FREEDOMPOST, a lawyer's commentary

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.

www.freedompost.typepad.com

DEMOCRATS SNOOKERED

Republican Elitism Trumps Democrats.

THE DEMOCRATS HAVE BEEN TRIANGULATED.

Throughout the entire Presidential campaign in 2004 the Bush Administrated campaigned against the effete snobs of the bi-coastal states. The heartland were told that if you voted for a Democrat, you would be governed by an "egghead" elitist. They scorned Kerry for speaking French. However, both Bush and Kerry went to Yale, and elitist university. They portrayed Bush as the common man and Kerry as the French speaking snob with that foreign born wife who inherited the Heinz fortune. The "heartland" fell for that line, hook, line, and sinker. Kerry was snookered into not playing the anti-war activist card as he had fine-tuned it after he served in Vietnam, with medals. Kerry just had no "cajones", and America knew it.

For more than a generation, the most popular maneuver in the conservative playbook has been to denounce academic and cultural elites. In the 1960's, William F. Buckley Jr. quipped that he'd rather "be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty." In 2003, David Frum, a conservative columnist and former Bush speechwriter, denounced the "American elite" for its "combination of guilt and self-doubt." "With his 'axis of evil' speech," he continued, "President Bush served notice to the world: he felt no guilt and no self-doubt."

But this year, many conservatives put the elite-baiting aside and began trafficking in their own elitist pronouncements. Even in the relatively rarefied world of appellate judges and academic economists, John Roberts (Harvard College, Harvard Law School), Samuel A. Alito Jr. (Princeton, Yale Law School) and Ben Bernanke (Harvard and M.I.T., Princeton professor) stand out for their impressive credentials. When George Bush nominated them to important offices, Frum and his fellow conservative commentators saluted their impeccable qualifications even as they denounced the nomination of the relatively uncredentialed Harriet Miers (Southern Methodist University, S.M.U. School of Law).

Of course, for all their insistence that businessmen and ordinary citizens understand the realities of American life better than highly credentialed professionals, conservatives have spent decades building a credentialed professional elite of their own. Ambitious conservatives have attended top graduate schools, taken positions at prestigious research groups and law firms, written important books and papers. They've waited patiently for the day when they could take their places at the highest levels of government - when, say, a second-term Republican president would enjoy majorities in both houses of Congress.

Now that the day has finally come, conservatives don't want the opportunity fumbled - and certainly not in favor of a few presidential cronies. For Bush "to take

a hazard on anything other than a known quantity of the highest intellectual and personal excellence," Frum wrote in the aftermath of the Miers nomination, would be "simply reckless." Responding to Bush's request that conservatives trust his assessment of Harriet Miers, George F. Will thundered: "He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president, particularly, is not disposed to such reflections." So much for the idea that what Bush knows in his heart is more important than what intellectuals know in their heads.

Conservatives still may not want the Harvard faculty running the country. But it turns out they'd be perfectly happy with alumni of the Harvard Republican Club. Let us not make them happy. Vote down Alioto and throw out Lieberman.

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

BUSH UNDER THE RADAR.

Under the Radar IRAQ -- PENTAGON PUTS OUT 'COVERT PROPAGANDA' IN IRAQ: Following the Education Department's "covert propaganda " campaign in the United States, the Pentagon is now secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories -- favorable to the United States -- written by the U.S. military. But when published, these stories often are presented as "unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists." The stories contain quotes from anonymous military officials, and it is "unclear whether the quotes are authentic." "Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories," said a senior military official. One newspaper that readily accepted the Pentagon's newspapers was Al Mutamar, the newspaper run by associates of Ahmad Chalabi. MILITARY -- ARMY TRIES TO REENLIST FORMER SOLDIERS: In an effort to meet their goal to enlist 80,000 soldiers this year, "the Army has a new offer: Join us and regain your old rank without repeating basic training ." The Army hopes to plug last year's 7,000 soldier recruitment gap. "The Army previously had welcomed back former service members, but only under conditions that made it unattractive to most, namely that they would lose their prior rank and were required to take basic training again." The new offer applies to all former soldiers who return to the Army after being out of uniform for fewer than five years. KATRINA -- REBUILDING PLAN ENRAGES NEW ORLEANS RESIDENTS:  "Elected officials and residents from New Orleans's hardest-hit areas on Monday responded with skepticism and, at times, outright hostility to a controversial proposal to eliminate their neighborhoods from post-Katrina rebuilding efforts ," the Times-Picayune reported. The Urban Land Institute presented its plan to rebuild New Orleans, which suggested residents "abandon, at least for the near term, some of the city's lowest-lying ground." Residents showed distaste for the ULI "color-coded maps" which divided the city into three zones, including those of lowest level priority: "areas to be re-evaluated as potential sites for mass buyouts and future green space." City Council member Cynthia Willard Lewis said the maps were "causing people to lose hope." SUPREME COURT -- ROBERTS RECEIVES CHANCE TO RULE ON ABORTION: Taking up its first abortion case in five years, the Supreme Court today will hear Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood, presenting the issue of "whether state parental notification laws must provide an exception when the minor's health is at risk." This case will be Chief Justice John Roberts's first opportunity to take a stand on abortion, after skirting the issue in his confirmation hearings . While the case will be argued today, it may not be decided until 2006, when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is no longer on the bench. "If the court is tied, 4 to 4, the case would be reargued next term, and O'Connor's replacement could be the deciding vote." Samuel A. Alito, if confirmed, would be the deciding vote. HUMAN RIGHTS -- RUMSFELD AND PACE DEBATE TORTURE POLICY DURING PRESS CONFERENCE: The Bush administration's position on torture is so ambiguous that top officials were left debating it in public yesterday. At a press conference , UPI reporter Pam Hess questioned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about accusations that some Iraqi officials have condoned torture of detainees. "Rumsfeld replied that 'obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility ' other than to voice disapproval." Evidently Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace disagreed. He added, "It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it ," the general said. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank notes, "Rumsfeld interjected: 'I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it.' But Pace meant what he said . 'If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it,' he said, firmly."

REPLACING THE BURNING BUSH WITH A PLAN FOR AMERICA

Bush is burning, but not fast enough. After the embers die down, and the trash is emptied, we still have to replace the garbage.

Last week I attended a book promotion for Gene Sperling, Clinton's former National Economic Advisor. I asked him directly what the Democratic Plan was, and who was going to deliver that Plan to the people. He took 15 minutes to address my question, but, really no answer. All he said was, "read my book".

We are living in a vacuum. I have a Plan, but Sperling has to accept my offer to consult with his Think Tanks before I present my ideas.

I gave him a "taster" in the form of a "Compact Between Louisiana and Mississippi" funded by Bonds issued by that "Compact" backed by the full faith and credit of both States, with the U.S. as the ultimate guarantor. After all the Port Authority of NY and NJ did not collapse when the WTC collapsed. That perked up his ears. I await his response, since he requested that I put my idea in writing. If you read my blog, I have two posts that set forth the idea and the legal authority for it.

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

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