Cheney: "So?" Perino: "You have input every four years."

Well, what can one say about these recent bits of revelatory banter by Darth Cheney and Cheney/Bush Administration spokes-folk like Dana Perino?

They blast me out of the water. 

As others have said, Cheney's argument that he should not be "blown off course" by  the "fluctuations" in the public opinion polls is pure barnyard animal product — ahh, those flighty, fickle citizens who think their government is their government, that it is working on their behalf, that it is sworn to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution! 

The direction of public opinion on the matter of Iraq has been fairly consistent all along — downhill.

And perhaps nowhere more downhill than among our troops in Iraq, our returning troops who require massive and long-term support, and their families, who have been supported (NOT!!) by the Cheney/Bush Administration: 

• By failing to provide sufficient soldiers to blow up or guard all of Saddam's dispersed ammo dumps so they couldn't be looted of the small-arms cartridges, machine gun ammo belts, machine guns (in US terminology, SAWs or Squad Automatic Weapons), mortars (tube, baseplate, propellant, detonators & shells), machine guns, sniper rifles, artillery shells and fuses, explosives and other materiel with which to build the roadside bombs — probably more than a 20-year supply — that have accounted for more than half of our combat deaths;
  
• By blocking public and press access to Dover AFB, so Americans can't see the coffins of our war dead coming home (we get more pictures in the MSM of Iraqi coffins than we get of American war dead); blocking public and press access to Andrews AFB, so Americans can't see the maimed and wounded American troops returning "from theater;" not junking ALL humvees — death-traps all, up-armored or not (they were never designed to be armored personnel carriers, capable of traversing minefields and gauntlets of IEDs and shape-charges — they're just jeeps, built with canvas doors and plastic side windows — and replacing them with mine-, shape-charge- and IED-deflecting APCs now called "MRAP"s [mine-deflecting, ambush-protected vehicles, originally deemed too expensive to build, given that Rummy, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al. were trying to run their invasion and occupation of Iraq on the cheap — "Nothing's too good for our troops! [Unless it costs money that can't be laundered through Halliburton, cuz they don't make mine-deflecting vehicles]");
• By failing to provide adequate body armor, when the rules of engagement require soldiers to fire only when fired upon;
• By never attending a soldier's funeral if you're the President, Vice President or top military brass (Hey, speaking of top brass, did you know that, while non-coms (the "grunts," "boots," or "legs") take an oath to support and defend the Constitution AND their ossifers and El Presidente, the commissioned officers swear only to support and defend the Constitution, NOT their superior officers, NOT THE PRESIDENT, even. So when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chiefs of Staff of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines and other top brass say they're duty-bound to do as the "Unitary Liar-in-Chief" orders, these military men are lying. They answer to higher forefathers — a few pieces of parchment our forefathers, the Framers, wrote on called the Constitution of the United States of America. They are, in fact, NOT sworn to obey the President. They are ALSO bound, by the Nuremberg Conventions, to disobey illegal orders (the fact that they were forced or coerced into following an illegal order — like, they were faced with immediate battlefield execution or court martial — does not excuse them of the crime, but the fact of the coercion may be used as an argument in mitigation of their sentence, when convicted). 

Most of our television, radio, cable and print organizations, unfathomably, still don't seem to get the proposition that you don't listen to what they say, you watch what they do. All governments lie to the people they are supposed to serve. And particularly the Cheney/Bush Administration, who have ginned up a "Global" and "Perpetual" war to excuse all manner of attacks on our Constitution, both in secret and in public, because we are "at war."

Well, we obviously are NOT at war with terrorists. If we were, we certainly let them escape in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld refused to send any soldiers to block Osama's escape into the caves and/or mountains of Tora Bora (sounds like a Japanese island rather than a mountainous region in the Middle East). Most observers say Rumsfeld's reason was that the CIA were running the Afghan operation, high-tech warriors on horseback. Rumsfeld wanted to control everything, from intelligence, warfare and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He told President Cheney and Vice President Bush that he'd take responsibility for the whole shootin' match, but only if he controlled everything. As we saw, he certainly took control — arrogant and ineffectual control, now that we know what he thought he knew but didn't, what he didn't know, and, worst of all, what he didn't know he didn't know (like about the Shia and the Sunni, the skill and inventiveness of the disbanded soldiers-turned-revolutionaries, fighting a guerilla war much like the Viet Cong — didn't Donald the Duck and Dickie the Dunce have some experience with that war way back when? (I'm sorry to sound disrespectful, but who can respect liars whose prevarications have cost the lives of 4,000-plus soldiers, maybe 1,000 more mercenaries and "contract non-nationals," the injury (30,000 or so by trauma; maybe 150,000 or more with PTSD) of thousands more soldiers, the lives of from 90,000 to more than a million Iraqi civilians — plus about 500,000 children under 5 by starvation, malnutrition, dysentery and other diarrheal — all preventible — from about 11 years of blockade (a war crime called "collective punishment"). 

