Tag: Iraq

The Best Way To Remember Your Father Is By Voting

Originally broadcast June 16, 2014.

Yesterday was Father’s Day which CNN, the most trusted name in news, celebrated by running a tribute to the 41st president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush. I’m sure there was a lot of crying because the Bush family always seems to get choked up whenever they talk about Poppy, and Poppy always seems to start crying whenever he talks about himself. I’m not sure how 41 ended up with the nickname Poppy. I think it has something to do with America dipping its beak into the heroin trade back when Poppy was running the CIA.

No, I couldn’t watch CNN because I was too busy keeping my misty eyes on Iraq, a country that appears to be unraveling all because back in 2000 former Spymaster George Herbert Walker Bush insisted on keeping a secret from the American people, that secret being his son George is a vicious moron.

George Herbert Walker Bush gets a medal even though he neglected to inform the American voters that his eldest son is a vicious moron.

George Herbert Walker Bush gets a medal even though he neglected to inform the American voters that his eldest son is a vicious moron.

I never once saw my father cry. My father came from the kind of poverty where nobody was going to comfort you no matter how loud you wept. Not that there’s anything wrong with grown men crying. But my father didn’t cry because he knew nobody would help. It’s different for a Bush. They get help from everybody, even the Supreme Court when they lose an election. I think even my father would have cried after that decision.

My father served in the Pacific around the same time President George W. Bush’s father served over there. My father didn’t live long enough to see W lose the popular vote and then have the Supreme Court hand him our nuclear launch codes anyway. Looking at Iraq come undone I know my father would tell George Herbert Walker Bush, “My eldest son is an idiot too. It’s good to encourage idiots, but you don’t let them play with dangerous toys, like our U.S. military.” Then my dad would have spat in George Herbert Walker’s face and called his entire family a tribe of money-grubbing whores. Because that’s how much dad loved America. My father loved this country. He never had to say that. You just knew by his visceral contempt for Reagan, Bush Senior and all those other charlatans who rely on false patriotism to steal from Americans.

The millions of dead Iraqis are the Bush family’s fault. They lied us into war. Had Americans known the truth, we never would have agreed to that illegal invasion. Unlike the Bush family, at our core Americans are a good and decent people. Which is why Gore won in 2000. America is much bigger than the noisemakers and the guns we fire overseas or at each other. Americans may differ on the nuance, but we all agree it should be hard to get a gun, harder to declare war, nobody disagrees that Big Banks are evil, that Main Street is superior to Wall Street, that politics needs to be shorn of money, that everyone is entitled to affordable healthcare and that anyone who works an eight hour day shouldn’t be broke. We all agree on that. We’re a good people. But we’re drowned out by Big Money.

If everyone who is registered to vote voted, all our problems would be solved. Read the polls, we’re a good people. Americans support, for the most part, all the right things. We just need to vote in numbers that drown out Big Money. Vote. How hard can it be? It’s not like we’re being asked to serve in the Pacific. Imagine if we all voted. Three years from now CNN would have to air a Mothers Day tribute to President Elizabeth Warren. And who knows? Maybe we can finally elect a congress willing to put George W. Bush on trial for Iraq.

Read More »

Dick Cheney Needs To Go Away

Americans Surprisingly Supportive of Unemployment Insurance

Originally broadcast June 21, 2014

When Dick Cheney left office he wanted Iraq to go away. And now it is. Soon Iraq will be divided into three parts as thousands more die from Cheney’s blunder.

Dick and Liz Cheney, his snarling lapdog for a daughter, penned a piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Their opening paragraph included these words about the calamitous situation in Iraq:

Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.

One would think that sentence was part of a larger mea culpa as Cheney, the de facto president between 2001-2009, finally took responsibility for the grievous injuries he inflicted on Iraq and our soldiers.

Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.

It was Dick Cheney’s responsibility to organize a terrorism task force, which gathered only once and then again inside the White House bunker on 9/11.

061814_kelly_cheney_640

Liz Cheney making the case for not trying daddy as a war criminal

Then Cheney failed to grab Bin Laden even though in late 2001 the CIA had him in their crosshairs at Tora Bora, but Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Cheney’s friend, wanted credit for the kill, so the CIA stood down.

Bin Laden got away as Cheney visited the CIA to cherry pick any evidence suggesting Iraq had WMDs even though the U.N., France, Germany, Great Britain and our own intelligence agencies said otherwise. Read the Downing Street memos. Tony Blair knew there were no WMDs, but he also knew if he went along on the ride into Baghdad there were lucrative post prime ministerial jobs waiting for him over at Cheney friendly establishments like the Carlyle Group.

