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How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare. An Election between a Secret President and a Leader of a Secret Mormon Cult. A Mad World.

How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare

Obama has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration's worst policies.

April 18, 2012 |

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When Barack Obama took office, he was the civil liberties communities’ great hope. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, pledged to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and run a transparent and open government. But he has become a civil libertarian’s nightmare: a supposedly liberal president who instead has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration’s worst policies, lending bipartisan support for a more intrusive and authoritarian federal government.

It started with the 9/11 attacks. Within a week, Congress, including many liberals, gave the White House blanket authority to wage a war on the terrorists. A month after that, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, authorizing many anti-terrorism measure including expanded surveillance. By mid-November, the White House ordered creation of military tribunals to try terrorists who were not U.S. citizens.

Bush quickly expanded covert operations, creating a shadow arrest, interrogation and detention system based at Guantanamo that violated international law and evaded domestic oversight. While the Supreme Court eventually ruled that detainees have some rights, the precedent that the Constitution does not restrict how a president conducts an endless war against a stateless enemy was firmly planted. In response, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union proposed reforms the newly elected president could make. What few anticipated was how he would embrace, expand and institutionalize many of Bush’s war on terror excesses.

President Obama now has power that Bush never had. Foremost is he can (and has) order the killing of U.S. citizens abroad who are deemed terrorists. Like Bush, he has asked the Justice Department to draft secret memos authorizing his actions without going before a federal court or disclosing them. Obama has continued indefinite detentions at Gitmo, but also brought the policy ashore by signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which authorizes the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of assisting terrorists, even citizens. That policy, codifying how the Bush treated Jose Padilla, a citizen who was arrested in a bomb plot after landing at a Chicago airport in 2002 and was transferred from civil to military custody,upends the 1878’s Posse Comitatus Act’s ban on domestic military deployment.

Meanwhile, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, Washington’s wartime posture has trickled down into many areas of domestic activity—even as some foreign policy experts say the world is a much safer place than it was 20 years ago, as measured by the growth in free-market economies and democratic governments. Domestic law enforcement has been militarized—as most visibly seen by the tactics used against the Occupy protests and also againstsuspected illegal immigrants, who are treated with brute force and have limited access to judicial review before being deported.

One of Bush’s biggest civil liberties breaches, spying on virtually all Americans via their telecommunications startingin 2003, also has been expanded. Congress authorized the effort in 2006. Two years later, it granted legal immunity to the telecom firms helping Bush—a bill Obama voted for. The National Security Agency is now building its largest data processing center ever, which Wired.com’s James Bamforth reports will go beyond the public Internet to grab data but also reach password-protected networks. The federal government continues to require that computer makers and big Web sites provide access for domestic surveillance purposes. More crucially, the NSA is increasingly relying on private firms to mine data, because, unlike the government, it does not need a search warrant. The Constitution only limits the government searches and seizures.

The government’s endless wartime footing is also seen in its war on whistleblowers. Obama has continued cases brought by Bush, such as going after the "leaker" in the warrantless wiretapping story broken by the New York Times in 2005, as well as the WikiLeaks case, prosecution of Bradley Manning, and others for allegedly mishandling classified materials related to the war on terrorism. Its suppression of war-related information given to journalists extends overseas, where the State Department this month has blocked a visa for aPakistani critic from speaking in the U.S. The White House also recentlypressured Yemen’s leader to jail the reporter who exposed U.S. drone strikes. Meanwhile, the administration has stonewalled Freedom of Information Act requests, particularly the Justice Department, which has issued the secret wartime memos.

How bad is it? Anthony Romero, the ACLU executive director, exclaimed in June 2010 that Obama “disgusted” him. Meanwhile, the most hawkish Bush administration officials have defended and praised Obama.

Last summer, liberal lawyer-journalist Glenn Greenwald tallied a list of Bush warrior endorsements. Jack Goldsmith, the former DOJ officials who approved the torture and domestic spying efforts, wrote in The New Republic in May 2009 that Obama actually was waging a more effective war on terror than Bush.

“The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expended some of it, and has narrowed only a bit,” Goldsmith wrote. “Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol and rhetoric.” Bush’s final CIA director, General Michael Hayden—whose confirmation Obama opposed as a senator—told CNN there was a “powerful continuity between the 43rd and 44th presidents.” And in early 2011 Vice-President Dick Cheney told NBC News, “He’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate.”

All of these civil liberties issues—executive authority to order assassination of citizens, unlimited detention without charges at Guantanamo, authority to deploy the military domestically to arrest and indefinitely detail terrorism suspects, a parallel "due process" that is outside the judicial branch, the expansion of the surveillance state, the increased militarization of local police and federal agencies especially ICE, the increasingly punitive treatment of protesters including strip searches, the war on whistleblowers, and others—are very complicated. The details are filled with shades of gray.

