11, I’d be extremely satisfied with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda lying in ruins before treading any deeper in potentially self-polluting waters, but apparently this administration doesn’t care what me and my former neighbors think about the matter at hand:

[…]

Over the next decades, a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be accommodated, then the carnage and the destruction of then recent memory of WWI, could be avoided.

It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis — the rise of fascism and Nazism — they were ridiculed, or ignored.

Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated.

[…]

I recount that history because, once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.

Today, another enemy, a different kind of enemy, has made clear its intentions with attacks in places like New York and Washington D.C., Bali, London, Moscow and so many other places. But some seem not to have learned history’s lessons.

We need to consider the following questions, I would submit:

With the growing lethality, and the increasing availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow, someway, vicious extremists can be appeased?

[…]

I have many thoughts on this line of reasoning, but first, take a listen to Keith Olberman’s perspective on the matter:

[…]

That about what Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this:

This is a democracy, still. Sometimes, just barely. And as such, all voices count. Not just his. Had he or his president, perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama bin Laden’s plans 5 years ago; about Saddam Hussein’s weapon’s 4 years ago; about Hurricane Katrina’s impact 1 year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris. Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina to flu vaccine shortages to the entire fog of fear that continues to envelop our nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and their cronies have, inadvertently or intentionally, profited or benefited, either personally or politically,

And yet he can stand up in public and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes.

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

[…]

Rumsfeld, in his eagerness to equate this administration’s strategy in Iraq with Winston Churchill’s call to watch Hitler and a Germany on the rise to destructive power once again, misses the mark entirely. But let’s not waste energy with generalizations; instead, let’s speak to historical fact regarding the nation of Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

The facts are that the United States of America financially backed Iraq in the early 1980’s. President Reagan sent this very same Donald Rumsfeld to speak with Saddam Hussein in December of 1983, during the peak of the Iraq-Iran war, to ensure that all was well in the struggle against that decade’s flavor of tyranny.

Only one month prior to the visit, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against both Iranian soldiers and his own people. Even though our intelligence confirmed such actions, nothing was said by Rumsfeld at the time.

Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t have a leg to stand on in a comparison with Winston Churchill. If anything, he is complicit in the build-up of aggression that “islamofascists” have against our nation.

Similarly, America, circa 1980 to 2006, is in no way analogous to a European continent that fell into conflict with a powerful, internal rogue state and their techniques of propaganda, fear mongering, terrorism, territorial occupation and mass executions.

If anything, this speech by Rumsfeld — one that holds both loaded arguments and misconstrued analogies of the highest order — is closer itself to propaganda than “the beacon of light in times of darkness” message that both he and this administration so very wishes to convince us of believing.

Olbermann, who might not speak for political analysts, but does for millions of Americans with quelled voices in this nation, put it best when he directly challenged this administration’s self-righteous claim to ownership of truth, by saying:

“And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a new type of fascism. As he was correct to remind us as how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that, though probably not in the way he thought he meant it. This country faces a new type of fascism, indeed.”

The only problem is that if you’re a student of history, it really isn’t that new.

The Carlyle Group was covered extensively in Fahrenheit 9/11. For those of you who refused to see the film, but are extremely upset about this port deal, I suggest you swallow your pride for a few hours and watch it.

As for the Olberman interview; there are some very real reasons that Bush is pushing this deal through. Our Navy needs the Dubai company controlled ports in the Middle East to continue the “War on Terror, “which progressively lines the pockets of The Carlyle Group more and more (sick, eh?). I’m sure international business doesn’t want to have ideology such as Homeland Security become a deal stopper in the future, but that’s a secondary concern to this President and his family at this point.

I mean come on, the bucks are rolling in.

This “Boycott MSNBC” meme being promoted by the “Open Letter To Chris Matthews” blog and pushed by big-time, left bloggers is disingenuous at best, and a horrible strategy… period. Forget for a moment that Chris Matthews compared Osama bin Laden’s recent choice of language to Michael Moore’s, the facts regarding Moore are just not being represented correctly. The “Open Letter…” blog states:

What’s this all about? Chris Matthews has repeatedly compared Osama bin Laden to Democrats…

Wrong.

1. Michael Moore is not a registered Democrat
2. Michael Moore does not hold office
3. Michael Moore is an independent documentary filmmaker, one who goes after both corrupt corporations and government administrations

1992 was the last time Moore was registered as a Democrat. In the past, I’ve had my own problems wrestling with how he has been positioned by both the media and the RNM as a “Liberal Democrat” due to his hardcore stance against the Bush administration. And then I experienced F9/11 on opening night and my eyes opened even wider regarding the actions of this administration, realizing that Moore wasn’t being partisan, he was being as direct and honest as humanly possible.

I’m sure Democrats feel a rush when an independent, creative voice rips apart the opposition party — especially one as corrupt as the Bush administration — but these actions don’t exclusively subscribe a voice such as Moore to the Democratic Party’s brand of progress or politics, nor should the Democrats want such to be the case.

As an independent (or non-affiliated here in North Carolina), I respect Moore’s perspective because he doesn’t belong to a political party. Michael Moore will reach more people to act and/or vote against corruption as an independent filmmaker, than a labeled “Liberal Democratic” filmmaker. The sheer amount of bloggers that are blindly supporting this meme is poor strategy.

Stop feeding the machine their propaganda. This is a short-term tactical reaction, one that will negatively affect Moore’s long-term output of truth if he’s pigeon holed as a Democrat.

UPDATE: The blog has changed its intro to now read:

What’s this all about? Chris Matthews has repeatedly compared Americans who are concerned about the war in Iraq to Osama bin Liden…

Well, at least they got the Democratic issue corrected, but Matthews only compared Moore’s language. This boycott is retarded. Shit, I’m watching Keith Olberman no matter what Chris Matthews says.

Welcome, fellers. I’m sure you’re going to be successful tilting that liberal network, CNN, back to the middle from their left-leaning ways.

Anything for ratings, eh?

UPDATE: Well, it didn’t take long for Beck to land on Keith Olberman’s World’s Worst Person segment: