THIMEROSAL
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Saturday, June 18, 2005 4:47 PM UPDATE—– Jeffrey Schneider, ABC News Vice President for Media Relations called me yesterday, clearly annoyed about the controversy surrounding Thursday’s sudden pulling of Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s story/interview package about Thimerosal slated for Good Morning America, 20/20, and a 3 minute piece on that evening’s World News Tonight. He said the idea that an executive on the “WEST Coast”- his phrase not mine-had the story yanked was ridiculous. He said that he suspected who the source was that gave the kill-story to The Huffington Post and that it was vendetta-driven. He was amused and a bit surprised , he said, that one web posting had created such a commotion. By mid-afternoon, the original story on The Huffington Post had vanished from Google News and replaced with a strong re-affirmation and claim that their source has “first-hand knowledge” of the situation. This was simply a story’s script that the producer took a look at before airing and said ” I want more” Mr. Schneider explained. I was finally able to get ahold of Mr. Kennedy about 20 minutes ago, just as he was getting off a plane, so I will update here when more details become available. Suffice it to say, after what Don Imus went through with the complete SMEARJOB in The Wall Street Journal, after daring to discuss Thimerosal poisoning, I’m starting to get the creeps…. JT
Wed 15 Mar 2006
Mission Creeps (Re-release)
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John Tully: ‘The mission creeps’
Posted on Wednesday, June 02 @ 10:08:03 EDT
This article has been read 1809 times.
By John Tully, The Los Angeles Sun
The Today Show, America’s number one source for morning infotainment seemed almost obsessed by two stories in the Fall of Two-Thousand Two. Elizabeth Smart, a young girl from Utah had been abducted from her home by a man at gunpoint that summer and it continued to be a big story. In October, seemingly random citizens of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area were being gunned down by a mysterious shooter.
Remember?
Katie and Matt stoically opened the show almost every morning with these two stories.
At the same time, a war in Iraq was looming and the shadow of a vote in Congress giving the President authorization to use military force was creeping forward. The vote was even more crucial because the midterm elections were just ahead in November and the GOP was playing the Patriot card like the pros they are.
The Bush administration had strolled into power promising anyone within earshot that they would be exactly the opposite of everything the Clinton administration was and added that the “W” missing from some computer keyboards was not funny.
They vowed to be different than President Clinton: different on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and a plan of disengagement was put in place as a way to “back off” and let the two sides work it out for a while.
Mr. Clinton had “coddled” North Korea they said and now the Bush White House was going to get tough. Moscow and Bejing would know who the new boss was with the plan going forward to build a missile defense shield.
Throw out Kyoto because it’s bad for business and bad for America and by the way, tell the domestic bad guys that John Ashcroft was putting law and order back into the Justice Department where it belonged.
Presidential transition teams notwithstanding, the grownups were now in charge, and in the first nine months of this new administration they made that fact perfectly clear.
Then the whole world watched in horror as airplanes struck New York, D.C. and Pennsylvania.
This was truly a call to leadership for Mr. Bush. But perhaps as a sign of things to come his initial statements thereafter and address in the pit at Ground Zero on a bullhorn was almost universally praised by the mainstream media though neither speech had much substance or style. Various pundits declared that simply: “everything had changed”
The rest is history.
Two wars, three tax cuts, and the whole world is watching in horror. Sixty miles outside of Kabul, Afghanistan the Taliban have taken back over. Opium production has tripled by some accounts; sure to sweep obscene amounts of heroin into Europe this year. The same conditions that led the country to harbor Al-Quaeda before that war are present once again and we have too few troops there to do the job.
Iraq and Afghanistan have taken close to a thousand lives and wounded at least five-thousand troops. There have been over thirteen-thousand medi-vacs or medical evacuations; mostly American forces. The Bush administration, while publically trying to form a coalition of countries willing to put boots on the ground in Iraq for violations of the United Nations Security Council resolution 144, had privately trashed that very same U.N. as “irrelevant” at every opportunity.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scoffed and sneered his way through press conferences, dismissively declaring that he knew where the Weapons of Mass Destruction were and did we mention that the U.N. is irrelevant? And FRANCE.
The CIA, DIA, FBI, independent intelligence, Congressman Jim McDermott, The Dixie Chicks and The Pope all expressed concern about the attack on Iraq but the administration pooh-poohed all dissent. While Prime Minister Tony Blair was getting absolutely grilled by the House of Commons, the U.S. Congress was eerily silent and on the first day of the War on Iraq Kent Conrad seemed to be all alone on the Senate floor as he lamented the lack of even a basic budget for the conflict and it’s aftermath.
There was a complete breakdown of even basic diplomacy shown by President Bush, failing to privately convince skeptical nations to join him in the fight as his father had done in the first Gulf War and using words like “crusade” “bring ‘em on” and “axis of evil” to further alienate the Muslim world.
The mealy-mouthed-chicken-hawked-think tankers in Northwest D.C. kept the pot stirring as well with talks of regime change, disarmament and virtual screaming about resolution 1441. Despite the evidence of dissipating mustard and sarin gas over the last ten years in Iraq, continued flyovers, sanctions and inspections, we were told there may be nuclear program-related activities; the ultimate McGuffin of the war debate. While the term imminent threat was never officially used, the talk of a nuke mushroom cloud Not being our smoking gun got the point across stoutly. Throw in chatter about fourty-five minute deployment and unmanned aerial vehicles and the cake is baked.
The military and diplomatic tracks never intersected. Spring came around and the U.S. demanded that Saddam destroy his conventional Al -Samoud missiles even while almost 100,000 troops were amassed on Iraq’s border and CNN was reporting that the first attack was only days away. “Might as well go in now that we’ve gone in” was all the noise that week.
President Bush of course had the complete support of Congress to go right ahead in and everyone North of MacArthur Boulevard knew he didn’t really have to go back for more approval. That crucial vote in Congress, that blank check, is now brought up whenever there is criticism of the war and rightly so. Because not one of these Senators or Congressman were really pressed by the Press on this vote, they showed no guts in standing up to the march to Baghdad. Perhaps if the morning shows and popular media had pumped up the voting issue and specific plans for post-war Iraq like the Laci Peterson/MichaelJackson/Elizabeth Smart/Sniper stories with full saturation coverage a real debate would have resulted.
We’ll never know.
In the middle of a War on Terrorism The United States Of America invaded a sovereign Muslim nation of twenty-five million people. Because there were no real plans for the occupation, and no substantive debate about it, we’ve got eighteen year-olds from Cedar Rapids, Iowa negotiating foreign policy on the streets of Fallujah.
This arrogant smug administration has made our country less safe. We’ve lost credibility and our moral standing in the world. Most importantly there can be no doubt that this invasion has created more terrorists that hate America.
Goodness Gracious.
© John S.Tully 2004
Reprinted from The Los Angeles Sun:
http://www.lasun.net/
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Wed 15 Mar 2006
Mr. Rove’s Wild Ride ( RE-RELEASE )
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John S. Tully: ‘Mr. Rove’s wild ride’
Posted on Sunday, September 29 @ 08:28:09 EDT
This article has been read 559 times.
By John S. Tully
Los Angeles — Politics is not a pretty thing.
Los Angeles — Politics is not a pretty thing.Look no further than this week in Washington D. C. Former Vice-president Albert Gore Jr. finally brought up the huge marsupial in the room. Criminy! folks, that’s gonna’ wake the whole herd up mate!