Bradley Manning’s harsh treatment, for example, is thought to be tied to the White House’s fear that the vast WikiLeaks cache contained references to the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden before his assassination—and could have alerted Al Qaeda. Better data mining and analysis could have detected the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act’s defenders past and present have repeatedly argued. But from a civil liberties perspective, Obama has more than chipped away at freedom from federal intrusion. The underlying problem is the tactics and values forged in foreign war have seeped into domestic policing.

“We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national security state,” Jack Balkin, a liberal Yale University Law School professor,told the New Yorker in a 2011 feature about a prominent NSA whistleblower. “The question is not whether we will have a surveillance state in the years to come, but what sort of state we will have,” he wrote in a prescient law review article published early in Obama’s presidency.

The larger dangers, Balkin said, was that the government is creating a “parallel track of preventative law enforcement that bypasses traditional protections in the Bill of Rights.” Moreover, he worries “traditional law enforcement and social services will increasingly resemble the parallel track.” And because the Constitution only restricts government actions, not “private parties, government has increasing incentives to rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it.”

“The major defining feature of the Obama administration on this issue is the eagerness with which it embraced the stunning evisceration of civil rights and liberties that was a hallmark of the Bush administration, and then deepened those outrageous programs,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, who is an attorney representing many Occupy protesters swept up in last fall’s mass arrests. “He has successfully counted on the acquiescent silence of the liberals.”

Eric Holder, the Defender

The biggest difference between Bush and Obama on civil liberties and the war on terror is the Obama administration is more attuned to the optics of trying to appear reasonable as it conducts much of the same policies. To be fair, Obama has not kidnapped innocent people en masse in Afghanistan and warehoused them in Cuba, as Bush did. But he has launched drone strikes in numerous counties, where the victims include children.

In 2010, the ACLU and New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented many Guantanamo detainees, filed a suit asking a federal court to set legal standards when the government could use lethal force against a U.S. citizen who was overseas but not on an active battlefield. That suit was dismissed. But Eric Holder, perhaps giving a victory to critics who have condemned the administration’s secrecy, gave an speech this March at Chicago’s Northwestern University School of Law explaining Obama’s wartime actions and authority. The speech was exactly what Goldsmith had described a year earlier in The New Republic—nearly identical on substance to Bush administration policy, but with more attention to the packaging for the public.

“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger,” Holder began, quoting President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural at the height of the Cold War. “But just as surely as we are a nation at war, we are also a nation of laws and values,” Holder continued, saying, “Our actions must always be grounded on the bedrock of the Constitution.”

Holder explained the challenge for government was what to do after someone is found who is suspected of participating in a terrorist plot against the United States. He said the federal courts have done an excellent job in dealing with suspected terrorists since 9/11—and those who claim otherwise “are simply wrong.” But then Holder built the case for using a “reformed” military commission system—granting foreign detainees a right to counsel, a right to see evidence against them, and a right to cross-examine witnesses.

Moreover, Holder defended the administration’s right to transfer a terrorism suspect from civilian courts to military custody “based on the considered judgment of the President’s senior national security team.” And he said that in a “war with a stateless enemy” that the federal government has a right an obligation “to target specific senior operational leaders of Al Qaeda and associated forces,” just as the military shot down the plane with the top Japanese Admiral who led the Pearl Harbor attacks in World War II. “It is important to explain these legal principles publicly,” Holder said. “The Constitution does not require the President to delay action until some theoretical end stage of planning—when the precise time, pace and manner of an attack become clear.”

Holder then said there is no constitutional requirement that the President “get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

Holder’s arguments sound reasonable until you stop and ask where it ends up. The U.S. is still involved in dubious warfare efforts overseas—particularly Afghanistan. But the full wartime powers invoked by Obama to endlessly fight stateless terrorists, which are on par to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s suspension of civil liberties in World War II, arguably are disproportionate to the scope of military actions. Moreover, people like Obama who are schooled in constitutional law know there are reasons why the foundation of American democracy is based on being a nation of laws—not arbitrary decisions by men—and are expected to respect that distinction govern with due deference and restraint.

Those who understand Obama’s civil liberties failing best include lawyers serving in the military, like David Frakt, a lawyer in the Air Force and Barry University School of Law professor. He recently wrote on Jurist.org that Obama’s targeted assassinations—a word Holder rejected in the speech—was the foreign policy equivalent of the domestic "Stand Your Ground" laws that led to Trayvon Martin's killing.

“During the Bush administration, we developed the rule of ‘we can kill you, but you can’t kill us,’” Frakt wrote. “Now, under the Obama administration, we have added a corollary… namely, ‘you can’t kill us, only we can kill us,’” referring to killing U.S. citizens abroad where “capture is not feasible.” The Stand Your Ground laws “are the logical domestic criminal counterpart to our nation’s aggressive pre-emptive self defense doctrine, under which we have gone to war on the same flimsy suspicions that George Zimmerman acted upon.”

The problem—as seen with more than 600 innocent people taken to Guantanamo—is that the White House can make mistakes. Cheney famouslycalled them “the worst of the worst,” but by 2009 only one in seven were seen as being enemy combatants. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, responding to Holder’s talk, said that, “Based on what I’ve heard so far, I can’t tell whether or not the Justice Department’s legal arguments would allow the president to order intelligence agents to kill an American inside the United States.”

Domestic civil liberties are fragile. They are not the same as a World War II battlefield where a grunt shoots first and asks questions later. Civil liberties take years to create and accrue, whereas a domestic terrorist attack can occur in a flash and then unwind those protections quickly and for many years. What started under Bush and has continued under Obama are battlefield values that have been conflated with domestic policing.

Just as Stand Your Ground laws turn every American going about their lives into a threat that needs to be measured, so too does a growing surveillance state encroach on privacy and specific constitutional rights, such as freedom from warrantless searches, judicial review and other constitutional checks and balances.

The question, as Balkan noted at the start of the Obama presidency, is not whether we will have a growing surveillance and police state, but what that state will be like. Obama has begun to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he hasn’t begun to roll back the most extreme civil liberties abuses tied to the earliest phases of that war. Liberals expected otherwise from a former constitutional law professor and candidate who campaigned against the excesses of the Bush administration.

 

MY PREDICTION AS TO BUSH GAME PLAN IN 2005

Subj: Marty The Pundit on Bush Game Plan  Date: 7/1/2005 2:02:50 PM Pacific Standard Time From: Msfried315

Here is Bush's game plan. This is original thought and not based on anything I read or heard.

1. O'Connor resigned before Rehnquist. Why?

2. Bush will nominate a "Thomas" clone to take her place. Why?

3. The nomination will go to committee. The Dems will filibuster or pull some other maneuver to prevent the nominee from going to the Senate for an up or down vote, per Frist.

4. I say it takes 60 votes to change a rule. They say 51. Frist will introduce a rule change to end the filibuster for judicial appointments. This will cause both parties to go nuclear. If the Fristites win, then this clone goes in as Associate Justice.

5. Rehnquist. will then announce his retirement. Bush will not nominate a candidate who is already on the Court to take his place. Instead Bush will nominate an outside that fits Bush's idea of a Chief Justice. May God protect us.

Best regards,

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq. (Pundit)

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?

Bush appointed a Thomas clone==Samuel Alito

Bush appointed the "Umpire" that is blind==Roberts

Citizens United undermines American Democracy

Still the Pundit.

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

 

GRASSLEY SCREWED YOU IN 2005 AND HE IS SCREWING YOU IN 2009.

Opening Statement of Sen. Chuck Grassley at the Bankruptcy Reform Hearing

 

Mr. Chairman, I'm pleased the bankruptcy bill is on the Judiciary Committee agenda and that we are scheduled to mark up this bill next week. The bipartisan legislation I just introduced as S. 256 is nearly identical to the 107th Congress H.R. 333 Conference Report signed by Senator Leahy, but voted down in the other body. The only difference is that I've removed the poison pill abortion amendment. All of the other compromises made at the request of our Democratic colleagues have been preserved intact in this bill.

As many of you know, we've been working on the issue of bankruptcy reform for a number of years now-since the mid 1990's. When I started working on this issue, it was considered a scandal that bankruptcies might reach 1.4 million. Guess what? In 2004, there were 1.6 million. Congress has wasted time and we still have a bankruptcy crisis on our hands.

By way of background, both Houses demonstrated overwhelming margins in favor of this bipartisan bill in 2000, but President Clinton pocket-vetoed the legislation and we simply ran out of time in the session to override the veto. In the 107th Congress, I re-introduced the bankruptcy bill and it passed the Senate overwhelmingly, with numerous changes to satisfy Democrats. We then went to conference with the House, and further concessions were made. The conference committee report language was the result of a long process of bipartisan negotiations that culminated in agreement on over four hundred pages of legislative text. Ultimately, we had a signed conference report supported by our Ranking Member.

Given that the language we are considering is the same as the 107th Congress conference report signed off on by our Democratic friends - minus the poison pill - I'm hopeful that we can all stand by the compromises we reached in good faith. We all cooperated and compromised on this legislation. It provides new consumer protections, helps children in need of child support, and makes other necessary reforms to a system that is open to abuse. There is no need to re-open this bill.

As we hear from witnesses today, I recall the broad public support for reforming our bankruptcy system. The vast majority of people believe that individuals who file for bankruptcy should be required to pay back some of their debts if they have the means to do so.

This is precisely what the bankruptcy reform legislation does.

Most people think it should be more difficult for people to file for bankruptcy. Americans have had enough; they are tired of paying for high rollers who game the current system and its loopholes to get out of paying their fair share.

This legislation eliminates some of the opportunities for abuse that exist under the current system. Our current system allows wealthy people to continue to abuse the system at the expense of everyone else. People with good incomes can run up massive debts and then use bankruptcy to get out of honoring them.

All of us end up paying for the unscrupulous who abuse the system. In fact, it has been estimated that every American family pays as much as $550 a year in a hidden tax as a result of the actions from these abuses. My bankruptcy reform legislation will help eliminate this hidden tax by implementing a means test to make wealthy people who can repay their debts actually honor them. I suppose we can call this a tax cut for the responsible people in America.

Bankruptcy abuse hurts our nation's small businesses. We will hear today about how small businesses have been hurt by losses due to bankruptcy. When businesses absorb these losses, they have to make up for the loss somehow through higher prices, or by laying off employees or going out of business.

The bankruptcy crisis is a jobs crisis. Making American's businesses stronger helps all of us - especially those in need of a job.

Make no mistake, misrepresentations about this legislation have been running rampant by those who oppose any meaningful bankruptcy reform. I've been in politics a long time, and I know that political criticism is never inhibited by ignorance. For instance, the statistical analysis in the U.S. Trustee's office examined over 5000 bankruptcy cases and found that under one-half listed medical debts of any sort. And those filers who did list medical debts, on average, listed under $5000 in medical debts.

So much for the myth that most bankruptcies are driven medical costs. The fact is there are abusers out there. The fact is S. 256 doesn't harm bankrupts with large medical debts.

Let's stop the abuse. Let's return to common sense. Let's enact bankruptcy reform now, before the abuse gets worse.

The reality is that the bankruptcy reform bill does not deny anyone access to bankruptcy relief; it just requires those who have the means to repay debts based on their income to do so. It's that simple. I look forward to quick Committee action and quick floor action on this bill.

COMMENT by Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

He is one pious son of a bitch. Listen to his BS about pulling the plug on Grandma. The Democrats should pull the plug on Grassley since most bankruptcies are caused by uninsured sick people. He favors bringing guns to Washington before violence erupts.

Give him the "heave ho".

Martin S Friedlander, Esq.

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHERE MAD KING GEORGE IS? HE CAN LEAVE BUT HE CANNOT HIDE. HE NEEDS TO WALK THE 13 STEPS TO THE SCAFFOLD AS DID SADDAM.

 

Add Up the Damage

By BOB HERBERT

Does anyone know where George W. Bush is?

You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.

We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.

But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.

When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.

This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

A year into the war Mr. Bush was cracking jokes about it at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. He displayed a series of photos that showed him searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”

And then there’s the Bush economy, another disaster, a trapdoor through which middle-class Americans can plunge toward the bracing experiences normally reserved for the poor and the destitute.

Mr. Bush traveled the country in the early days of his presidency, promoting his tax cut plans as hugely beneficial to small-business people and families of modest means. This was more deceit. The tax cuts would go overwhelmingly to the very rich.

The president would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression. Once again he was lighting a fire. This time the flames would engulf the economy and, as with Iraq, bring catastrophe.

If the U.S. were a product line, it would be seen now as deeply damaged goods, subject to recall.

There seemed to be no end to Mr. Bush’s talent for destruction. He tried to hand the piggy bank known as Social Security over to the marauders of the financial sector, but saner heads prevailed.

In New Orleans, the president failed to intervene swiftly and decisively to aid the tens of thousands of poor people who were very publicly suffering and, in many cases, dying. He then compounded this colossal failure of leadership by traveling to New Orleans and promising, in a dramatic, floodlit appearance, to spare no effort in rebuilding the flood-torn region and the wrecked lives of the victims.

He went further, vowing to confront the issue of poverty in America “with bold action.”

It was all nonsense, of course. He did nothing of the kind.

The catalog of his transgressions against the nation’s interests — sins of commission and omission — would keep Mr. Bush in a confessional for the rest of his life. Don’t hold your breath. He’s hardly the contrite sort.

He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson: “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”

The president chuckled, thinking — as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction — that there was something funny going on.

 

KING GEORGE, THE NIGHTMARE OF OUR TIME.

               

                         

King George W.:  James Madison's Nightmare

       

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war -- the very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress.

