Just Say NO to Guli. Here's Why

Rudi's dined out long enough on his "heroic role" on that terrible September day six years ago. It's not enough to qualify him for anything higher imo. And even if AIPAC gets behind him (and who in their right mind would want that?,) there's still the Skull and Bones factor. Membership in this dubious group seems to be on of the prerequisites for nomination. But why tempt fate? Nip this one in the bud.

Blue Ibis
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Meet Giuliani's Advisors: AIPAC's Dream Team

Ken Silverstein
Harper's Magazine
Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:45 EDT

"The Republican Party is in desperate straits. How else to explain that Rudy Giuliani - a former mayor with no foreign policy experience - is the Republican front-runner, largely based on his supposed foreign policy expertise?"

So opens an amusing critique penned by conservative writer Doug Bandow about Giuliani's recent essay in Foreign Affairs. In that essay, Giuliani stated that the next U.S. president "will face three key foreign policy challenges. First and foremost will be to set a course for victory in the terrorists' war on global order." It seems that Democrats, and many Republicans besides Giuliani, just don't understand what needs to be done to confront the terrorist threat. The essay is filled with simplistic, idiotic arguments, and Bandow does a good job of demolishing them.

Let's take just one of Giuliani's insights - "For 15 years, the de facto policy of both Republicans and Democrats has been to ask the U.S. military to do increasingly more with increasingly less. The idea of a post-Cold War 'peace dividend' was a serious mistake - the product of wishful thinking and the opposite of true realism."

Bandow's rejoinder:

In an essay filled with silly nonsense, this statement stands out as being uniquely stupid. Between 1980 and 2000 the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Warsaw Pact disbanded, Maoism disappeared from China, the former Soviet republics and Eastern European satellites gravitated towards America and Europe, and Vietnam opened to the West. As a result, the United States found itself allied with every major industrialized state as well as many former communist countries while, as Colin Powell famously put it, America's enemies were down to Cuba and North Korea. In this new world, Giuliani believes that the U.S. shouldn't have reduced military spending even a little?

It's easy to see where Giuliani gets his ideas on foreign policy, given the team of foreign policy advisors he announced last month Norman Podhoretz's name attracted the most attention when the list was announced, and with good reason - take a look at this video (posted by Andrew Sullivan), for example, in which Podhoretz portrays a military attack on Iran as not only the best option but the only option.

[Normie's not got a lot of imagination going there, huh? Maybe we should ask a Fifth Grader. They might suggest some dialog.]

There are a number of other notable hardliners advising Giuliani. Charles Hill of the Hoover Institution, the campaign's chief advisor, joined a number of leading neo-conservatives in signing a September 20, 2001 letter to President Bush that said that even if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove [him] from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

[I guess Hill missed this shot of Rusmfeld and Saddam making friendly. With "friends" like the US, who needs enemies?]

During a March 2003 debate at Yale, shortly before the Iraq war began, Hill said: "The U.S. has the power to do this operation swiftly, and it will be a war that will not do great damage to Iraq, to its installations, to its infrastructure, or to its people." [ Do I hear a Yeah, right???!!] He downplayed obstacles and suggestions that the financial cost of the war might be huge, saying the long-terms benefits of an invasion would be huge, and would include "the restoration of American credibility and decisiveness. We'll see an Iraq that is freed from oppression. This situation will also do a lot to transform the Israeli-Palestinian situation." (This is the tip of the iceberg. Do a Google search on Hill and Iraq and you'll find a trove of false prophecies.)

There's also Martin Kramer, who spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University and whose Middle East policy can basically be summarized as "What's Good for Israel," and former Senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, whose career was best known for his loopy attacks on the United Nations and for being arrested for drunk driving after running a red light and driving down the wrong side of the road.

I asked Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, for his take on Giuliani's crew. He dubbed the group "AIPAC's Dream Team."

"What I find fascinating," he said, "is how skewed this team seems to be in terms of the regional focus. Most of the members are well known as Israel advocates. There is no real expertise on Africa, Asia, Latin America, or much of Europe."

[And there you have it. Just say NO to Guli!]

Once again, the Editors of the Signs of the Times bring you the best of web commentary. Today's offering is written by the ever insightful Kurt Nimmo. His website Another Day in the Empire, is highly recommended reading for anyone wanting to get an objective grip on the world.

Blue Ibis

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Pat Tillman and the "Elaborate Lies" of Psychopathic Rulers

Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:05 EDT

The fact our rulers would lie and lie mightily should not come as a surprise, as they are mostly psychopaths, and psychopathy is defined as a condition characterized by lack of conscience and manipulative behavior. "The psychopaths, those human-looking predators without conscience, have no love for the rest of humanity," notes Henry See, citing the work of Andrew Lobaczewski. "It is a life and death struggle between them and us because they know that if the true nature of their existence as humanity's natural predator ever come to light, they would lose everything."

Lies. For the Bush neocons, they are second nature, as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning. Bush and crew lied about the events of September 11, 2001, about "al-Qaeda" in Afghanistan, about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Pat Tillman, the football star who walked away from an NFL career to fight a manufactured enemy in Afghanistan, where he was shot dead by his own troops, was shamelessly exploited by the Pentagon, and became part of yet another lie.

