I don’t like what I’m seeing at all.

I don’t like the fact that there is no one in a position of leadership who will even discuss the human cost of what is happening on the Gaza strip.

I don’t like the fact that Barack Obama has said nothing.

What are they going to do, treat it like we treated Fallujah?

Disproportionate response.

The situation is complex, for sure – and I’ve been listening to the arguments for days. The rockets are wrong, and the attack is wrong – and neither will contribute to any sort of sustainable relationship among the peoples there.

There is something fundamentally wrong about what is happening right now, and, as for me, my heart goes out to the civilians who are suffering and being killed.

Israel is using our weapons to killing innocents, not just arguable targets. They’ve blockaded.

The lives of Palestinians are worth just as much as any other life. The reporting is permeated with subhuman projections, something that is doubly distressing from people who have a history that should have taught them better.

Here it seems I’m in opposition even to my own party. Who in America will speak for the humanity of the people there? Look what happened when Jimmy Carter tried to do it.

This campaign to prevent Hamas from having the ability to lob old rockets (and compare the death counts) will have to level the whole place.

How does that serve anyone?

My feeling is that Israel is divided – much as we are. They have every right to protect their citizens. But this is too much.

The first question that comes to mind: Who is this helping in the election there?

Comment if you want to but, as this is a difficult thorny topic, please remember that no hate speech will be approved.

I hear “betray us” whenever they say General Petraeus’ name too, but yeah, it was a bit cheap to play on the name. Making a stink about the childishness of of that would be fair, but the comments I’m hearing are really over the top. And with all of the concentration on the word play, the actual point of the ad was lost.

Then there’s all this babbling about how the Democrats are “afraid” of irritating the members of Moveon.org. Makes ‘em sound like pansies, doesn’t it? Actually, one area where the Democrats have showed spine is in risking a lot of their voter base to try to compromise realistically in areas where there is significant disagreement and anger. Maybe they should be a little more afraid of irritating them sometimes….

But then consider everything the Republicans have to do in order not to “irritate” segments of their own voter base, especially the right-wing “Christian” voters. I doubt most imperialist neo-cons really care about abortion or homosexuality, but they throw out statements and bits of legislation. It keeps us fighting one another instead of realizing how we’re all getting robbed and losing any credibility in the world.

The bigger stink should be made about the brazen self-righteousness and hypocrisy of the ones pointing the finger, considering their own honored traditions in the history of smear (Ann Richards, Max Cleland, John Kerry, John McCain, etc etc).

Keith Olbermann makes a couple of very stunning points here about maintaining a tilted and anti-democratic playing field, and the politicizing of the military. To me, that’s the larger context and it isn’t being discussed nearly enough. If this story about MoveOn.org keeps on playing, then here are better “talking points” for the discussion.

Olbermann to Bush: “Your Hypocrisy Is So Vast” by Keith Olbermann, MSNBC “Countdown,” Thursday 20 September 2007

A reaction to Thursday’s press conference: the president was the one who interjected Gen. Petraeus into the political dialogue in the first place.

So the President, behaving a little bit more than usual, like we would all interrupt him while he was watching his favorite cartoons on the DVR, stepped before the press conference microphone and after side-stepping most of the substantive issues like the Israeli raid on Syria, in condescending and infuriating fashion, produced a big political finish that indicates, certainly, that if it wasn’t already – the annual Republican witch-hunting season is underway.

“I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an attack not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. Military.”

“And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad.

“And that leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like Moveon.org or more afraid of irritating them, than they are of irritating the United States military.”

“That was a sorry deal.”

First off, it’s “Democrat-ic” party.

You keep pretending you’re not a politician, so stop using words your party made up. Show a little respect.

Secondly, you could say this seriously after the advertising/mugging of Senator Max Cleland? After the swift-boating of John Kerry?

But most importantly, making that the last question?

So that there was no chance at a follow-up?

So nobody could point out, as Chris Matthews so incisively did, a week ago tonight, that you were the one who inappropriately interjected General Petraeus into the political dialogue of this nation in the first place!

Deliberately, premeditatedly, and virtually without precedent, you shanghaied a military man as your personal spokesman and now you’re complaining about the outcome, and then running away from the microphone?

Eleven months ago the President’s own party, the Republican National Committee, introduced this very different kind of advertisement, just nineteen days before the mid-term elections.

Bin Laden.

Al-Zawahiri’s rumored quote of six years ago about having bought “suitcase bombs.”

All set against a ticking clock, and finally a blinding explosion and the dire announcement:

“These are the stakes – vote, November 7th.”

That one was ok, Mr. Bush?

Terrorizing your own people in hopes of getting them to vote for your own party has never brought as much as a public comment from you?

The Republican Hamstringing of Captain Max Cleland and lying about Lieutenant John Kerry met with your approval?

