Politics

Coming this September, on the three-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: National Preparedness Month.

Because the prior 35 months were all about slacking off and letting the terrorists win, apparently?

This will be publicly announced to the world on September 9th, by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Why announce it nine days into the month?

Why September 9th? That’s awfully late, if it’s supposed to be the entire month. My guess, thinking like Karl Rove: this year’s 9/11 anniversary falls on a Saturday, so an announcement on the date or even Friday would only get a burst of free media on a weekend. But by timing it for the 6 pm news on Thursday, it’ll reach the Friday papers, and thus be fully-injected into all of the emotion-laden anniversary coverage, plus the Sunday morning talk shows.

The America Prepared Campaign has a downloadable calendar of events (PDF link).

There’s much more to all of this — check out This Modern World for more fun details.

Of course, keep in mind, that this isn’t politically motivated (the fact that they didn’t do something like this until election season, and that it all kicks off just after the GOP convention, is entirely coincidental).

Uh-huh.

Right.

iTunes: “Notorious” by Duran Duran from the album Decade (1988, 4:01).

Today’s must-read: They Knew…

Despite the whitewash, we now know that the Bush administration was warned before the war that its Iraq claims were weak.

If desperation is ugly, then Washington, D.C. today is downright hideous.

As the 9/11 Commission recently reported, there was “no credible evidence” of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Similarly, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. With U.S. casualties mounting in an election year, the White House is grasping at straws to avoid being held accountable for its dishonesty.

The whitewash already has started: In July, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee released a controversial report blaming the CIA for the mess. The panel conveniently refuses to evaluate what the White House did with the information it was given or how the White House set up its own special team of Pentagon political appointees (called the Office of Special Plans) to circumvent well-established intelligence channels. And Vice President Dick Cheney continues to say without a shred of proof that there is “overwhelming evidence” justifying the administration’s pre-war charges.

But as author Flannery O’Conner noted, “Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” That means no matter how much defensive spin spews from the White House, the Bush administration cannot escape the documented fact that it was clearly warned before the war that its rationale for invading Iraq was weak.

Top administration officials repeatedly ignored warnings that their assertions about Iraq’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and connections to al Qaeda were overstated. In some cases, they were told their claims were wholly without merit, yet they went ahead and made them anyway. Even the Senate report admits that the White House “misrepresented” classified intelligence by eliminating references to contradictory assertions.

In short, they knew they were misleading America.

And they did not care.

The full article has many bits of information that have been known for a long time — at least to those of us who have been paying any amount of attention — but the authors do a wonderful job of summarizing it all in one neat package, extensively linked with source articles.

How anybody can continue to put any stock in the Bush administration is just mind boggling to me.

(via MeFi)

iTunes: “Stare and Stare” by MC 900 Ft Jesus from the album One Step Ahead of the Spider (1994, 6:59).

Pratridiot Watch takes Bush to task for using the recent security alerts as a photo op for Laura and the twins.

The day after Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge announced with great urgency an fanfare that they had specific information on terror targets in New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC, the Bush campaign is using the targets for photo ops with Laura and the Twins.

First Lady Laura Bush and her twin daughters paid a surprise visit to the Citigroup Center yesterday, joining Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki to cheer on employees who ignored the terror threat and reported for work. The lunchtime crowd erupted in applause when Mrs. Bush and her daughters, Jenna and Barbara, stopped to chat over coffee at a table of Citigroup employees in the atrium.

“I wanted to thank people for coming to work and I’m really glad to be with them today,” the first lady said to a roar of approval from the crowd.

So the Bush administration took information that al Queda looked at these buildings three years ago, issued an urgent alert that the Citigroup building is a target of terrorists, then sent Bush’s wife and daughters in for a campaign photo op to rally the troops.

Actually, I think that’s entirely the wrong way to look at it. It wasn’t a photo op — Bush was actually just hoping the terrorists would attack, killing his wife and children in the process, so he could play upon the sympathies of the nation’s people to re-elect him next November.

Big honkin’ disclaimer: No, of course I’m not serious. I just have an occasionally very black sense of humor, and this popped into my head. I don’t wish Laura, the twins, or anyone else any harm — I don’t even wish George Bush any physical harm, merely the ego blow of losing the upcoming election, and maybe a few solid kicks to the shin for being a complete and total putz.

I do very strongly agree that using this alert as a photo op is rather disgusting.

(via Len)

iTunes: “Complacency” by Noxious Emotion from the album This Hallowed Ground (1995, 4:11).

Lately, Bush’s line of attack has been that Kerry just hasn’t done that much during his time in the Senate — a charge that, unfortunately, is being blindly accepted and parroted until it’s accepted as “truth”. I had a conversation with a gentleman yesterday during my lunch break where he delighted in pointing out Kerry’s supposed lack of real experience.

Now, being relatively new to trying to keep track of all this political fun and games, and occasionally being a bear of very little brain, I couldn’t do much yesterday to turn this man’s opinion around, not being able to call much evidence to the contrary to the table off the top of my head. Two posts popped into my reading today, though, that’d give me a good place to start should the topic come up again.