In his "Political Observations," written years before he served as fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to underscore the dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war fever. "In war," Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young republic still faced its share of dangerous enemies, "the discretionary power of the Executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force, of the people."

How remarkably prescient of Madison to anticipate the specter of our current King George imperiously undermining Congress' attempts to end the Iraq war. When the prime author of the U.S. Constitution explained why that document grants Congress -- not the president -- the exclusive power to declare and fund wars, Madison wrote, "A delegation of such powers [to the president] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments."

Because "[n]o nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare," Madison urged that the constitutional separation of powers he had codified be respected. "The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war ... the power of raising armies," he wrote. "The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them."

That last sentence perfectly describes the threat of what President Dwight Eisenhower, 165 years later, would describe as the "military-industrial complex," a permanent war economy feeding off a permanent state of insecurity. The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the military profiteers and their handsomely rewarded cheerleaders in the government of a raison d'être for the massive war economy supposedly created in response to it. Fortunately for them, Bush found in the 9/11 attack an excuse to make war even more profitable and longer lasting. The Iraq war, which the president's 9/11 Commission concluded never had anything to do with the terrorist assault, nonetheless has transferred many hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars into the military economy. And when Congress seeks to exercise its power to control the budget, this president asserts that this will not govern his conduct of the war.

There never was a congressional declaration of war to cover the invasion of Iraq. Instead, President Bush acted under his claimed power as commander in chief, which the Supreme Court has held does allow him to respond to a "state of war" against the United States. That proviso was clearly a reference to surprise attacks or sudden emergencies.

The problem is that the "state of war" in question here was an al-Qaida attack on the U.S. that had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Perhaps to spare Congress the embarrassment of formally declaring war against a nation that had not attacked America, Bush settled for a loosely worded resolution supporting his use of military power if Iraq failed to comply with U.N. mandates. This was justified by the White House as a means of strengthening the United Nations in holding Iraq accountable for its WMD arsenal, but as most of the world looked on in dismay, Bush invaded Iraq after U.N. inspectors on the ground discovered that Iraq had no WMD.

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people -- just as Madison feared when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other."

What do we do with this treasonous traitor? End the war by not passing any appropriations bill to fund the war. Starve the bastard, then impeach him. We have to burn his ass.

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

MAD KING GEORGE BUSH MUST BE DIVERTED TO HIS EVER LASTING HELL.

     In his press conference on July 12, President Bush told the big lie yet again: "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th."

False but also crude, self-serving, easily exposed. Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia did not exist on September 11, 2001. The lie came eight days after a Fourth of July oration in which he compared himself to George Washington.

A few months earlier, he had listened with Vice President Cheney as the director of the CIA said that the Iraqi government was not built to last. The president's response was to consult with the vice president. Then he ordered his "surge."

It is time we got him in focus. He is not amenable to persuasion. He may signal a willingness to compromise, but he always goes back on his word; not charging himself with insincerity when he does so, for he means what he promises in some special, private sense: "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job."

He is not up to his job, and (to a greater extent than most people imagine) he knows it. This explains his inability to sack officials who have demonstrated their incompetence. A substratum of vivid knowledge of his own demerits forms a constant impediment, and has played a larger part in shaping his conduct than petulance, mere cronyism, or the boyish code of loyalty. Not just "There, but for the grace of God, go I," but: "Who am I to fire this one, or any one?"

There has never been a president so unable to solicit or comprehend advice from qualified judges who don't support his prejudices. Never a president before with so continuous a motive for repression of reality. He bears the burden of having done great wrong. To admit even a fraction of that wrong would be to enter a path of remorse that is alien to his nature.

This president has lost contact with reality, in any ordinary sense of the words "lost," "contact," and "reality." We Americans are too cautious, too literal in our ideas of such irreversible disconnection. The truth is that people who are lost to us in this way can't be relied on to show it conspicuously. They may appear sober and friendly, on occasion. They do not froth and gibber. And yet they are not capable of curing themselves. Every bad new choice only deepens the rupture.

Someone with a history of such isolation can't be moved by rational argument or the workings of common sympathy. He must be made to change course as water changes course. You build up the banks, and secure the altered direction, so that there is only one way for him to flow. Every other path must be obstructed, just as the physical universe obstructs a person who attempts
unaided flight with arms for wings.

We must not play with his toys. Acceptance of the phrase "war on terror" is an implicit acceptance of endless war. Terror has been a component of this world from the start--along with sin and death, chaos and night. Terrorists who attack us must be fought, and must be stopped. But terrorists, like other people, act on motives; and one way of fighting them is to remove those motives. A war on terror conceived, as Cheney's experiment has been conceived, as a global war of extermination that ends with the killing of the last terrorist, in fact creates more terrorists than it destroys. A global war on terror means a war to the end of time. It is, in essence, a totalitarian idea.

