John Cusack Lacerates the Neo-Cons,
Leaving Just a Carcass and Some Bones to Chew on
www.buzzflash.com
"Dems don't have the courage to suggest that people
who lied to get us into war should not only
NOT be in office, they should be in prison".
"If these men are not impeached and thrown in jail,
we truly are approaching the end of days".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/on-bush-the-dems-jon-st_b_10485.ht
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11 Nov. 2005 By
On Bush, the Dems, Jon Stewart, Hunter Thompson,
Bill Moyers and King (not Don)
Murder is a crime.
Uunless it is done... by a poooollliiicceeeman.
Or an ariissssstoocrat
-- Joe Strummer --
Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and
tragically absurd the administration's world view
actually is ... how low the moral bar has been lowered...
and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually
lazy notions of collective guilt) how complicit
our silence as citizens is... Nixon, a true fiend,
looks like a paragon of virtue next to the criminally
incompetent robber barons now raiding the present
and future.
But where are the Dems ? American foreign policy
is in chaos. We are now left in the surreal position
of having to condemn American-sponsored torture
as official policy while a deranged President Bush
orders his staff to attend ethics briefings -- a "refresher
course" -- from the White House counsel.
The very idea of America is in chaos and this chaos
has created a vacuum. One question for any
Democrat : Who will have the balls to get us out of Iraq ?
If the Democrats don't step up and fill this vacuum,
the Republicans will. They will take us out of Iraq.
And then the Democrats will be left holding the bag
-- first as the enablers who let the Republicans take us
into an unnecessary and immoral war, and then
as the whipping boys who stood by while the
Republicans kept justifying what was clearly
an unnecessary and immoral war.
They were so worried about positioning themselves
as hawks, not being seen as soft on terror and war,
that they lost the capacity for outrage when
the person responsible for a legal memo that
denied the validity of the Geneva Conventions
was appointed Attorney General. And it was
downhill from there.
The Republicans, especially leading up to the 2006
elections, with the Bush administration crumbling,
KNOW they have to find a way out of Iraq. So they
will basically find a way to declare victory and
do something that looks like a withdrawal, and
the Democrats will be left as passive bystanders
-- because they don't have the courage to suggest
that people who lied to get us into war should
not only not be in office, they should be in prison.
Last Tuesday, Harry Reid demonstrated wonderful
signs of life. The question now is, are they going
to build on this, or is it going to be an isolated
episode that doesn't lead to a fundamental shift ?
Will enough Democrats now be willing to admit
that voting to authorize the war was a mistake ?
Whether they were genuinely misled, they bought
into it, or they were too cowardly to vote for
what they believed was true, it was a mistake.
Will they now have the courage to say, "This
was wrong, and that we need to get our brave
troops out of Iraq now" ?
Are the Democrats going to offer an alternative
plan to get us out of Iraq ? Are they going to fill
this vacuum created by the chaos in Iraq and
a scandal-plagued administration in tatters,
or are they going to wait for the Republicans
to do it their way, reap the political diviedends,
and leave the Democrats sniping outside the palace gate ?
All this makes me think of Jon Stewart, and
the tricky position he finds himself in...
I love the man. He is the most important media
watchdog right now. As Bill Moyers said
"If Mark Twain were back today, he'd be
at Comedy Central."
But I hope we're not putting too much pressure
on Mr. Stewart. There should be a lot more like him,
but right now he's all we've got. He's the vanguard.
And therefore when Republicans, who were
the ones who led us into this war, and the ones
whom he's so rightly skewering every night, sit
across the table from him -- there is some kind
of unspoken message being given that they
are not part of the problem, that they can wink
and laugh with Jon and the things he is making fun of.
That they are not them, when in fact, they are...
And they are getting a free pass to sit next
to someone who speaks truth to power.
They get reflected hipness just by sitting across
the table from him, and the irony is that they
share a laugh over the same things that he rails against.
As an example, look at the jokey appearances
by Bill Kristol, or David Frum. These are
not dutiful soldiers standing by their president
(which would be bad enough), these are
the intellectual architects of the the invasion.
Bill Kristol, the editor of the neocon house organ
The Weekly Standard, came on and could barely
keep a straight face when he said that Bush
was a good president.
And as anyone knows, reflected hipness on
these types of men is a truly ugly thing. I would
suggest each Republican must face a press
conference, or a gauntlet perhaps, of Daily Show
correspondents... or at least Lewis Black.
Yes, there is a difference between the McCain/Hagel
Repubs and the neo-con/White House Iraq Group
lunatics. But it's also good to remember :
no matter what he does from here on out, McCain
stood by the president, a man (and his machine)
who smeared him viciously on the 2000 campaign
trail, and then, at the GOP convention four years
later, campaigned for him when we were well
on to this disastrous course. And thinking men
-- of which McCain is surely one -- knew
the neo-cons were exploiting 9/11 for
their hideous misadventure in Iraq, and knew
this was an administration that would not allow
photos of the dead.
Etc. etc. etc.
Every man who stood by Bush should be forced
to answer for it. The problem isn't with Jon Stewart,
who's a hero. The problem is that he's the only
one (with ratings at least; none of the right-wing
heavyweights are going on the Al Franken show,
are they ?).
And we are pouring too much concrete under
his pedestal. But I must admit that he's far too
polite to the architects and enablers of the tragic
last five years. If I hear one more asshole say,
"The issue isn't whether I would send my own
children to Iraq, this is an all-voluntary army...
National security is at stake... There are monsters
in this world."
Well, thanks for telling us that -- and for lying
about the war and profiting from it. And trying
to privatize Iraq so corporate interests could have
a free-market laboratory without all those pesky
questions about "who owns what" and "who gets
a piece of the action." (See Naomi Klein's (1)
excellent "Baghdad Year Zero".) This is indeed
a league of bastards -- these men are human scum.
There were many who would have given their life
to fight al-Qaeda. Many parents would have
sent their children on that cause. It is the issue...
of course that is the issue...
Here's an American thought ......................
Read the rest :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/on-bush-the-dems-jon-st_b_10485.ht
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1) Baghdad Year Zero
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
24 September 2004, By Naomi Klein. Originally from Harper's Magazine,
http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html
( ... )
So Moyers : "One of the biggest changes in politics
in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer
marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in
the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress.
For the first time in our history, ideology
and theology hold a monopoly of power ................
To read the rest of this remarkable speech :
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/38/8664
(30 Jan. 2005 : There Is No Tomorrow By Bill Moyers - The Star Tribune
Fight ignorance read www.buzzflash.com
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