From Matt Deatherage: Bush Criticizes Kerry’s Achievements

Before he was 40, John Kerry graduated Yale with higher than Bush’s 2.0 GPA, and volunteered for service in Vietnam. After earning all those medals, he returned to the US, testified before Congress about the War, and founded Vietnam Veterans for America. He was then accepted to Boston College Law School, graduated, and became a prosecutor in Boston. He ran for the US House of Representatives once and lost, but in 1982, he ran for Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and won. In 1984, at age 40, he was elected to the US Senate, where he’s served for 20 years.

Before he was 40, George W. Bush was accepted as a “legacy” student at Yale University, where he blew off classes and graduated with a GPA variously described as 1.68 or 2.0. His family’s friends pulled connections to get him into the Texas Air National Guard, and to get him accepted for flight training despite the lowest acceptable score on the test. In both cases, he magically jumped ahead of hundreds of other people on waiting lists for those positions through absolutely no merit or achievement of his own.

And, of course, he goes on from there. At the end of his post, Matt points to Josh Marshall’s take on the situation…

“My opponent has good intentions,” the president said today. “But intentions don’t always translate into results. After 19 years in the United States Senate, my opponent has had thousands of votes but very few signature achievements.”

This might be a plausible line of attack coming from another opponent. Unlike, say, Russ Feingold or Ted Kennedy, there’s no prominent piece of legislation with Kerry’s name on it, though admirers of Kerry point to his critical role in a series of high-profile Senate investigations.

But coming from George W. Bush? A guy whose handlers had to get some of the more gullible run of journalists to refer to his life before he turned forty as his ‘lost years’?

But will the media actually look into any of this and make the comparisons? Unlikely, and it’s the “swing voters” and the voters who don’t have or take the time to investigate on their own, who rely on the major news sources in print and on the television, that will suffer when it’s time to decide which way they’re going to vote.

And if the charges stick, it’ll be the entire country that suffers if Bush is elected.

(via Lane)

iTunes: “World Outside Your Window” by Tikaram, Tanita from the album Best of Tanita Tikaram, The (1988, 4:52).

Kirsten sent this my way earlier today, and then I ran across it again on Len’s site, and both times it just made my skin crawl: Obtaining Cheney Rally Ticket Requires Signing Bush Endorsement.

Some would-be spectators hoping to attend Vice President Dick Cheney’s rally in Rio Rancho this weekend walked out of a Republican campaign office miffed and ticketless Thursday after getting this news:

Unless you sign an endorsement for President George W. Bush, you’re not getting any passes.

The Albuquerque Bush-Cheney Victory office in charge of doling out the tickets to Saturday’s event was requiring the endorsement forms from people it could not verify as supporters.

[…]

An endorsement form provided to the Journal by Random says: “I, (full name) … do herby (sic) endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States.” It later adds that, “In signing the above endorsement you are consenting to use and release of your name by Bush-Cheney as an endorser of President Bush.”

So much for open government, of the people, for the people, and by the people.

iTunes: “Injected With a Poison (Sinsational)” by Khan, Praga from the album Injected With a Poison (1998, 6:12).

Thanks to C-Span‘s video archive, I just sat back and watched Kerry’s speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I must say, I’m more impressed than I thought I was going to be, not having been overly impressed by what little I’ve seen of Kerry in the past. A good, well-written speech, and he delivered it quite well.

A few choice quotes that especially impressed me:

We’re told that outsourcing jobs is good for America. We’re told that new jobs that pay \$9,000 less than the jobs that have been lost is the best we can do. They say this is the best economy we’ve ever had. And they say that anyone who thinks otherwise is a pessimist. Well, here is our answer: There is nothing more pessimistic than saying America can’t do better.

I am proud that after September 11th all our people rallied to President Bush’s call for unity to meet the danger. There were no Democrats. There were no Republicans. There were only Americans. How we wish it had stayed that way.

As president, I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence. I will immediately reform the intelligence system, so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics. And as president, I will bring back this nation’s time-honored tradition: The United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.

As president, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in war. Before you go to battle, you have to be able to look a parent in the eye and truthfully say: “I tried everything possible to avoid sending your son or daughter into harm’s way. But we had no choice. We had to protect the American people, fundamental American values from a threat that was real and imminent.” So lesson one, this is the only justification for going to war.

For four years, we’ve heard a lot of talk about values. But values spoken without actions taken are just slogans. Values are not just words. They’re what we live by. They’re about the causes we champion and the people we fight for. And it is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families.

I want to address these next words directly to President George W. Bush: In the weeks ahead, let’s be optimists, not just opponents. Let’s build unity in the American family, not angry division. Let’s honor this nation’s diversity; let’s respect one another; and let’s never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.

I don’t want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side.

Good stuff.

Now, let’s get this man into office.

iTunes: “More” by Crystal Method, The from the album Plastic Compilation Vol. I (1997, 5:59).