The global war on terror is a pure product of the mind of Cheney working on the mind of Bush. On the one hand, the craving for secrecy, order, and acts of executive will that brook no opposition; on the other hand, the need for simplicity, the love of vicarious battles and intoxicating emotions, and a cause as irrefutable as a local team to lead the cheering for.

"Never wholly separate in your mind," wrote Edmund Burke, "the merits of any political question from the men who are concerned in it." We have seen the men, and we know them by their actions.

They are gathering the forces now for Iran. The carriers on patrol in the Persian Gulf, the series of accusations that hold Iran responsible for the violence in Iraq, the propaganda corps at the American Enterprise Institute turning up the heat--all the preparations are in place in the summer of 2007, just as they were in the summer of 2002. An administration with a modicum of
prudence would not risk setting the Muslim world aflame by carving up a second theater of devastation in the Middle East. Yet these are men of wild imaginings.

What is the best way to build up the banks and obstruct this Mad Dog? Congress must take a vacation for at least one month so that no legislation gets passed. Starve the Dogs of War so that the Mad Dog King gets diverted to an endless burning hell that he deserves for every soldier who died in vain. He will start ranting and raving like a Mad Man and pass from the scene like an antibiotic purging a growing bacteria of death and destruction.

Editor and Commentor

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

MAD KING GEORGE BUSH MAFIA LETTERS REGARDING SCOOTER THE GUILTY.

GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200.

Scooter Libby Love Letters

Washington elite petition judge on behalf of convicted Cheney aide

JUNE 5--Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Bolton top the list of individuals who wrote a federal judge on behalf of former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was sentenced today to 30 months in prison for lying to investigators and a federal grand jury examining the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. On the following 30 pages you'll find an assortment of letters from former colleagues and friends of Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. The letters, which do not include a missive from Cheney himself, were filed this morning in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.. Included in the correspondence is a letter on former Cheney aide Mary Matalin's stationery which is signed by her and husband James Carville, the Democratic strategist. Others writing on Libby's behalf included Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Richard Perle, former Pentagon adviser; James Woolsey, ex-CIA director; Douglas Feith, former Under Secretary of Defense; Christopher Cox, ex-congressman and current Securities and Exchange Commission chairman; Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic; former Richard Nixon counsel Leonard Garment; former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson; former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky; former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard Myers; and Dr. Anthony Fauci, a National Institutes of Health official. Of the 198 letters sent to Judge Reggie Walton, 174 referred positively to Libby, while the balance urged Walton to throw the book at the convicted felon. (30 pages)

The screen faded to black as Bush's Soprano companions sent letters to the conservative Judge appointed by Reagan and reappointed by our Mad Man if Office pleading for leniency from the Judge. This Judge gave Scooter the "Go Directly to Jail Card" instead of knuckling to our Mad King in Office. This Judge is an Article III judge (lifetime appointment) and therefore Bush could not "knuckle" him under. If only our elected representatives in Congress could have such "Cajones". But alas, they are all elected for either 2 or 6 year terms, and are all beholden to the "Bagmen of Washington" for their election.

There was even a little pillow talk between Mary Matlin (Cheney's former assistant) and James Carville (Clinton's former assistant), husband a wife, and James got "de-Cajoned", resulting in Carville writing one of those "sniveling" love letters to Judge Walton.

This whole process is a disgrace to America, the "Torch Bearer" for democracy in the world. Some democracy. Some example to the world. As the Brooklyn Dodger fans in Brooklyn used to chant on a daily basis before "their team" was bought to Los Angeles by more "bread"

"THROW THE BUMS OUT"

That should be our chant to the money grubbing bums in Washington. They should all fade to black as did the Sopranos. Is there any difference between the two?

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

MAD KING GEORGE'S DOMINO THEORY

MAD KING GEORGE HAS PLAYED WITH HIS DOMINOES AND LOST

    The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk explains the psyche of George W. Bush. Bush is a little man with ideas larger than his capacity to understand them. His mentors praise his abilities which are almost non-existent. His mentors are those power hungry neo-conservators (sic-conservatives) who wish to replace British and French Imperialism with their own misguided ideas of a”New World Order”, The neos have falsely praised themselves on winning the “Cold War” and in so doing have engaged George, the “little man” in a master disaster of “self-delusion”. George has been deluded through “hard drinking”, “coke sniffing”, and master “pranksmanship into believing he is “the second coming of Christ”. He has been promoted as such by the “Evangelicals” who surround him and guide his mind and actions. But unlike Christ this so-called “compassionate conservative” has no compassion. He searches for a legacy and believes he has found it by democraticizing the people of the middle east into a satellite of America. He will teach them Christianity when all they want is Mohammad and their Koran. George will lead the “New Crusade” to forever free Jerusalem from Islamic rule. Richard I knew he could capture Jerusalem from Saladin but knew he could not occupy or hold it from the Arab multitudes, and so left to return to England. George has never gotten this picture of history because his fraternity boys and cheerleaders deprived him of the study of history. He has subjected himself to the call of Pope Urban to lead this “Great Crusade” under the guise of his delusional “War on Terror”.