Los Angeles — Politics is not a pretty thing.Look no further than this week in Washington D. C. Former Vice-president Albert Gore Jr. finally brought up the huge marsupial in the room. Criminy! folks, that’s gonna’ wake the whole herd up mate!Senate Leader Tom Daschle, who seemed to have stashed his opinions in a lock box this summer finally blew his top on the Senate floor denouncing President Bush’s comment at a recent fundraiser that the “Senate” is more interested in “special interests” than in the Security Of Americans. That very same fundraiser pushed the President past Bill Clinton’s record of $126 million raised in one year and it’s only the last week of September.Stepping right up to the plate this week was a small group of Senators who have been all too quiet this summer with any dissent of this administration’s dual War On Terrorism and Iraq. In fact the debate on war had bipassed “if” and went straight through to “when” and “who’s with us” by the time Mr. Gore finally cleared his throat Monday in San Francisco. Actual questions were raised about our effectiveness in toppling Saddam and how to proceed post-war in Iraq among others.
Sen. Robert Byrd paced and shook with disdain as he read Bush’s remarks from the newspaper on the senate floor. Sen. Daschle’s voice broke as he defended his colleagues, spoke of members who have served in the military and demanded an apology from the President. He also spoke of not politicizing the nation’s debate. It was a classic case of “too little,too late”
Back in June an internal G.O.P. playbook, authored by White House political strategist Karl Rove got into the hands of the opposition. The Powerpoint presentation suggested Republican candidates play up the “War” to keep the political dialogue on their side of the fence.The relative silence of the Democrats this summer only strengthened the resolve of the true hawks in the administration and a bipartisan resolution for war will almost definitely be passed by both houses. For GOP candidates however, the strategy might not pay off.
A new poll released this week shows that while the majority of Americans are for action against Iraq, three out of five want our allies to sign on. Colin Powell would like to go back to the Security Council soon with a joint resolution from the United States Congress and it looks as if he will have it. Unfortunately for the Republicans, this momentary truce focuses the debate back onto the domestic front where, as usual, it is the Economy…stupid.
Crikey! The bugger just ate his own heed!
Politics is not a pretty creature.
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Wed 15 Mar 2006
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN
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ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN
By John S. Tully
The New York Herald Sun
October 27 2005
On one of the final episodes of HBO’s remarkable Six Feet Under, a character named Vanessa gently consoles the grieving sister of an Iraqi war veteran who has just committed suicide after losing many limbs. She tells the woman of watching her kids; sleeping; just being. Right then and there it seems to take the woman’s pain and turn it to something beautiful. There’s 2000 dead soldiers, sailors and Marines, thousands more injured for life, and countless dead and injured Iraqis.
It’s just getting to be too much for the American people.
America tortures and kills prisoners of war, lies about its soldiers’ deaths, allows its citizens to starve for days after a hurricane and produces its own news.
Meanwhile the press breaks a collective arm patting itself on the back for its gut-check Katrina coverage.
Too little and too late.
While we’re at war, a cadre of cowards has brazenly robbed the Treasury blind, mortgaging our great-grandchildren’s future while the last five years has been a cash-grab of epic proportions for the fat Republican-only lobbyists in Washington D.C.. As Mr. Bush completely alienated the rest of the free world, the un-free world got more dangerous. The Cowboy President didn’t want to use diplomacy when he could with North Korea so now they want their own reactor. Unfortunately, the intelligence agencies are in shambles, and Donald Rumsfeld’s “lighter, quicker, faster” military is decimated, demoralized and stretched dangerously thin. Meanwhile, China and Japan own much of our debt.
There is still a lack of adequate equipment for our troops on the ground in a war done so completely nearsightedly and on the cheap that families have to send goggles and boots to their children in Iraq and taxpayer-paid mercenaries/private contractors from companies like CACI make four times as much as the enlisted man. Meanwhile, Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown and Root and American oil companies are reaping windfall profits while heating-oil bills double for that widow in Detroit. Up on Capitol Hill, the Republican Senate leader Bill Frist is in serious legal trouble and House leader Tom Delay has now stepped down after being indicted in Texas… twice. The chief purchasing official for the United States of America you ask? Why, he’s just been frog-marched from his office in handcuffs for multiple counts of fraud on the federal government. During a so-called War on Terrorism the Federal Emergency Management chief gets his important job because he is a buddy of the old chief. The criminalization of politics?
These guys and gals make ordinary criminals feel squeamish.
So many troubling occurrences have in fact already gone down the memory hole so far this year that these cold winds of autumn will surely blow more truth away; too many stolen billions, too damn many lives. Somebody in The White House is going to jail for revealing a CIA agent’s identity or lying about it to investigators. The great New York Times helped to sell this war on stories by a reporter named Judith Miller who had sources like a fellow named Curveball, well known by international intelligence agencies to be a fabricator, Jordanian-convicted criminal and American advisor Ahmed Chalabi and the Vice-President’s chief advisor Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Mr. Chalabi was issued an arrest warrant last year by the Iraqi government but now he’s firmly in place again as leader of a Shiite Iraqi coalition. Curveball was last seen fleeing from a prison in Iraq and Ms. Miller went to jail for 89 days for not revealing her source to Independent Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. She was released after reaching a deal and revealed that Mr. Libby was one of her sources for the information about Mr. Wilson’s wife. She claims to have written it in her notes as Valerie Flame.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
This foul mess is greased by a Mainstream Media who butter Americans with a steady
diet of Paula Abdul-Tryst /Brain-Dead Woman /Missing Blond-Girl stories. Lately the press has been hammering home the notion that this leak of a C.I.A. agent’s name is a very complicated story. It’s not but one can understand why, to journalists like Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert, it must seem complicated, because so many of them are such active participants in the Wink-Wink Washington Game that it completely clouds their judgment. The leak story is simple. It’s about the dirty politics of war.
Between President Bush telling Americans in a State Of The Union speech that Iraq was seeking uranium, and Condoleeza Rice talking that nuclear nonsense about not wanting to wait until we had a “mushroom cloud” in our skies, the deal was sealed to go to war.
In the end, this main reason for invasion, the imminent nuclear threat posed by Saddam and Iraq, was fabricated. Ambassador Joseph Wilson called the administration on this lie and they ruined his wife’s career in the C.I.A for revenge. Mr. Wilson had been sent by the C.I.A. to Niger Africa to see if Iraq had actually tried to get the specialized yellowcake uranium to make a nuclear bomb. He found no evidence of this, neither has anyone else, and he wrote an op-ed piece to this effect. The Bush Administration, in order to punish Mr. Wilson for revealing their big war lie, told some journalists on the White House beat that he had been sent there by his wife, C.I.A. agent Valerie Wilson, who had been undercover for years under the alias of Plame, and was now at headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
They were sure to get some so-called fair journalists like Evan Thomas of Newsweek to backhandedly trash Joseph Wilson’s integrity on John Donald Imus’ program and some politicians to label it simple partisanship. Don’t forget the Drudge/Rush/Freepers, they’re almost as mean and nasty as their heroes in the Oval Office, where wishful thinking and self-delusion rule the day; get in their way and you’ll pay. They’ll turn on anyone who disagrees with them. Ask Richard Clarke, Gen. Shinseki or Paul O’Neill.
Don’t worry, here comes mealy-mouth media-darlings David Brooks and Tom “Pakistani Cabdriver” Friedman to tell us a nice story that will make us feel better.
But now, even the administration’s personal water-carriers are starting to criticize the President over this latest Supreme Court debacle.
The president nominated an unqualified, lightweight, personal friend and advisor Harriet Meirs to the highest court in the nation and the right-wing is absolutely crushed. Like little children who aren’t getting what they thought had been promised, columnists George Will, Bill Kristol and the Republican activists are fuming and furious and beginning to go off-message.
Egads!
Their loyalty to this administration’s consistent and constant shenanigans is finally wearing thin. The very machine that keeps the disinformation going is breaking down.
It’s hard work these days for the White House to cover its tracks and they can’t even blame the Democrats. The first Court crisis began this presidency and this week’s indictments, the Meirs mistake, and the mess in Iraq signals the end.
Leandre Rice, a newly returned soldier from Iraq, came home with a skull fracture, vicious burns all over his body and no more eyesight. He’ll never see his twins born two months ago.
It’s too much for the American people; too many mistakes and too many lies.
As Mr. Libby wrote in a letter to
Wed 15 Mar 2006
Darkness Come
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THE DARKNESS HAS
ARRIVEDBY JOHN TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
MARCH 25
Last year the oily and corrupt House majority leader, Congressman Tom DeLay, personally used the Department Of Homeland Security to track down and locate members of the Texas State Legislature who had fled to Oklahoma after Mr. DeLay tried to redistrict his home state into illogical shapes that were straight off of a sushi plate.
This week Mr. DeLay subpoenaed a brain-dead woman to Capitol Hill to score political capital from the religious and rigid right, and distract from his vast legal problems, including the illegal use of campaign funds and his current successful attempt to literally change the House’s ethics rules, written in secret.
Texas, of course, is where they execute retarded people and adolescents.
Irving Kristol’s son Bill, the neoconservative dreamer and top propagandist for the Iraq invasion since his co-founding of The Project For A New American Century, had his expert say on Fox News the other day. He claimed that one of the neurologists who had examined Terri Schiavo said: ” She can recover substantially if she gets the proper rehabilitation. ”
It almost makes you long for the days of uninterrupted Atlanta courtroom-killer news and video.
There are approximately $8.8 billion missing in Iraq; completely unaccounted for. The money was entrusted to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Never one to miss an opportunity for irony, George W. Bush nominated yet another chief architect of the Iraq invasion, Paul Wolfowitz to run The World Bank.
That’s a perfect triangle of failure with a secretary of state who did a miserable job advising Bush on National Security and an attorney general who tried to find legal loopholes in torture laws.
A recent document uncovered Halliburton’s newest overcharge of $108 million for Jordanian and Turkish fuel—”The cost data did not reconcile to KBR’s (Halliburton subsidiary) accounting” – and added to countless overcharges totaling close to two billion dollars. Meanwhile, Congress decides to investigate steroid use in professional baseball.
They must not know that Chandra Levy’s killer is still on the loose.
The media swine scoffed and smirked at veteran journalist Dan Rather’s final plea for courage as they ripped apart Michael Jackson for wearing pajamas and blanketed the airwaves with coverage of Martha Stewart.
It’s always hard to figure out, week in and week out, who the biggest media weenie is. George Will and David Brooks both could hardly wait to make immediate cheeky/mealy-mouthed references to France in discussing the Syrian mess in Lebanon. Everyone in the cool kids media club was praising Bush for his bold leadership, though almost two months have gone by since the Iraqi election and the many sides are still fighting, and the country is a bloody mess.
Or is it the three-headed liberal weenie, The Evan Thomas/ Howard Fineman/ Chris Mathews Monster with their newest shtick, the just-so-wacky-it-might-work: “George Bush is an idiot-genius who had to lie to America to get us into a war to bring freedom to the Middle East.” Subtitle: “We won’t know for 50 years”
Talk about mission creeps.
In fact, all three men were performing it brilliantly last week, after about 20 minutes of adolescent discussion of Mr. Jackson’s wardrobe and Ms. Stewart’s homecoming, on radio legend Don Imus’ program. That hardly left them any time to discuss the brand-new appointment of America’s chief diplomat to the United Nations, John Bolton.
The little coverage and criticism the media did give the truly absurd nomination usually referred to a bad joke that Bolton had once told about cutting off the top floors of the UN building and it not mattering. But the consistently undiplomatic Bolton once seriously asserted, “We (United States) are the Security Council.” One of the few reporters left in Washington, Mark Shields, remarked that the nomination was “like naming Howard Stern as your chief of protocol or Mary Baker Eddy as your surgeon general.”
Back in the middle of 2003, before Jon Stewart was a big star, Chris Matthews was on The Daily Show and was asked about the presidential election and the long list of Democratic candidates. The war that Mathews had passive-aggressively cheer leaded had not been going well. The questions that he had failed to ask the politicians and leaders about the preparation and planning for the war were coming home to roost.
With all his experience in “Wershington” as he calls it in his Pennsylvanian drawl, working for the late, great Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, among others, this would have been a perfect opportunity to educate the young people about the issues on a cool TV show and discuss the politics involved with them.
But Mr. Mathews tried to be hip and irreverent, and summarized the whole field of candidates by giddily telling Stewart that Congressman Dick Gephardt had big eyebrows.
Hilarious.
Tip O’Neill was probably rolling in his grave that summer night. And just about the same time out in Colorado, an old salty dog named Hunter S. Thompson was stewing about the sorry state of affairs in America.
The journalist and author fumed: “It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap war in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgivable sin in America.”
“Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war zone, our national economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon’s ‘war strategy’ has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.
“The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world. The stock market will never come back, our armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.”
He ended his diatribe by declaring “Big Darkness Come Soon”
The day after Thompson killed himself, the beat-up, piled-upon and tired-looking Mr. Rather declared simply and dramatically: “Gonzo is dead” This fact was immediately evident upon watching the cable news channels.
CNN’s Judy Woodruff introduced two young women at computers who were reading weblogs to gauge the reaction to the sad news. One of the women stated that Thompson had basically pioneered the practice of Gonzo Journalism. Don Imus’ producer stooge Bernard McGuirk and sports stooge Sid Rosenberg just could not, for the life of them, figure out what all the fuss was about regarding Thompson’s death. “What did he ‘eva do?” chortled the pool-ball headed producer. “Who is this guy?” laughed Mr. Rosenberg.
But their questions would soon be answered by the newsbunnies at MSNBC who were broadcasting Live from the Studio with In-Depth coverage of the top story: The darkness had indeed come.
Copyright © 2005 The Los Angeles Sun
Wed 15 Mar 2006
Peabody award-winning/not really®
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Peabodyaward-
winning/not really®
THE JAMESGUCKERT/ JEFF GANNON
FAKE REPORTER IN THE WHITE
HOUSE QUESTION IS MOOT!
BY JOHN TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES
SUN FEB 23
A weekend journalism-school reporter, using a fake name, was given access to the President of the United States at White House press briefings before he even worked for any news organization.
He claims that he has seen a confidential, so-called C.I.A. document which reveals the name of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife and shows her recommending him for the trip to Niger to investigate yellowcake uranium sales to the Iraqis.
It turns out that Secret Service has been waving James Guckert by the guardhouse for two and a half years and once inside, he became Jeff Gannon. He wrote for a fake website, Talon News, run by Republican strategist Bobby Eberle and the organization GOPUSA.
To understand how something like this could Not be a story, that this could happen to begin with, is to understand how The District of Columbia really runs. However, one can only watch and wait as the laws of physics begin to rear their ugly head. Try as they might and for whatever reason, The Mainstream Media (as good of a description as any) just can’t keep this monster down.
Howard Kurtz, the longtime and wise sage media critic with The Washington Post, trusted by little old Quaker ladies in Cleveland Park D.C. and lobbyists alike, just could not figure out what the big fuss was all about and immediately chalked it up to over-eager WWW types and their preoccupation with the salacious part of the story.
Oh that.
The Great Diversion and the reason why non-political junkies in America are apparently not talking about this story is that this fella’ publicly advertised his services as a male prostitute on numerous sites on the Internet and registered and launched numerous gay male pornographic websites.
Really.
CNN’s Aaron Brown, so brilliant in his earlier years on the old ABC overnight news program, pooh-poohed the scandal as a bit of “so what”. On Wolf Blitzer’s “Hard News” program, Mr. Guckert/Gannon was treated almost softly, as if not to upset.
The New York Times finally ran the story, deep in the back pages on Friday, Feb 11th, more than a week after website journalists began to fully reveal this fake journalist’s deceptions.The shockjock mentality came out instantly in the groupthink mainstream media with a curious mix of apathy and frat-boy jokes.
There was no outrage to be outraged over. Meanwhile, writers on web sites like The Daily Kos, David Brock’s Media Matters and John Aravosis’s America Blog, among others, had been doing their own journalism and found out that Mr. Guckert was not who or what he appeared to be. They started their dig after witnessing a press briefing by the President back in late January. A strange reporter asked a clearly partisan question / pronouncement that, among other things, stated that the Democrats were “divorced from reality”.
They got dirt all right.
Columnists Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd finally had to write cute pieces about the mess nearing the end of last week. Katie, Matt, and The Today Show eventually did a quick three- minute story in the first hour last Wednesday. Radio man Don Imus couldn’t get anyone to bite and wondered aloud about the titillating aspect of the thing.
This was now more than ten days since the story had broken, or hadn’t broken. No one was even discussing, outside of the Web, the nasty business of the C.I.A. memo that Mr.Guckert had claimed to have seen or knew about right there on Mr. Blitzer’s show.
Links to web sites where Mr. Guckert solicited clients for sex were widely available at the very same time Mr. Blitzer was tripping all over himself to give Mr. Guckert an Easypass.
Ultimate Washington insider Mary Matalin, Vice President Cheney’s sometimes consultant, told Imus that she just wished Ms. Dowd would just come in from the cold and get with the program.
Why did President Bush and Scott McClellan, the President’s spokesman, call on Mr. Guckert/Gannon so often in those two and a half years and how could other reporters not write about Talon News and GOPUSA ’s illegitimacy? Veterans of the White House beat sometimes don’t see a question for years. Was he a plant?
But just like the high school sophomores that they are, the Washington press corps have hemmed and hawed and giggled their way for weeks now through a real-live genuine scandal unfurling at the White House. Waving their collective finger, they dismissed the whole affair in full. It was simply The Bloggers and their liberal retribution for the Rather/CBS assassination and a lurid fascination with the X-rated angle thrown in for good measure.
Now the simply idiotic Bush-Tapes story, along with a long weekend and a brilliant fake-outrage campaign over a congressman’s comments about Karl Rove, is threatening to bury forever a story that the entire profession of journalism would like to pretend was never born to begin with.
Everyone seems to be looking around at each other and tsk-tsking the lack of outrage on each other’s part, as if to say “This is terrible. Someone do some real reporting.
“Someone did – as Mr. Bush would say, on the “Internets”.
Stay Tuned.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
HTTP//:LASUN.NET
©2005 THE LOS ANGELES SUN
Wed 15 Mar 2006
HYPOCRISY AND HUBRIS
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HYPOCRISY AND HUBRIS
BY JOHN TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
Jan. 25 2005
There are weeks on that tiny hill full of impressive buildings and important people when swirling winds truly collide. Halfway through 2004, the June sun was shining, the war was spiraling out of control, and nobody except maybe Joe Biden had the faintest trace of a viable plan to stop digging the hole . It had been an extraordinary few days, one which brought William Jefferson Clinton back to the limelight that he loves so much. The former president’s book tour received a curious mixture of scoffing and slathering from the networks while they just about ignored a visit from the Special Prosecutor to the Oval Office, He was there to find out who gave Bob Novak the identity of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame, which ruined her long undercover career.A pitiful week, which found Colin Powell apologizing for a fraudulent State Department report on terrorism that suffered from shockingly wrong statistics and apparent, er, printing problems. The original report stated that terrorism acts in the world against America, for the year 2003, had gone down.
It hadn’t .
Terrorism acts actually went up for the year; what do you know? It turned out that they had only looked at part of the year and in fact attacks were up by a record amount.
A typical week, as the Vice-President was given a break by the Supreme Court when it sent the now infamous lawsuit about his energy policy meetings back down to the lower courts.
As usual the mainstream media got lost in the shuffle about Ken Lay and Big Oil running energy policy. Forgotten once again was the release in 2003 of curious Energy Task-Force documents that contained detailed Iraqi oil field maps, pipelines and terminals, and a list of “Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oil Field Contracts”.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, it had been a long week for Congressman Henry Waxman who called for a Select House committee to investigate the abuses at a prison named Abu-Ghraib after weeks of outright stonewalling by the administration.
A partial and select document dump of memos late on a Tuesday evening by the White House, showed that the President had approved a document on February 7, 2002 approving a new set of interrogation techniques that fall outside the law of the Geneva Convention and could be used in future conflicts.
Now, six months later, the fellow who cleared those torture memos will be our new Attorney General, the head of the C.I.A. who claimed the intelligence about Iraq’s imminent threat was a “slam dunk” gets a medal, and the President’s adviser on national security for the past four years and two failed wars gets to head up the State Department.
Oy that Bush….
Wed 11 Aug 2004
OUT OF THE LOOP
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OUT OF THE LOOP
Red Truth and Blue Truth
BY JOHN S.TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
August 2004
John Kerry is really making a mess of this war in Iraq.
He brought this on himself after all, by completely screwing up the entire month of August. The Senator accused his fellow soldiers in Vietnam of torture and heinous acts while he bragged and boasted about his own alleged service.
Then he went windsurfing!
Wasn’t he a snowboarder just this past winter?
Make up your mind Mr. Kerry.
The liberal elite media won’t inform the people, as the president gladly did this week, that the “right track/wrong track” polling numbers are actually better in Iraq than here in America. Those people are dealing with kidnappings, hostage-taking, beheadings and car-bombings yet they are optimistic for the future and answer pollster’s questions.
It’s going to take the long lens of time to understand what really happened on the ground during the liberation of Iraq. History will be the final judge, so it’s best to continue on this path of unexamined patriotism, at least until the war on terrorism is over. If you want to take umbrage with President Bush, wait for about thirty years. After all, these people started it.
As usual, the Democrats are best at criticizing themselves, so they’re keeping Kerry on his feet and scared. After Zell Miller (and Karl Rove) eviscerated the Senator for being a weakling on security and defense, the talking heads, pundits, and subpar speculators in the lazy press started writing his obituary.
Even Cokie Roberts and Howard Fineman were plain old baffled at how poor a candidate Kerry was, and they know things. It seems that the candidate just doesn’t “get” the voters. Deep thoughts from the ?Cool Kids Media Club: “Who is John Kerry?”.
An English person named Katty Kay from the BBC said on a television program called “The Chris Matthews Show” that the Kerry and Edwards speeches at the Democratic convention were the only ones of any note. Clarence Page looked stunned. The British are very smart you know.
During August, the bloodiest month yet for the soldiers and Marines in Iraq, with combat injuries reaching 1100, CNN spent about fifteen minutes an hour on the Swift Boat Veterans. This month it’s as bloody as ever and they’ve got fifteen minutes an hour on IBM Selectric typewriters.
Robert Novak, the syndicated columnist, wants Dan Rather and CBS to reveal their document sources. The Dems just can’t win for trying.
The intellectuals stammered something faint about ill-prepared troops, lack of exit strategy, and a 25,000 page Army War College /CIA/ State Department plan for the war. More left-wing nuanced goo-gah; freedom, liberty and democracy aren’t always a walk in the park folks, and this is a messy business.
Should we have guarded the ammunition dumps?Youbetcha’!Was there a complete lack of intelligence and a credible plan for war?Sure!Were we forced to funnel resources and troops out of Afghanistan to mount the war in Iraq thereby leaving Osama Bin Laden uncontested at Tora Bora?Hey!….scram kid!
The oxygen-loving lefties claim the president has used 9/11 as a pretext to get his legislation through Congress and point to rollbacks of various EPA regulations, corporate tax breaks, and drug company profits during his term. Protest, dissent, and hand wringing don’t make us safer.
Tell that to the Cassandras at the CIA, whose National Intelligence Estimate about the long-term outlook for Iraq was leaked this week. The best-case scenario for the country was described as “tenuous stability”. These naysayers and naer-do-wells squawk about “civil war” yet they got the 9/11 attack and Iraq’s weapons capability completely wrong. Why should we believe them now? The President rightly called it just “a guess”.
Republican doomsdayer Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said this week that Iraq was “beyond pitiful, beyond embarrassing, now in the zone of dangerous”. What did he think would happen, that we’d be greeted as liberators, with flowers thrown at us?
Perhaps General Jay Garner was correct so very long ago when he advocated quick elections and a hasty withdrawal. But this is George Bush’s war and once you take your hands off the bible you’re the Commander-in-Chief, boss.
If we’ve squandered our credibility and destroyed relationships with other countries when we need their help with the global war on religious fundamentalism, too bad, so sad. France and Germany were making money over there the whole time and besides, aren’t we all safer with Saddam in a jailcell?
It’s Fallujah or Cleveland buddy, so fire up Ebay and pass the Freedom Fries. It’s a fabulous disaster and a catastrophic success.
2004 ?THE LOS ANGELES SUN
Sun 1 Aug 2004
It’s the troops that we’re concerned about….. asses
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IOWA SOLDIER
Blinded with rain in the country
Blinded with rain in the town
Blinded with rain in the battlefield
Black hail pouring down
Oh the rainstorm chills me
Chills me right to the bone
Fills my heart with [rainfall]
Out there in the dark alone
Haunted with voices from yesterday
Haunted with voices that sing
Haunted with voices that slip away
Leave only the hope that they bring
Oh the voices show me
Things nobody can see
Oh the voices tell me
What hard work it is to be free
Chorus-
Oh my darling HattieIowa’s far away-Don’t forsake me for another-Hold on for one more day
Selling my heart down the river
Selling my heart on the sand
Selling my heart to Arkansas
At the Company A command
Oh the heart tells slowly
To the edge of the living line
Voices singing holy
Cut free of the prison of time
Eighteen hundred and sixty four
Cloud in the eye of the storm
Sitting here wondering what for
In a tattered blue uniform
Oh the heart grows weary
Of battles that never end
Hope this war is settled
Before there’s nothing to defend
If they re-elect Abe Lincoln
Sooner the war will end
Every man in Company A
Is voting for him again
General Holmes and Marmaduke
Attacked July the fourth
Buried four hundred of their dead
Only forty four from the north
Oh my darling Hattie
I’d give the world to be
Next to you and those I love
Back in Monroe County
Oh my darling HattieIowa’s so far away-Don’t forsake me for another-I will return some day ….
When the war is over
No matter which side prevails
When the war is over
No matter which side fails
?Robert Hunter
THE LOS ANGELES SUN Since 2003
Tue 27 Jul 2004
KOOL KIDS MEDIA CLUB
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KOOL KIDS MEDIA CLUB
I can’t for the life of me find a valid account of Sandy Berger stuffing his pockets/pants
with secrets, etc. etc. Ah, and there’s the rub these days in the Cool Kids Media Club.
I tried hard; I love a good research hunt and spent some coin calling D.C. but I’m new
in the media game so I don’t have many contacts yet. Nothing, nada, zilch, and rumor
becomes fact.
Robert Novak saying that everyone knew Valerie Plame was undercover?
He’s still saying this and seems more confident now that the second round of
the Smear Ambassador Wilson Patrol is out and about. He’s going to swallow
his wet teeth one of these days.
Jack Cafferty isn’t dead and was on CNN Monday morning grumbling about….
you guessed it, Berger stuffing things into his… socks er…jacket,er….pants…;
….and the boys on Imus were snickering like the seventh graders at
The Potomac School about that SPY stealing secrets in his underwear…
JT
SANDY BERGER IS A SPY!!
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SANDY BERGER IS A SPY!!
Amazing that the two-year old Sandy Berger investigation leak came out two days before the (now all-but-forgotten, complete stonewalling every step along the way by this administration) 9/11 report would be released…
David Brooks was just salivating the other night about how this five hundred page report is such a great symbol of blah blah blah…A beacon, if you will, of light, in an otherwise dark period of time, in this great nation or somesuch trite.
Get a root canal now.
Hey this report would have come out earlier if the Bush Jr. administration hadn’t delayed, delayed, delayed.As usual, the media is now parroting each other this week in urging /warning/encouraging Kerry to not Bush-bash….I mean everyone in the cool- kids media club is squawking about it…Awesome!
….and the whole ” Who is the real John Kerry?” nonsense?The Dems. are going to listen and Kerry, who IS charismatic, will give a so-so mushy speech instead of what everyone, of either political party, is salivating to see to see in a politician: someone who lays it on the line and stands for something, anything.
Prolly won’t happen, Kerry will win anyway and it’s a good thing I don’t run campaigns.
?2004 THE LOS ANGELES SUN
Sun 20 Jun 2004
Gassed His Own People
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GASSED HIS OWN PEOPLE
By John Tully
The Los Angeles Sun
20 June 2004
One of the unfortunate things about doing things completely different from the Clinton administration is that you’re bound to trip all over yourself and skin your shins doing just that.
Richard Clarke, the counterterror chief for President Clinton, kept on by the Bush administration and whom Vice President Cheney claimed was “out of the loop”, repeatedly warned of planes being used as a weapon, probably by al Qaeda, in as late as summer of 2001 to anyone on the new team who would listen.
In fact, on 31 January of 2001, The United States Commission on National Security concludes that we are not only unprepared for an attack on American soil but specifically mentions the phrase “weapon of mass destruction in a high-rise building”. The report basically states that there is a real lack of coordination between our intelligence agencies and a fragmented system to deal with threats.