But a shot at General Petraeus, about whom you conveniently ignore it, was you who reduced him from four-star hero to a political hack, merits this pissy juvenile blast at the Democrats on national television?

Your hypocrisy is so vast that if we could somehow use it to fill the ranks in Iraq you could realize your dream and keep us fighting there until the year 3000.

The line between the military and the civilian government is not to be crossed.

When Douglas MacArthur attempted to make policy for the United States in Korea half a century ago, President Truman moved quickly to fire him, even though Truman knew it meant his own political suicide, and the deification of a General who history suggests had begun to lose his mind.

When George McClellan tried to make policy for the Union in the Civil War, President Lincoln finally fired his chief General, even though he knew McClellan could galvanize political opposition which he did when McClellan ran as Lincoln’s presidential opponent in 1864, nearly defeating our greatest president.

Even when the conduit flowed the other way and Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to smear the Army because it wouldn’t defer the service of one of McCarthy’s staff aides, the entire civilian and Defense Department structures, after four years of fearful servitude, rose up against McCarthy and said “enough” and buried him.

The list is not endless but it is instructive.

Air Force General LeMay – who broke with Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis and was retired.

Army General Edwin Anderson Walker – who started passing out John Birch Society leaflets to his soldiers.

Marine General Smedley Butler – who revealed to Congress the makings of a plot to remove FDR as President and for merely being approached by the plotters, was phased out of the military hierarchy.

These careers were ended because the line between the military and the civilian is not to be crossed!

Mr. Bush, you had no right to order General Petraeus to become your front man.

And he obviously should have refused that order and resigned rather than ruin his military career.

The upshot is and contrary it is, to the MoveOn advertisement he betrayed himself more than he did us.

But there has been in his actions a sort of reflexive courage, some twisted vision of duty at a time of crisis. That the man doesn’t understand that serving officers cannot double as serving political ops, is not so much his fault as it is your good, exploitable, fortune.

But Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts of ‘the planted last question’ at a news conference, to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation, and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond.

That is not only un-American but it is dictatorial.

And in pimping General David Petraeus and in the violation of everything this country has been assiduously and vigilantly against for 220 years, you have tried to blur the gleaming radioactive demarcation between the military and the political, and to portray your party as the one associated with the military, and your opponents as the ones somehow antithetical to it.

You did it again today and you need to know how history will judge the line you just crossed.

It is a line thankfully only the first of a series that makes the military political, and the political, military.

It is a line which history shows is always the first one crossed when a democratic government in some other country has started down the long, slippery, suicidal slope towards a Military Junta.

Get back behind that line, Mr. Bush, before some of your supporters mistake your dangerous transgression, for a call to further politicize our military.

“You know what I’m gonna tell those Jews when I get to Israel, don’t you Herman?” a then Governor George W. Bush allegedly asked a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. When the journalist, Ken Herman, replied that he did not know, Bush reportedly delivered the punch line: “I’m telling ‘em they’re all going to hell.”

More

This about sums it up. Bush really doesn’t seem to be able to accept the differences between American democracy and a kingship.

Bush declares himself absolute ruler: It’s ‘my government’
August 8, 2006 6:28 AM

Once again, President George W. Bush has shown complete disregard and utter contempt for the documents which define this country: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Speaking in Crawford, Texas, Monday, Bush said:

“The loss of life on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border has been a great tragedy. Millions of Lebanese civilians have been caught in the crossfire of military operations because of the unprovoked attack and kidnappings by Hezbollah. The humanitarian crisis in Lebanon is of deep concern to all Americans, and alleviating it will remain a priority of my government.”

“My government?” Abraham Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, said the Constitution establishes a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” The Declaration of Independence starts with phrase “We the people.” They say nothing of turning the government over to any elected official so that it becomes “my government.”

Presidents have administrations and they can, and usually do, refer to such as “my administration.” But Bush, we believe, feels his power is absolute and the government of this nation belongs not to the people but to him and him alone.

This is not the first time that Bush has disregarded the protections of freedoms that are the cornerstone of our Republic. His widespread abuse of power has forced the Supreme Court to slap him down again and again, especially on the abandonment of Constitutionally-guaranteed rights for detainees at Guantanamo and others held without due course in the hysteria following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The American Bar Association recently issued a report noting his abuse of the Constitution through a deluge of “signing statements” where he declares he does not have to obey laws passed by Congress.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while serving as White House Counsel, wrote a memo that referred to the Constitution as “an outdated document” and Bush himself has expressed contempt for the very document he has twice sworn an oath to uphold and defend.

America is no longer a democracy or a democratic republic. Government no longer belongs to the people. The President of the United States has declared it do be a government of Bush, by Bush and for Bush.

In his own words, Bush calls it “my government.”

As has happened too often in the past, the fate of a nation and the world rests in the hands of a megalomaniacal despot who claims absolute power to wage war, destroy freedom and spread chaos.

© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue