BY TOM TOMORROW
The first in a three-part series by Roger Morris examining the career of Robert Gates is up now at Tomdispatch. It’s fascinating.
More recent Tomdispatch:
• Michael Klare: “The Pentagon as Global Gas Guzzler”
• Karen J. Greenberg: “Blowback, Detainee-Style”
If you’re in Chicago, there’s going to be an interesting event downtown this Thursday the 21st discussing nationwide efforts to impeach Bush and Cheney. Well worth attending if you can.
Prominent Anti-War Voices To Discuss Politics of Impeachment at DePaul Law School
WHAT: John McNichols (The Nation), Elaine Brower (Military Families Speak Out) and David Swanson (Progressive Democrats of America) discuss national efforts to impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney
WHEN: Thursday, June 21st, 6-9pm
WHERE: DePaul University College of Law, 25 E. Jackson Blvd., Rm. 803, Chicago, IL
On April 24th, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to impeach Vice President Cheney. Eight representatives — including Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois — are now co-sponsoring the bill.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to stonewall congressional investigations on all fronts — including its rationale for and prosecution of the Iraq war, the outing of an undercover CIA agent, warrantless wiretapping, and politicization of the Justice Department — while sectors of the administration push for war with Iran.
Is it time to invoke the process of impeachment? What efforts are occurring at the state and local level? What are the prospects for impeachment in the current political climate, and how do today’s events compare to historical attempts at impeachment? Hear from these provocative voices:
John Nichols is an American author and journalist best known for his activism on issues related to the U.S. Constitution. He writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent; his articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers. Nichols is the author of the book, The Genius of Impeachment, and he has interviewed US presidents and world leaders from Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to Nelson Mandala and Desmond Tutu.
Elaine Brower is the outspoken mother of a US Marine who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a member of Military Families Speak Out. She is a leader of The World Can’t Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime and of several other antiwar groups. She has appeared on “Good Morning America,” “Fox & Friends,” Ashaki TV, NOVA TV, BBC’s “Morning Show,” and most recently on “The Montel Williams Show,” advocating for the removal of the Bush Regime. She has been featured in numerous New York area newspapers, as well as national radio talk shows, and writes at Op-Ed News.
David Swanson is the Washington Director of Democrats.com and co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and of the Backbone Campaign. He serves on a working group of United for Peace and Justice. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign. His website is davidswanson.org.
Endorsed by:
Chicago Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild
Progressive Democrats of Illinois
Northside Chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America
Chicago Area Code Pink
So Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Palestinian government today, with US approval. Here’s State Department spokesman Sean McCormack this afternoon, publicly decrying violence in Gaza:
…we haven’t seen the spread of violence in the West Bank and I think everybody’s glad for that and everybody’s pleased for that. Nobody wants to see violence.
Yes, the US sure hates all this violence!
Here’s Condoleezza Rice, speaking in public on February 15, 2007, after Fatah and Hamas agreed in Mecca to form a unity government:
Americans did not want to see Palestinians killing Palestinians. Palestinians should be living in peace among themselves and with Israel. And I know how difficult it was to watch the violence and to watch innocent people lose their lives. And so the calm, the hopes for a ceasefire between the Palestinian factions, that’s something we very much support.
This violence! We hate it!
Now, here’s David Welch, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and US Envoy to the Middle East, speaking in private several weeks before Rice. This appears on p.21 of the leaked report (pdf) by Alvaro de Soto, former UN coordinator for the Middle East:
…the US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fateh and Hamas — so much so that, a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much “I like this violence”, referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured, because “it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas”.
(via Paul Woodward at War in Context)
For further evidence of US efforts to foment civil war between Hamas and Fatah, see here.
• Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse: “Fighting Words: An 11-Quote Quiz on the Bush Administration’s War of Words”
• Dilip Hiro: “Nuclear Weapons Programs Are about Regime Survival: The Iranian Bomb in a MAD World”
• Tom Engelhardt: “The Great American Disconnect: Iraq Has Always Been ‘South Korea’ for the Bush Administration”
And if the excellent content weren’t enough, the site’s also undergone a snazzy redesign.
Andrew Ferguson is almost certainly correct that the purported Lincoln quote that Al Gore uses in The Assault on Reason is bogus. Snopes says so, as does the University of Michigan.
What Ferguson is wrong about (beyond his hilarious “no footnotes!” mistake) is this:
…the point of the passage is very un-Lincolnian…Lincoln was a vigorous champion of market capitalism, even when it drifted (as it tends to do) toward large concentrations of wealth.
In fact, the bogus quote is not far from things Lincoln definitely did say. Here’s the fake quote, supposedly written by Lincoln in an 1864 letter:
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
And here’s Lincoln in December, 1861 in his first State of the Union address:
It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government–the rights of the people…
In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.
It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government…
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration…
No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty…Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.
Indeed, those are close enough that I strongly suspect the bogus quote was directly inspired by Lincoln’s real statement—which is pretty famous now, and was more so then. And then there’s this well-known Lincoln statement, from 1837:
These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people.
Yes, vigorous champions of market capitalism say such things all the time. I believe Milton Friedman had that engraved on his tombstone.