    Picture Captain Queeg on the deck of the Caine. Queeg is in the middle of a storm that is threatening the safety and life of the ship. Queeg rolls the steel ball between his fingers during his quickly apparent loss of a sense of reality. That loss of reality will cause the capsize of his ship (in George’s case the “Ship of State”). One or two of the ships junior grade officers persuade the First Office to remove Queeg from command, because Queeg has the “steel balls” and the Junior Officers have none. Queeg is a brave man but he has been promoted beyond his capacity.

    George, in turn, is not the favorite son of father George, Jeb is. ( View the tears of Father Bush when he bade farewell to Jeb in Florida several weeks ago) George knows he is not his father’s favorite son. However, he is the favorite son of his mother Barbara, and like the mother in the “Manchurian Candidate”she  molds her incompetent son in her own petulant, non-feeling, incompetent image. George is the “True Apprentice” who should have been fired years ago, but through the likes of Rove, who built up his ego from scratch, and the neos, like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Kristol that he has surrounded himself, and now receiving the advice of Kissinger, he has made mistake after mistake, and continue to make mistake after mistake in the leadership of this country.

    He has convinced himself that the “Middle East” is his domino set as South East Asia was Johnson’s, and that Bush must devote all of his energies to prevent the dominos from falling, one by one. Johnson was wrong, Nixon was wrong, and Kissinger was wrong. All of the so-called “pundits” were wrong. Viet Nam was a colonial war on National Liberation with a little religion thrown into the mix. The North were Buddhists, while the South were good little “Catholics”mimicking the “colonialist French who occupied them. They even built their version of Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon. Remember the photographs of the Buddhists Monks setting themselves on fire to protest to the Catholic occupation of the South. The French got their asses kicked after the Vichy French turned over Viet Nam to the hated brutal Japanese. The French, after the war that America, Britain and Russia won (America in the Far East) the French just reoccupied Indochine as if they never left. Ho Chi Minh disabused them of that colonialist destiny.
   
    Then the American pundits such as Rusk, MacNamara, and others convinced Johnson, then Kissinger convinced Nixon, that if America did not keep the French South Vietnamese in power, all of South East Asia would fall like dominos, one after the other. After the South was militarily defeated in 1975 by the North, no domino fell. All of the pundits and advisors were “wrong” The united Viet Nam is now pat of the Global economy and the “New World Order”.

    George, like Johnson and Nixon before him wrongly believes that unless he imposes American style democracy in Iraq, all of the Islamic states would fall like dominos, and the Middle East, with most of the World’s oil resources, would be controlled by radical Islam.

    George never studied or understood history since he was cutting class and boozing while history and geography were taught in school. He failed to comprehend that the Sunnis and Shias have been fighting each other ever since the death of Mohammad since Mohammad never named his successor. Sunnis control 80% of the worlds Muslims while the Shias control only 20%. Do you really believe that the 80% Sunnis are going to surrender to the 20% Shias. Not on your life.

    All the pundits believe that if the US redeploys out of Iraq, there will be chaos. However I don’t believe that the chaos will be irreversible. All of the Middle East is made of “artificial” borders imposed by the colonialist French and British after WW I. Persia was the greatest empire in the Middle East until they were defeated by that “Barbarian”, Alexander. Persia, now Iran is small modicum of it former empire. Persians, who are mistakenly called Arabs, wishes to expand. If they choose to expand, the Sunnis will push back.

    Do I believe there will be a war in Iraq if the US redeploys. Sure as shit I do.  But why should we care? What are our interests? This war will redefine and redraw the boundaries of the Middle East as the two World Wars redefined and redrew the boundaries of Europe. Nothing in history is forever. Why is that a bad thing for America. If America lets them “duke it out”, America will gain its interests in another fashion. But to do that, America has to rebuild its military within the next 15 years (that is how long it took the US to rebuild after Viet Nam).

    We have taken our eye off of China, the new 800 pound guerilla. China has the guidance system to shoot our satellites out of the sky with ballistic missiles. China holds most of our debt. Through a “stupid” taxation policy we have transferred our wealth from the “Middle Class” to the 1% selfish greedy bastards, who only want more, and financed this transfer by incurring huge debt obligations to China. China now holds our economy in check while its strives to beat us in military development. What then? Remember history. China once had the greatest and largest empire in the world. They are smart, industrious, and naturally warlike. They did invent gunpowder.