The White House, disregarding even their own master of hand moves, Donald Rumsfeld, stifles the call for hearings and sets up a task force that meets a total of once, on September the fourth.
It’s not surprising then, that a memo in July of that summer from the FBI doesn’t raise any eyebrows. Agent Kenneth Williams worries about Middle Eastern men attending flight schools and German and Russian intelligence has Arabic terrorists training to fly airplanes as weapons against the U.S. and Israel. They are ignored or not coordinated.
Scarry with two R’s.
Think of the 9/11 commission and it’s sordid history as the perfect metaphor for this administration and the sheer chutzpah of it’s officials. Having thwarted the very creation of such a commission, they’ve monkey wrenched every single aspect of it from the start. The families of the deceased have entire web sites set up that document the complete unwillingness of the Bush administration to hand over even the simplest of file requests.
But will one ever, in their lifetime, forget the brilliant appointment of Henry Kissinger as the Commission’s first Chairman?
Certainly the honorable Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey and general good guy would be perfect for the job. Unfortunately, Mr. Kean is a director of Amerada-Hess, a partner with an outfit called Delta Oil Ltd. of Saudi Arabia. Delta is partly owned by Osama Bin laden’s brother-in-law: financier Khalid bin Mahfouz, formerly of that whole messy BCCI bank scandal. His partner in Delta is Mohammed Hussein al Amoudi and both are thought to have funnelled many millions to al-Qaeda and it’s network.
Ouch.
Co- chairmen Lee Hamilton is widely known to have looked the other way when confronted with the evidence that former Presidents Reagan and Bush were very much “in the loop” during the secret Iran-Contra covert arms transactions. One would assume that this Trilateral Commission member would give the kid the same free pass. He also sits on the President’s Homeland Security Advisory Council.The rest of the commission doesn’t instill in one the feeling of impartiality.
Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste, the scourge of the Right, is a former lawyer for one of the drug runners during Iran-Contra. He still represents United Airlines.
Fred Fielding is a former Nixon crony who vetted cabinet members on the Bush transition team and works for the law firm that lobbies for United Airlines.
Commission member Jamie Gorelick is a former lawyer for two of the American men, Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, most responsible when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International robbed depositors of $10 billion. It was an early nineties transcontinental giant ponzi scheme of a bank scandal. While she was the second in command at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration she was responsible for a memo suggesting a separation of counterintelligence and criminal investigations and their record on infiltrating and weakening al-Qaeda can only be described as less than stellar.
Her law firm is representing Muhammed al-Faisal, the Saudi prince who allegedly financed Osama bin laden. The plaintiffs are 9/11 family members.
Former Senator Slade Gorton has ties to Boeing who built all the planes that crashed on 9/11 and his law firm represents Delta Airlines. Two days after the attack The Seattle Times reported that he said to a public television audience that there was “nothing government intelligence officials could have done to thwart the attack.”
By far though, the most interesting of appointees to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States; the 9/11 commission’s official name, is it’s executive director, Mr. Philip Zelicow.
He served on the President?s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and as a member of the Bush administration’s transition team, often briefed incoming security staff on Iraq and al-Qaeda. Of course his well known personal friendship with the President’s National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, with whom he wrote a book, is widely known. He’s a member of the controversial Council on Foreign Relations and The Aspen Strategy Group, a foreign policy think-tank that counts Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Ms. Rice as members. Mr. Zelicow allegedly made the claim at UVA in the fall of 2002 that the real Iraqi threat was not to America: “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 — it’s the threat against Israel.”
Mr. Zelicow is also executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform and general editor of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Presidential Recordings Program that, among other things, transcribes presidential telephone conversations and meetings recorded during the fifties, sixties and seventies. Unfortunately the transcriptions have been found to contain at least a hundred key mistakes that ironically have been attributed by Zelikow to his work on the 9/11 commission and have still not been corrected.
This week the commission issued it’s preliminary report, read by Mr. Zelicow. Among other findings was the statement: “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States” While Bin Laden was in the Sudan he reportedly met with a senior Iraqi official after the man’s third attempt. This was apparently at the behest of the Sudanese who wanted him to cease his support of anti-Saddam Islamists in the Kurdish north.
In case there might still be some confusion, the commission’s report goes further and reads: “There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship”
The next morning the President immediately chimed in, saying: “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda” is “because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”
The Vice President was outraged by the outrage and blamed the New York Times and it’s headlines as the culprit. He also derided the media in general for the confusion.
But there was Mr. Cheney just this past Monday crowing that Saddam “had long-established ties with al Qaeda.” and last fall when he said that Iraq was: “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”
Most impressively though was the Vice President’s outright insistence Thursday night that the old battle ax herself, the “Prague meeting”, wherein Mohammed Atta, one of the nineteen highjackers, meets with Iraqi officials, actually took place. “It’s never been refuted.” he weakly snorted.
The Commission’s Staff Report 15 clearly states: “We do not believe that such a meeting occurred.” Various intelligence has placed Atta in Florida at the time and Commissioner Hamilton claimed Sunday morning that the Iraqi spy wasn’t there either. Newsweek is now reporting that Commission staff members were “astonished” that the Vice President still clings to this story.
Now that’s what you call Chuztpah.
Welcome to Dick Cheney’s America.
?2004 LOS ANGELES SUN
Sat 19 Jun 2004
Letter From The Editor
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JUNE 19 2004
A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
An Open Letter to:People who thought this war was a good idea.
Period.
Subtitle: You know who you are.
You don’t get to sneer about how the evidence was there.
You don’t get to scoff about how even Bill Clinton, Germany and France
thought there were WMD’s.
You don’t get to shriek about media-elite liberals just Bush-hating, conspiracy theorists
whining about Halliburton, and Saddam gassing his own people:
…Not when our leaders were so fully unprepared for this war that there was no legitimate
flank or rear security support for the thousands of vehicles, many endlessly breaking
down, in that convoy that stretched across the Iraqi desert at the beginning of the war.
…Not when they couldn’t even bribe Turkey into letting us enter Iraq from the north.
…Not when there weren’t enough MRE’s, tanks that would work in the sand
and flack-jackets for our troops .
…Not when our Marines suddenly became gendarmes on the streets
of Baghdad while we completely disbanded both the Iraqi army and
police and the country was being destroyed from the bottom up as
the looters demolished everything that the precision guided bombs
and Dick Lugar had been screaming about the need for a plan
post-war Iraq and what to do about the Shiites/Sunnis/Kurds
on The News Hour and Charlie Rose virtually every night for
the twelve months leading up to the start of the attack.
…Not when there was no budget for the war, funding was
asked for on the eve of the initial strike and there have been
no plans to pay for the ever-increasing cost.
…Not when Deputy Secretary Of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz is asked to give the number of Americans killed
in Iraq during a congressional commitee on April 29 2004
and he’s off by over two hundred soldiers.
…Not when they won’t let us see the bodies at Dover and
undercount casualties received in combat by the thousands.
Now bugger off and prepare for the trials.
John Tully
WWW.LASUN.NET
?The Los Angeles Sun
Thu 17 Jun 2004
The Editor comments on the news of the day
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Against The Beheadists ?
BECAUSE SOME OF US STILL LOVE OUR COUNTRY
——————————————————————————–
IN A NEW YORK MINUTE
BY JOHN TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
Being a vocal, loyal fan of the Redskins, Bullets and Redsox at an upstate New York boarding school didn’t go over too well with the lads. He hated their teams right back, as any good D.C.- loving boy would but he was badly outnumbered. The Big Apple’s teams and in turn, the city had been his nemesis for years and moving to the coast only strengthened that rivalry.
He used to fly People Express in and out of Newark and it was hell. The bus to Port Authority and the cruise to Canal Street was always a fun adventure but he had absolutely revelled in not being a Newyorker.
Seventeen years and a friggin’ minute later he fell hard.
MISTA? Hello?!
Can you blame him?
Every polish waitress, every Ecuadorian launderer,
Indian Cabdriver, downtown hipster, bodega owner and Yankee Stadium attendee treated him like a king.
Gettheheckouta’ere!
What gives?
The smell of burnt pretzels and Sabrett hot dogs with cars whizzing/honking by; a beautiful day in Central Park and the sun going down right exactly over the West Village. Thirty Irish bars in ten square blocks, thousands of great restaurants and a subway that works.
He gave in.
Seventeen years later he fell in love with a city that never sleeps and it was all over. But it wasn’t until he flew back to the coast that evening that he choked-up when he figured it out:
this was a truly great town that had been attacked; it’s heart broken just two and a half years before.
Just when he had lost faith in pretty much all of mankind, this good, noble, wounded yet resilient city had given him some hope that America could still be great.
The beautiful woman didn’t hurt either.
? John Tully 2004
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tue 1 Jun 2004
THE MISSION CREEPS
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OUTRAGED ABOUT THE OUTRAGE OVER THE OUTRAGE
THE MISSION CREEPS
BY JOHN TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
June 1 2004
The Today Show, America’s number one source for morning infotainment seemed almost obsessed by two stories in the Fall of Two-Thousand Two. Elizabeth Smart, a young girl from Utah had been abducted from her home by a man at gunpoint that summer and it continued to be a big story. In October, seemingly random citizens of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area were being gunned down by a mysterious shooter.
Remember?
Katie and Matt stoically opened the show almost every morning with these two stories.
At the same time, a war in Iraq was looming and the shadow of a vote in Congress giving the President authorization to use military force was creeping forward. The vote was even more crucial because the midterm elections were just ahead in November and the GOP was playing the Patriot card like the pros they are.
The Bush administration had strolled into power promising anyone within earshot that they would be exactly the opposite of everything the Clinton administration was and added that the “W” missing from some computer keyboards was not funny.
They vowed to be different from President Clinton: different on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, and a plan of disengagement was put in place as a way to “back off” and let the two sides work it out for a while.
Mr. Clinton had “coddled” North Korea they said, and now the Bush White House was going to get tough. Moscow and Beijing would know who the new boss was with the plan going forward to build a missile defense shield.
Throw out Kyoto because it’s bad for business and bad for America, and by the way, tell the domestic bad guys that John Ashcroft was putting law and order back into the Justice Department where it belonged.
Presidential transition teams notwithstanding, the grownups were now in charge, and in the first nine months of this new administration they made that fact perfectly clear.
Then the whole world watched in horror as airplanes struck New York, D.C. and Pennsylvania.
This was truly a call to leadership for Mr. Bush.
But perhaps as a sign of things to come, his initial statements thereafter and his address in the pit at Ground Zero on a bullhorn was almost universally praised by the mainstream media though neither speech had much substance or style. Various pundits declared that simply “everything had changed.”
The rest is history.
Two wars, three tax cuts, and the whole world is watching in horror. Sixty miles outside of Kabul, Afghanistan the Taliban have taken over again. Opium production has tripled by some accounts, sure to sweep obscene amounts of heroin into Europe this year. The same conditions that led the country to harbor Al-Qaeda before that war are present once again and we have too few troops there to do the job.
Iraq and Afghanistan have taken close to a thousand lives and wounded at least five-thousand troops. There have been over thirteen-thousand medi-vacs or medical evacuations-mostly American forces. The Bush administration, while publically trying to form a coalition of countries willing to put boots on the ground in Iraq for violations of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1441, had privately trashed that very same U.N. as “irrelevant” at every opportunity.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scoffed and sneered his way through press conferences, dismissively declaring that he knew where the Weapons of Mass Destruction were, and did we mention that the U.N. is irrelevant? And FRANCE.
The CIA, DIA, FBI, independent intelligence, Congressman Jim McDermott, The Dixie Chicks and The Pope all expressed concern about the attack on Iraq but the administration pooh-poohed all dissent. While Prime Minister Tony Blair was getting absolutely grilled by the House of Commons, the U.S. Congress was eerily silent and on the first day of the War on Iraq Kent Conrad seemed to be all alone on the Senate floor as he lamented the lack of even a basic budget for the conflict and it’s aftermath.
There was a complete breakdown of even basic diplomacy shown by President Bush, failing to privately convince skeptical nations to join him in the fight as his father had done in the first Gulf War and using words like “crusade” “bring ‘em on” and “axis of evil” to further alienate the Muslim world.
The mealy-mouthed-chicken-hawk-think tankers in Northwest D.C. kept the pot stirring as well with talks of regime change, disarmament and virtual screaming about resolution 1441. Despite the evidence of dissipating mustard and sarin gas over the last ten years in Iraq, continued flyovers, sanctions and inspections, we were told there may be nuclear program-related activities; the ultimate McGuffin of the war debate. While the term imminent threat was never officially used, the talk of a nuke mushroom cloud not being our smoking gun got the point across stoutly. Throw in chatter about forty-five minute deployment and unmanned aerial vehicles and the cake was baked.
The military and diplomatic tracks never intersected. Spring came around, and the U.S. demanded that Saddam destroy his conventional Al -Samoud missiles even while almost 100,000 troops were amassed on Iraq’s border and CNN was reporting that the first attack was only days away. “Might as well go in now that we’ve gone in” was all the noise that week.
President Bush of course had the complete support of Congress to go right ahead in, and everyone north of MacArthur Boulevard knew he didn’t really have to go back for more approval. That crucial vote in Congress, that blank check, is now brought up whenever there is criticism of the war and rightly so. Because not one of these Senators or Congressmen were really pressed by the Press on this vote, they showed no guts in standing up to the march to Baghdad. Perhaps if the morning shows and popular media had pumped up the voting issue and specific plans for post-war Iraq like the Laci Peterson/MichaelJackson/Elizabeth Smart/Sniper stories with full saturation coverage a real debate would have resulted.
We’ll never know.
In the middle of a War on Terrorism The United States Of America invaded a sovereign Muslim nation of twenty-five million people. Because there were no real plans for the occupation, and no substantive debate about it, we’ve got eighteen year-olds from Cedar Rapids, Iowa negotiating foreign policy on the streets of Fallujah.
This arrogant smug administration has made our country less safe. We’ve lost credibility and our moral standing in the world. Most importantly there can be no doubt that this invasion has created more terrorists that hate America.
Goodness Gracious.
? 2004 THE LOS ANGELES SUN
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Fri 13 Dec 2002
Little Boys With Their Toys
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Smirking Chimp
LITTLE BOYS WITH THEIR TOYS
September 22 2002
By John S. Tully
Los Angeles–
It has become the age of “muddled thinking” around Washington D.C. and throughout this great nation. The debate about Mr. Hussein never materialized and now the war drums are beating hideously loud. No politician it seems is even questioning the administration’s stance that regime change must take place now. The non-debate is currently focusing on when to strike and whether the rest of the world will be cooperative.
This is a time when we are still actively engaged in Afghanistan, searching for remnants of Al-Quaeda amongst the Taliban regime; one that still has a viable presence in a country that our troops will be engaged in for many years to come. In this “War On Terrorism” Osama Bin Laden has not been found and dozens of military experts can still find no connection between Al Quaeda and Iraq. The Middle East peace process is in shambles; the two sides continue to tear one another apart and there are no concrete plans in place to change this paradigm. Indeed, Mr. Sharon has declared that he will strike back if Iraq launches scud missiles on Israel as it did during the Gulf War.
Meanwhile, both India and Pakistan have nuclear capability at a time of increased reports of Al Quaeda presence in both countries. There is serious uneasiness in the entire region about the ramifications of a power play in an Islamic country by a foreign power.
Administration officials asked the United Nations for permission to go back into Iraq and hold meaningful inspections of their weapons program; permission was granted unconditionally with disarmament being the ultimate goal. Now it seems that nothing short of a “regime change” will satisfy officials in the White House and the State Department.
Experts from the military, scholars of international diplomacy, recognized leaders of democratic countries have warned the United States that an attack on Iraq could be disasterous for the entire region and in fact the entire globe. Saddam Hussein is a very dangerous man in a very dangerous neighborhood. Evidence shows that he does have chemical and biological weapons. There is however absolutely no conclusive evidence of any kind that Mr. Hussein has “Weapons of Mass Destruction”
Young American men and women are about to go to a war with Iraq that may take more lives than that devastating day last September. With six weeks until the elections United States Congressman and Senators have fallen silent; their hollow echoes frightening the rest of the world.
Who will speak up?
Smirking Chimp
MR. ROVE’S WILD RIDE
October 8 2002
By John S. Tully
Los Angeles — Politics is not a pretty thing.
Look no further than this week in Washington D. C. Former Vice-president Albert Gore Jr. finally brought up the huge marsupial in the room. Criminy! folks, that’s gonna’ wake the whole herd up mate!
Senate Leader Tom Daschle, who seemed to have stashed his opinions in a lock box this summer finally blew his top on the Senate floor denouncing President Bush’s comment at a recent fundraiser that the “Senate” is more interested in “special interests” than in the Security Of Americans. That very same fundraiser pushed the President past Bill Clinton’s record of $126 million raised in one year and it’s only the last week of September.
Stepping right up to the plate this week was a small group of Senators who have been all too quiet this summer with any dissent of this administration’s dual War On Terrorism and Iraq. In fact the debate on war had bipassed “if” and went straight through to “when” and “who’s with us” by the time Mr. Gore finally cleared his throat Monday in San Francisco. Actual questions were raised about our effectiveness in toppling Saddam and how to proceed post-war in Iraq among others.
Sen. Robert Byrd paced and shook with disdain as he read Bush’s remarks from the newspaper on the senate floor. Sen. Daschle’s voice broke as he defended his colleagues, spoke of members who have served in the military and demanded an apology from the President. He also spoke of not politicizing the nation’s debate. It was a classic case of “too little,too late”
Back in June an internal G.O.P. playbook, authored by White House political strategist Karl Rove got into the hands of the opposition. The Powerpoint presentation suggested Republican candidates play up the “War” to keep the political dialogue on their side of the fence.The relative silence of the Democrats this summer only strengthened the resolve of the true hawks in the administration and a bipartisan resolution for war will almost definitely be passed by both houses. For GOP candidates however, the strategy might not pay off.
A new poll released this week shows that while the majority of Americans are for action against Iraq, three out of five want our allies to sign on. Colin Powell would like to go back to the Security Council soon with a joint resolution from the United States Congress and it looks as if he will have it. Unfortunately for the Republicans, this momentary truce focuses the debate back onto the domestic front where, as usual, it is the Economy…stupid.
Crikey! The bugger just ate his own heed!
Politics is not a pretty creature.
Thu 4 Jul 2002
GREAT AMERICAN PROMISE
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THE GREAT AMERICAN PROMISE
Jul 4 2002
Americans are a good people and America is truly a great country. We are a tribe; like it or not. Los Angeles International Airport was the scene of a three-person murder this morning; the suspect and his two victims. Apparently fellow travellers stepped in to help stop the suspect before a security guard shot him dead. Twenty miles away in San Dimas California a small plane crashed into a picnic site at a local lake. Nearby Fourth Of July celebrants rushed over to help lift one of the plane’s s smoking wings and free a small child. Firefighters and ordinary people in Arizona and Colorado have been battling massive wildfires in thier backyard this week. Drink a cup of coffee and read the paper on this day that we celebrate America’s independence; there is another story about some shady business transactions from our top leader that are similar to the criminal acts of Enron and Arthur Andersen. The real story may be the lack of surprise by the American people to this newest revelation. Thirty years of American leaders lying cheating and stealing from the American public produced this heavy cynicism. Hundeds of thousands of people have lost their life savings and their jobs this year due to fraud from business leaders possibly helped by political leaders. Big business has always held a certain special place in American society. However, with the stock markets crashing, huge companies failing and the prospects that more will bust soon, confidence is low. Will this nation’s leaders show leadership, step in and step up to the corruption in business and politics pulling the country away from this fire? The citizens of Colorado, Arizona and California have all shown this week that they are ready to help. The rest of the tribe must speak up.
?2005 THE LOS ANGELES SUN
Sun 30 Jun 2002
Alpine Opener
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Local: Sun,Jun 30 2002 2:07 pm
Subject: Re: Alpine Opener
Gimme Some Lovin’ with Warren belting out that mutha…. then a Shakedown/Sugar /Scarlett
“Hog of a Sunday Dog of a Monday Get it back some day What’d I say?”
JT
?2005 THE LOS ANGELES SUN
Thu 20 Jun 2002
Jim Ladd
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Jim Ladd is one of the all-time great heads…(as well as one of the legends of FM+Los Angeles radio) As many can surely remember, Jim has spun some wonderful twenty minute lead-in stories about the boys and their music before launching into a tune. Both Jerry and Brent’s deaths were illuminated celebrated and cleansed through this gentlemen’s oratory and song selection and I will always be grateful.
“….Oh These Folks Don’t Ever Sleep Till They’re Passed Out In the Street ”
2005 THE LOS ANGELES SUN
Sat 20 Apr 2002
Reno….?RENO? LET… IT…GO!
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Reno??? LET IT GO! she’s gone and so is Clinton … You Win or, er ,ah ,not really win -you stole the argument… like Scalia and the treacherous 9 justices….
Again Iggles Let It Go! WhitewaterChinagate Travelgate HOW ABOUT A REAL SCANDAL….like ENRON!!! Bush is GOING DOWN and for legitimate shit no less…. GO AWAY and bring the smirking chimp with you
They still can’t get over it …and they investigated the poor guy for the entire 8 years… TRAITORS! You Republicans…
I’m sorry but Al Gore was one of the good guys on Capitol hill for the last 17 years as a servent to the people as congressman and senator whilst Monkeyboy was still doing lines with his frat buddies from Connecticut (where he’s from) and failing as an oilman….
2005 THE LOS ANGELES SUN
::Tullycast:: 