"His family was initially misled by the Pentagon and did not learn the truth for more than a month. Tillman was awarded a Silver Star based on fabricated accounts - who fabricated them still isn't clear after several investigations," reports the Ledger Independent. "We don't know what the secretary of defense knew, we don't know what the White House knew," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "What we do know is these were not a series of accidents, these stories. They were calculatedly put out for a public relations purpose.... Even now there seems to be a cover-up."

Of course there was a cover-up - that's what government officials do. Pathological lies come easy and right as rain for the likes of the pathocrats who lord over us.

"I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary," former Pvt. Jessica Lynch told the committee. "The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don't need to be told elaborate tales."

However, with all due respect to Ms. Lynch, the American people do need to be told "elaborate tales," in fact elaborate and engineered lies designed to hornswoggle the commoners, who in the past were motivated to tar and feather government officials for lesser crimes, for instance levying excise taxes.

Now?

We are more outraged over celebrity actors with anger management problems yelling at their daughters. We can't be bothered with illegal wars predicated on malfeasance and mendacity - not when Shyamalia the Hooters girl is showing cleavage one channel over. If indeed we are the least bit interested in politics, we can tune in to Sheryl Crow and producer Laurie David confronting Karl Rove over the issue of global warming, never mind there "is absolutely no convincing scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases are driving global climate change," as climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball, would have it.

The fact our rulers would lie and lie mightily should not come as a surprise, as they are mostly psychopaths, and psychopathy is defined as a condition characterized by lack of conscience and manipulative behavior. "The psychopaths, those human-looking predators without conscience, have no love for the rest of humanity," notes Henry See, citing the work of Andrew Lobaczewski. "It is a life and death struggle between them and us because they know that if the true nature of their existence as humanity's natural predator ever come to light, they would lose everything."

Indeed, they would lose everything, but as it now stands humanity, at least the slice here in America, can't be bothered with these "intraspecies predators," not when rumors regnant offer details on Paris Hilton's promenade with Kevin Federline in Las Vegas.

Pity the masses for their inability or unwillingness to call out the predators, for their ignorance carries an ultimately burdensome, if not fatal, result.

"President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won't. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice," writes Eric Alterman, with obvious frustration. "In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush's consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush's statements represented 'embroidering key assertions' and were clearly 'dubious, if not wrong.' The President's 'rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy,' he has 'taken some liberties,' 'omitted qualifiers' and 'simply outpace[d] the facts.' But 'Bush lied'? Never."

But of course, Eric, and for obvious reason - the corporate media is owned and operated by the same psychopaths, the Washington Post and the New York Times constitute their purview.

As Lobaczewski writes, "all ponerogenic associations have in common ... their statistically high concentration of individuals with various psychological anomalies," malformations shared by "gangs, criminal mobs, mafias, cliques, and coteries."

Naturally, media owned by a psychopathic death merchant outfit such as General Electric, a megacorporation with a $43 billion media empire, will naturally engage "various psychological anomalies" in order to stay atop the dung heap - or, more accurately, a massive and stinking mountain of dead bodies, numbering in the millions - and it is quite naive, if not downright half-witted, for Mr. Alterman to think otherwise.

Dana Milbank, regardless of what Eric Alterman writes, is a Yalie, a member of Skull and Bones, and works for the CIA's favorite newspaper. No doubt he is quite enthusiastic about his job as a corporate scrivener and doubtless as well he is well-compensated for the effort. But then the Nation magazine, where Mr. Alterman writes, is owned by Katrina vanden Heuvel, daughter of William J. vanden Heuvel, the onetime executive assistant to the founder of the CIA, William Joseph Donovan. Vanden Heuvel later became a board member of the Farfield Foundation, billed as a "philanthropic foundation," in fact a CIA front organization.

If you can say anything about the media psychopaths and their pathocratic buddies in government, it is they are accomplished at manipulation, a hallmark of psychopathy. Frank "Wisner's gang of weirdos," as the closet queen J. Edgar Hoover described the CIA, was and is certainly accomplished at manipulation, as Operation Mockingbird, that is to say the wholesale compromise of corporate media, is a well-oiled machine going on some sixty odd years now. Thus it should come as no surprise criminal - indeed, genocidal - lies keep a tight ship.

Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, may call for the Oversight and Government Reform Committee to haul former Secretary of Forever War, Donald Rumsfeld, and Gen. John Abizaid, then-chief of the U.S. Central Command, before his committee to explain the lies surrounding the death of former NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman, but this is an exercise in futility, at best a roadside spectacle, soon obviated by larger, more portentous news stories, for instance Courtney Love's decision to keep her "butt in shape" through diet and exercise.

"How high up did it go?" Henry Waxman demands to know.

Well, Hank, if the truth be told - and even if it is, no doubt it will be preempted by the Sports Babes' draft analysis - we can bet our bottom dollar it runs all the way to the top.

Finally, and sadly, considering the fact Mr. Waxman needs to ask is indication enough he will never get there