    We need new thought processes in Washington. The greatest generation saved the world as we know it and the “boomers” are on their way to destroying that place. Steel balls with “brains” are what we need. No more “purple” fingers” in the air. We need a new leader to challenge America. Hillary may have balls, but not the right kind. She blows in the wind. She thinks old thoughts. Her time is past. She has no spirit. George needs to be challenged now, even if it means shutting down the government to do it. The Democrats hold the “purse strings”. Pull them tight. Force America to redeploy out of Iraq by depriving our forces with the material to make war. The Sunnis and Shias will kill each other off. Let them. It took the total destruction of Japan and Germany to bring peace to the world. An Islamic civil war that has been centuries in the making may be the salvation of our Western civilization.

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

MAD KING GEORGE CANNOT THINK FAST, LET ALONE THINK.

Think Fast "President Bush is apparently ready to end his boycott of the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States, with a possible speech Thursday before the group's national convention." Despite soaring gas prices, automakers "have made no progress in improving vehicle fuel economy over the past year" -- stuck at 21 mpg for 2006-model vehicles -- "continuing a nearly 25-year trend of industry stagnation on gasoline mileage, according to the Environmental Protection Agency." In an analysis of 13 American cities, the Brookings Institution found "the nation's working poor households pay much more than moderate- and high-income households for life's essentials.” U.S.-led troops are facing "intense resistance" in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban have recently captured two towns and are now believed to "operate freely." The violence "forced police and government officials to flee." "Rising seas caused by climate change could destroy half the mangroves on some Pacific islands," reports one new study, while massive droughts in Brazil are threatening the Amazon basin, "drying up tributaries more than a mile wide." House conservatives have "organized a communications 'war room'" to push their hard-line, enforcement-first strategy on immigration reform "during the remaining months of the 109th Congress." Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), "who comes from a long line of family military service," has proposed a bill that would deduct $1,000 from Donald Rumsfeld's salary for every day after Jan. 1, 2007 that a military sexual-assault tracking system is not active. The Pentagon "has had 18 years to implement" the system. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker "is worried that the Army cannot repair vital equipment fast enough because supplemental budget requests have been too little, too late." Congress has started to push back on the White House, trying to force the appropriations into the Pentagon's regular budget. And finally: Bush rubbed the German Chancellor Angela Merkel the wrong way at the G8 summit. The Los Angeles Times reports, “Bush headed directly behind the chancellor, reached out and, placing both hands on the collar of her gold jacket, gave her a short massage just below the neck. She smiled.” Yet, according to the video evidence, it’s pretty clear the chancellor wanted nothing to do with the massage. Watch the video here.

MAD KING GEORGE'S MESS IN PALESTINE

Abu Mess

February 16, 2006

At a time when anti-western sentiment is raging in the Arab world, Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service showed previously unreleased images of abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners. These couldn’t have come at a worse time, considering the furor over the Danish cartoons and new video showing British troops beating Iraqi protesters. These new photos will only hurt American efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. And while the Bush White House will surely fault the media for showing the photos, the administration has yet to deal with the fallout from the first photos published in 2004. Donald Rumsfeld remains the Secretary of Defense, the White House believes it can "waive the restrictions" of the McCain Torture amendment, and none of the higher-ups involved in the scandal are being punished for their participation.

* Abu Ghraib is a terrorist incubator. Bush promised back in May 2004 that Abu Ghraib would be demolished “as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning.” The prison has instead become a breeding ground for more violence and a training ground for the insurgency. Abu Ghraib has instead turned into a symbol for the larger problems in Iraq – a country that "has become a magnet for violent extremists from across the Islamic world."

* Iraqi says violence is worse now than under Saddam. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told the Observer in London late last year, "People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse." On Sunday he reiterated his beliefs to Wolf Blitzer. The Iraqi government is currently investigating the existence of a "police death squad" after the government "found the bodies of 10 more men who had been shot execution-style and dumped in three different areas of Baghdad's predominantly Shiite suburb of Shula." Allawi warned that if this violence was allowed to continue, Iraqis would once again be living in fear as they did under Saddam.

* President Bush is sending the wrong signals on torture. It should be clear-cut – we do not support torture and will not allow it to happen. Yet despite promises that Abu Ghraib was fully investigated, the line between what soldiers can and cannot do to detainees remains blurred, thanks in part to the President himself. After signing the anti-torture legislation, Bush released a "signing statement" which said the "executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President ... as Commander in Chief." In other words, he will follow the torture law when he sees fit.

Martin S Friedlander, Esq.

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