Four Years On

Right wing tries one more big lie, but nothing works

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
3/18/07
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

The London Times, a Murdoch rag that was once regarded as the world’s finest newspaper, took a frantic effort at salvaging the Iraq occupation. Murdoch spent years lying Britain and America into that mess, and heedless of the thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted, he continues to push for the occupation.

Kangarupe’s rag breathlessly reported, “ Iraqis: life is getting better!” They cited (but did not specify the source of) a poll which claimed, among other things, that 61% of Iraqis didn’t believe there was a civil war raging, and that by a two-to-one margin, Iraqis believe Operation Surge will “disarm all militias.”

The poll results were so laughably far removed from reality that, as with “Jeff Gannon” asking the president if Democrats had lost their minds, people got around to wondering just what strange beast this was.

My sources have found that the poll was done by Opinion Research Business, a British private pollster specializing in polling for right wing groups, including the Conservative Party. This particular poll was commissioned by the Public Relations firm of Hill & Knowlton, the same people who brought us lurid stories of Iraqis dumping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators back in the first Gulf War.

Chances that Murdoch could sway public opinion on the occupation were pretty slim to begin with, but the results came at the same time that a horrible new element had evolved in the fighting in Iraq; the use of banned chemical weapons. Five times now in recent weeks, bombs using chlorine gas have been used, with predictably horrific results. It’s only a matter of time before we start seeing mustard gas and, if any of the factions can get their hands on it, nerve gases such as sarin in use there.

It’s a war crime, of course, and the perpetrators should be rotting in jail for the rest of their lives. But it’s also not unexpected. When the White House, in its wisdom, said that the protections of international treaties no longer applied to the insurgents in Iraq, it effectively placed them not only outside of the protection of the law, but outside of any moral obligation to the law. One of the many lessons right wingers never seem to learn is that if you put people outside of the law, then you can’t expect them to respect those same laws.

On that same day, nine American troops were killed in Iraq, bringing the total dead to 3,219, 219 of them in this year alone. The American casualty rate is climbing sharply.

There were peace rallies around the country, most notably in Washington DC, but they were smaller than in previous years. Most people have realized that the original goal of such rallies – to convince the general public that the occupation of Iraq is wrong – has been realized, and that the rallies simply aren’t going to have any further impact. What is needed, instead, is to keep unrelenting pressure on elected officials to pull the US out of Iraq, and to impeach Bush and Cheney and get rid of this vile, criminal administration that has done so much damage to America and to America’s standing in the world.

There were more pro-war protesters than usual, due in large part to an internet rumor that the peace marchers were going to vandalize the Vietnam Memorial Wall. The rumor was just right wing idiocy, of course, but there are still quite a few right wing idiots out there. In fact, “right wing idiot” is pretty much a redundancy these days, since most of Bush’s remaining supporters are just the idiots and the criminals.

In the meantime, the administration is losing battles at home. The Libby trial didn’t just show that Cheney and others had considerable complicity in the efforts to smear Wilson, even if it meant putting American intelligence sources around the world at grave risk, but in the ensuing testimony by Plame in Congress it came to light that the administration never investigated the leak as it said it was going to. Not even informally. We’ll probably never know how many “intelligence assets”, i.e., Americans or people friendly to America, have died or been rendered ineffective by the politically motivated treason of Robert Novak, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Putsch.

The administration didn’t even pretend to investigate the leak, even as it became clear that major crimes against the United States had been committed, and despite Putsch’s promise to do so.

But then, Putsch has always been a weak, cowardly liar. Why should anyone expect him to act like a man now?

The scandal over the US Attorneys’ firings has grown to huge proportions. The White House told Congress that it would wait until Tuesday to respond to the subpoenas Congress has issued in the case, which leads to speculation that Attorney General Gonzales and others subpoenaed by the Congress may get fired Monday, making a White House response to the subpoenas moot. The White House is clearly waiting for a point where they feel they might be able to defy a Congressional subpoena and get away with it politically.

Meanwhile, even as they prepare to get rid of the vile Gonzales and some of his freedom-hating henchmen, the White House is maintaining that the effort to politicize the US attorneys by punishing or rewarding based on political perspectives was no different from the accepting of resignations done by Clinton (and by Putsch, and by his daddy, and by Reagan, except they don’t mention that). Of course, these are the same people who routinely blame Clinton for Iraq because he believed that Saddam was a bad guy, and the Democrats for failing to fix the incredible mess the Republican have made in the past six years in just a few short weeks.

How is Putsch dealing with all this? He’s going to meet with a football team! As with his guitar playing session while New Orleans drowned, and stopping to read a childrens’ story as 9/11 unfolded, the White House has clearly decided to keep the boy president (drinking rumors and all) as far removed from the decision-making as possible. So he’s going to be meeting with the Florida Gators tomorrow to congratulate them on winning the national title.

But the reporter for the Orlando Sentinel who covered the story pointed to at least one element the team had that they might share with Putsch: they both play in a place called “The Swamp.”