Eight of those 11 years of blockade took place on Hillary, Bill, Madeleine and Janet's watch. Maybe It Takes a Village to raise a child, but only a couple of representatives, one from the UK and one from the US, sitting behind closed doors at the UN, answerable to no one, to kill 500,000 of those children under 5, to collectively punish an entire nation, trying to make its citizens suffer enough that they'd rise up and assassinate or depose Saddam Hussein, our former ally (in the Iran/Iraq war). This was a task that our very own devious CIA failed at a couple of times. (Of course, you have to cut them some slack, because just about no member of the CIA spoke Arabic, which is a definite disadvantage in Arab countries. 

But what did Madeleine (Albright) say about this collective punishment aspect of Bill and Hillary's foreign policy (Hillary has said that she was in on all the decisions, right? Claims that was how the un-elected spousal unit got another eight years of experience, right? Well, was it pillow talk? Did they even sleep in the same bed? Or bedroom?)?

Here's what Madeleine told Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes on 5/12/96:

And mind you, the blockade had another seven (7) years to run — until April 9, 2003, when Saddam's statue was pulled down by a military PR crew, apparently. And that was after Shock&Awe II blew up, once again (Shock&Awe I was launched by Poppy Bush in 1992), all of the civilian infrastructure — hospitals, electric plants, water purification plants, sewer processing plants, roads, bridges, the airport, if I recall, schools (not needed because the blockade guys wouldn't allow the import of pads and pencils — they were "dual-purpose," I suppose, because you could write chemical formulae on the pads with the pencils, or diagram nuclear warheads, or lab instructions on the care and feeding of lethal viruses or other microbial agents). With bombing like that, who needs a blockade? And the five years of US  occupation? Hooo boy. At least 2 million Iraqis escaped their country and another 2.5 million got to move out of the cities, so they could starve in the mountains. And don't think they had TB Sans (sanitariums) in the Adirondacks to take the fresh, non-polluted piney air.

Just imagine, if you have or ever have had children under 5, what it would be like to see them slowly die of malnutrition, of dysentery, and you know that if you could get non-polluted water, food and ordinary medicines, your children could be saved. You have to imagine this, because the American press showed us none of the suffering our war crimes caused. At any rate, because of Hillary's complicity in this activity, I'll not vote for her. I think, in fact, that she's probably even more dangerous than John McCain, because she has to prove that she can out-man any example of the male species, and perhaps first and foremost, her own spousal unit, the man who should insist on genuine YKK (Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha) products (now with a factory in Macon, Georgia, saith Google) for his pants.

But it's really silly to waste one's time, breath, typing or outrage, or whatever activity and emotions these kinds of interchanges trigger. As I've said before, and will no doubt say many more times again, these lads and lassies of the Cheney/Bush administration are just "doin' thur thang," come hell or high crimes and misdemeanors.

Congress is pretty much useless.

As are the three remaining presidential candidates, all of whom are sitting senators (if they can take time out of their busy, busy campaign schedules), who could actually push legislation NOW for the plans they propose to initiate "When I am President." Well, hell, they're sitting legislators right now. What's to stop them from pursuing the legislative side of their proposals right here, right now, right there in the Senate, which is supposed to be a legislative body, last time I looked? Are the problems they "promise" to address "if elected" not pressing, right here, right now? Is ANYONE calling them on this? Cannot the members of our 4th Estate more than one idea at a time? Senator today. Candidate tomorrow. Or is it just that our "main stream media" can't manage to assign a reporter to cover the candidates both "on the trail" and "meanwhile, back at the ranch"? Do they split the duties? One reporter for Congress, another for Campaign, and never the twain shall compare notes and make a joint story?

Speaking of "Mainstream," the title of Jim Hightower's new book is Swim against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow.

Back to Dana Perino: Input every four years, indeed. The elections are actually every two years, not four. And the elections are not the only time the citizens get to tell their leaders — at least the ones who actually honor their oaths of office to preserve, protect and defend the US Constitution. Not at all. There's that "petition the government for redress of grievances" thing in the First Amendment — a right and power specifically reserved by the people who set up this whole thing in the first place. Dana Perino is right in saying "that's the way we're set up," but she doesn't know the half of it, like everyone else who doesn't know a damned thing about the Constitution. Impeachment is another of those "That's the way we're set up" thingies.

I remain flummoxed by the fact that "our" members of congress are unable to open and read the Constitution, and make a conceptual link between that "piece of paper" and their oath of office (the "support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Cheney — oops, I mean domestic"  part).  Which reminds me of the lame joke, "Whadaya get when you cross a Cheney and a male Congressional couch potato? A limp dicktater — afflicted with MCS (Missing Constitution Syndrome), VSA (vertebraic stiffener atrophy), and BALLS (Bravery-loss And Lapse of Leadership Syndrome).

Probably the only corrective is to launch campaigns to replace almost all of the members of Congress — of both "parties," Demican and Republicrat. I'm sure we've all noticed that a Democratic majority in the House:

• gave/is giving everything away to the Cheney/Bush administration,
  
• has done nothing effective to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
  
• has not acted to cure the contempt of congress charges against White House staff or ex-staff (the cure is arrest by the Sergeant-at-Arms and detention (or incarceration, to use the English Language) as " Illegal Enemy Combatants" in the Global War On Terrifying Congress),
  
• has not acted to cure the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by (and boasted about by) the Cheney/Bush administration, including (but not limited to):
  

1. extra-Constitutional veto-by-signing statement (torture, permanent military bases in Iraq, Embassy City in Baghdad),
2. Multiple violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, admitted in public fora,
3. Warrantless searches and seizures in violation of law, contravention of the 4th Amendment,
4. Suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus,
5. Obstruction of Justice (failure to comply with Congressional subpoenae duces tecum [production of records under subpoena], likely perjury in the Plame case, lying to a Congressional Commission — the 9/11 Commission; likely cooperation in destruction of evidence in the 9/11 case, cooperation with the military and FAA coverup of the events of 9/11),
6. Fixing the intelligence to support a decision to invade and occupy Iraq (lying about WMDs, including, but not limited to: an Iraq/al Qaeda connection, presence of WMDs, attempted acquisition of uranium ore — yellow cake, purpose/suitability of aluminum tubing for uranium enrichment,  
7. Failure to comply with federal records preservation laws,
8. Failure to comply with laws prohibiting the disclosure of CIA operatives identities, (more to come)

And the leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said early on in her "reign," that "Impeachment is off the table." Meaning that she was refusing to honor her very, very recent oath to support and defend the US Constitution, which provides impeachment as a remedy to a runaway branch of government, whether the Executive Branch or the Judicial Branch. It's kind of like the employee of a window-cleaning company showing up for work and declaring, "I don't do Constitution." Or windows. My guess is, they'd be fired forthwith.

So the only thing left to do

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Thank God for British Skepticism and Punctuation!

By which I mean the use of quotation marks by the writers and editors of The Economist magazine. (I know they call it a newspaper, but it's not; it's a news magazine. Sorry, lads, but that's the way it is.)

They put quotes around "war on terror." In every reference. Like, baby, it's the Economist's official, every-week style.*

They put quotes around the "surge." (It's a troop escalation, for god's ache.)

They captioned (March 29th - April 4th edition) a photo of GIs, "The fog of an under-resourced war."

Another photo, captioned "The place to look for al-Qaeda," shows a lone soldier standing on a barren, rocky mountaintop in what looks to be Afghanistan.

And how about this absolutely grand lead [Page 10 in the print version]?:

FOUR years ago “empire” was the mot du jour in Washington, DC. Dick Cheney's 2003 Christmas card bore the motto: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”** One of Mr Bush's senior advisers dismissed criticism from the “reality-based community”. “That's not the way the world really works any more...We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Neoconservative intellectuals published articles with titles such as “The Case for American Empire”.

What a difference a bungled war makes. These days the word “imperial” is usually followed by “overstretch”. The bookshops are full of titles cautioning against the folly of empire (Cullen Murphey's “Are We Rome?”, Amy Chua's “Day of Empire”). Nobody doubts America's unparalleled ability to project its military power into every corner of the world, but blowing things up is not the same as establishing an “imperium”. [Emphasis supplied. bw]

And that's not all. I commend the whole "A special report on America and the world" to your attention. I swear that without Canadian web writers (I dislike the term "bloggers") and publications, British writers and publications and (last but certainly not least!) Al-Jazeera English, we sad souls who try to find some semblance of truth about what the US is doing at  home and abroad in the name of "Democracy" and "Freedom" and "Homeland Security," wouldn't have a transplanted heart's chance in a Cheney. If you will.

By the way, that "reality-based" quote was just too good not to look up. My Google-paths found it first in The New York Review of Books, in an article by Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War, quoting the quote from The New York Times Magazine, in an article by Ron Suskind.

In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall:

The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Ron Suskind, Without a Doubt, in The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004. The headline online is Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Finally, the British usage on single and double quotes makes eminent sense to me. Generally, the single quote is used for the main quote. If there's a nested quote, that gets the double treatment. And the quotation marks always come after the punctuation. Well, not in the Economist, but in other British works. The Economist does the double-first-single-nested deal. I can't imagine why, since it's so much easier to start and end most quotations without using the shift key; an extra effort is appropriate for a quote-within-a-quote, such as this memorable one: 'It depends on what the meaning of "is" is'. 

As I recall thinking when I first heard Zipper-Flipper Bill utter that sentence in his videotaped deposition, "He punctuated that 'is' quote perfectly — in quotes just by his inflection!"  He "took the extra effort," if you will. 

Speaking of oral punctuation, don't you just love it when Cheney says "if you will," instead of "unhhh," or "y'know"? Senator Chris Dodd uses "here" all the time as his audio equivalent of "ummm." Both mannerisms are quite distracting and, after a while, annoying. Cheney's particularly so, because you know damned well he could give a fleet-footed expletive whether "you will" or "you won't."

 You've certainly heard the response he gave to ABC's Martha Raddatz, by the way? About Americans disapproving of the war?  "So?" he asked. Here's a nice comment in the Athens (GA) Banner-Herald. And the ABC clip on YouTube.

Cheney's "So?" Cool, no? No. 

 As for those fickle citizens who blow hot, then cold, then hot, then cold, just all those "fluctuations" in the opinion polls. Man, oh man, with fluctuations like those on the Iraq misadventure you could build a great black-diamond ski run, or soap-box derby course, or bob-sled run, but no roller-coaster ride.  It's been all down hill since March 19, 2003, with maybe one or two moguls when Cheney, Bush, the Joint Chiefs, whoever, tried to inject a new dose of botox-lies to plump up the legend for the citizenry. But Cheney and Bush, et alii, are now the dead-enders, doing their last-gasping at the bottom of the very steep hill of public disgust.

I'm glad Dana and her crew think they have to listen to the public only once every four years. They'd probably fall over a cliff if they ever read the reports on the very first sessions of Congress, and of the Constitutional Convention, etc. The administration (and Congress) are not even on the same planet our Framers inhabited back then when they created the Constitution, it seems.

bw

——————————— notes ——————————

 * (Everyone in the world knows that it's a bullshit title and a bullshit effort, a cloak under which to hide attacks on the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague and Nuremberg conventions, illegal torture of prisoners of war, even though it's not a war, kidnapping, violations of the US War Crimes statute — 18 USCode §2441, violation of the UN Charter — no wonder I heard a rumor from an Indian auto dealer from Dubai that people are thinking of moving the UN Headquarters to Dubai. And wouldn't that be a sharp stick in David Rockefeller's eye, now, wouldn't it?

** I hadn't heard/read about this nifty little Cheney Christmas card bit, had you? What would Jesus have sent?

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Soldiers Who Speak Arabic, Revisited

I was doing a little bit of cleanup and ran across a comment I'd made nine months ago about Navy Petty Officer Second Class Stephen Benjamin, one of the not-so-many of our military trained to speak Arabic.

As you may recall, he was cashiered with another 60 or so trained Arabic speakers for being gay. Here's his recounting of the experience in the NYTimes, on the Colbert Report, on the Huffington Report, and in this BraveNewFilms video on YouTube.

My thoughts on the sad, self-defeating issue were and still are, these:

This seemingly senseless policy--kicking out servicemen who've completed 504 hours of Arabic training at the justly world-famous Army Language School at Presidio of Monterey--can only be adequately explained, not by stupidity, but by design. (IMHO, of course.)

That is, the military actually does not care whether our troops are supported by loyal Americans who can speak Arabic and American English fluently.

That is why there were not enough troops sent to Iraq. That is why we left Afghanistan before we "brought bin Laden to justice."

That is why the troops ride around in "Up-yours Armored" Humvees, instead of Buffalo and Cougar APCs that were designed in South Africa with V-shaped undercarriages to deflect the blasts mines and roadside bombs.

 [UPDATE: The military did finally start making them. They call 'em MRAPs — Mine-Repelling, Ambush-Protected APCs — armored personnel carriers. I'm not clear whether they're going to replace every single UAHDT — Up-Armored Humvee Death Trap — or not. But going out in a Humvee is a 55% suicide mission. It does not "Support Our Troops" to EVER, EVER send them out in a Humvee. Period.]

That's why the only ministry guarded after the Fall of the Statue was the Ministry of Oil, certainly not the waterworks, power stations, the museum (Right, Rummy, shit DOES happen when you don't give a damn). Ohhh yeah, and there certainly not enough troops to guard or blow up the hundreds of ammo dumps scattered throughout the nation that have provided all the explosives for the "IED"s that account for more than half of the US combat dead, probably almost all of the traumatic brain injury cases, etc.

That is why the military (ever ready to criticize it's critics as "not supporting our troops"), has been fighting to deny those self-same marines, soldiers, sailors and airpersons disability benefits, overlooking treatment for traumitic brain injury, and for post traumatic stress disorder (look up DSM IV §309.81 in the psychiatry bible to see how the medical profession (and health insurance special interest group) describes PTSD if you want another ironic "yuk").  When you get done reading the DSM description, see if you don't conclude, as I have, that the potential exists for every single soldier who has served or is serving in Iraq and Afghanistan to be afflicted with PTSD. That means every single soldier returning stateside must be screened for PTSD, probably at three-month intervals for a year or so.

There's a very up-close-and-personal discussion of PTSD in Navy clinical psychologist PhD Heidi Squier Kraft's book Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital in Iraq. According to a self-styled M*A*S*H fan and psychology nerd at ILOVECYNICS: 

As may be noticed by reading my posts, I’m both a psychology nerd and a M*A*S*H fan. So when I saw Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital I new exactly what the title was referring to … [—] …  a quote from the M*A*S*H episode “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet.” A friend of Hawkeye [Pierce] has just died on the operating table, and Hawkeye is wondering why he’s crying for this loss, but not … others. [To quote 4077th's CO, Lt. Col. … Henry Blake …:

Look, all I know is what they taught me at command school. There are certain rules about a war and rule number one is young men die. And rule number two is doctors can’t change rule number one.

I can tell you it's fortunate that the test is double-spaced and the footnotes are actually at the foot of the page. I picked it up as bedtime reading, but couldn't put it down until Dawn's rosy fingers tickled the sky. (Bedtime happened to be 2:45 ayem, lest you think I'm that slow a reader, thank you.) Of two comments on Cynic's book report, one was plumb negative (What's Kraft whingeing about? How about the doctors who have to actually tuck a brain back in some poor soldier's skull?); the other, positive — and a former patient ("She saved my life").

Also, as Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes noted in their book Three Trillion Dollar War, one of the results of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has been and will continue to be that great numbers of our soldiers will return with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Soldiers treated for PTSD generally require a "three-legged stool" support system: the psychiatrist or psychiatric clinical nurse specialist to go through the heuristics (trial and error) of getting the soldiers' medications "right," the psychologist or  psychiatrist for one-on-one therapy, and group therapy with those similarly afflicted. For years.  

That is why the military says "we don't count bodies" of the thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed or wounded. (Hey, hey, dooble-vay, how many kids did you kill today?--dooble-vay being the pronunciation, in German, of the letter W--kind of fits the Hey, Hey, LBJ... beat nicely, if you happen to remember that beat, Vietnam and the '60s.)

I've already suggested to the White House that at least, if we can't win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, we could at least harvest them for transplantation, at least the few that are left whole. No response. (I did admit that the harvesting would have to be done expeditiously, given the lack of electricity, refrigeration, passable roadways, etc. But heck, we're America--we can do whatever we set out to do, right?)

I think we all tend to forget our purpose in the world and need to put up reminders all over, like Clinton did for his campaigns. In this case, "It's the oil, stupid."

I'm certain that the Iraqis accept our apologies for when they and their loved ones get in the way of our artillery shells, grenades, bombs and bullets. If we had more translators, perhaps they'd find the thousands of Iraqis who would say, if asked, that they "understand, GI, that you have really precisely targeted bombs — in fact, that they can kill any person whose name you enter into the guidance system. And I know you feel badly that you don't have enough translators to get our names right, so you just drop them with the name "Collateral" entered into the guidance system, right?"

I'm thinking of petitioning the NHSTA--the CAFE folks--to calculate their fuel economy ratings in a more realistic manner-- in Mid Eastern combat deaths, DPPG instead of MPG--Dead People Per Gallon instead of Miles Per Gallon.

(And I sure hope the No Such Agency (NSA) isn't eavesdropping on these comments. Well, I guess since I haven't received a wiretap warrant or a "Don't Knock, Don't Tell" visit from the constabulary, I don't have to worry about speaking freely, right?) Of course, as the saying goes, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you."

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