Cheney bullied the CIA and Colin Powell into making the case for war as he toured the country convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 while feeding Judith Miller at the New York Times phony tales of Iraq being days away from dropping a nuclear bomb on us.

Cheney promised that Iraqis would greet us as liberators never grasping how much the Shiites and Sunnis despised each other and that while Hussein was evil he was at the same time keeping a tight lid on centuries of ethnic and religious hatred squeezed into a country created after World War One with geographic boundaries catering to the imperial needs of France and Great Britain and not the people who actually lived there, like Shiites and Sunnis. Iraq without Hussein was a tinderbox waiting to explode. But because Cheney flunked out of Yale he didn’t know that when you topple Iraq’s army you needed something to take its place.

Capture10-650x405

Even Megyn Kelly isn’t buying it.

You don’t dismiss Saddam’s army because the last thing American troops wanted were hundreds of thousands of unemployed soldiers taking off their uniforms, keeping their weapons, and receding into the countryside to fight as insurgents. Maybe had Dick Cheney not taken 5,000 college deferments during Vietnam he would have learned that.

And so after Baghdad fell, Hussein’s disbanded army waged a guerrilla war against a very small American occupying force. Why so small? General Eric Shinseki warned Cheney before the invasion that America needed at least 500,000 soldiers to maintain security. Shinseki was immediately dismissed only to pop up later at Obama’s VA cleaning up the very mess he warned about.

When the Mission Accomplished sign came down and the insurgents rose up Cheney dismissed the Iraqi opposition as being in its “death throes.” Cheney’s war of choice dragged on with American soldiers dying because they didn’t have the proper equipment. Cheney fought Iraq on the cheap, with Humvees lacking the under armor plating that deflects the impact from a roadside bomb.

Cheney’s invasion of Iraq, without Iraq attacking or even threatening to attack America, is called a preventive war. Preventive war waged without the approval of the United Nations, which Cheney didn’t have, violates international law. Thus Dick Cheney is a war criminal.

Of course Dick Cheney isn’t America’s first war criminal. But Americans are a forgiving people, especially when their war criminals have a modicum of success. President Obama comes to mind. Americans will excuse illegal drone strikes when you’re killing Bin Laden and capturing the guy responsible for Benghazi.

richard-dick-cheney

Cheney took 5,000 college draft deferments during Vietnam.

But Dick Cheney failed at everything. There is not a single decision Dick Cheney can point to that he got right in Iraq. Even the surge he’s so proud of turned out to be smoke and mirrors having nothing to do with our military finally sending in more troops but more about our military handing over boatloads of cash to Sunni warlords so they would stop shooting at us.

Dick Cheney got nothing right. Yet in their Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal what president do he and Liz say was wrong on everything? Barack Obama. The president who, before coming to Washington, publicly opposed Cheney’s invasion of Iraq.

Cheney can’t admit he’s wrong, because to admit he’s wrong, to admit that he destroyed three countries, Iraq, Afghanistan and America is a burden too heavy to bare. Plus he’s a sociopath.

Cheney would rather spend time with his new heart fly fishing, but he is surrounded by three ambitious women, his wife Lynne and two daughters who are pushing him out there to defend his record because they know that if the lie isn’t repeated over and over he will go down in history as the worst U.S. president since Jefferson Davis. I know Jefferson Davis was the Confederate president, so technically he wasn’t really president. But technically Cheney wasn’t president either.

Cheney didn’t write that article for the Wall Street Journal, his daughter Liz did. Liz is building a business in Washington D.C. as a career lobbyist pushing right wing agendas and charging a lot of money for the wisdom she absorbed sitting at her father’s feet.

Liz Cheney is burnishing her father’s reputation because Liz Cheney doesn’t have one of her own. Her calling card is being Dick Cheney’s daughter. It’s not working. As Dick Cheney’s name becomes synonymous with failure, Liz Cheney is losing power, like a Baathist general who must now fight a desperate insurgency indiscriminately firing cheap shots at our president.

Liz Cheney calling Obama “a dangerous president who is intent on weakening America” is the act of a frantic daughter who can’t handle the brutal truth that the Cheney name shall never be rehabilitated. Because the name Cheney is forever tarnished and even Republicans wish, like Iraq, it would just go away.

Read More »

Watch: Judith Miller, Dick Cheney’s Stooge In Promoting Iraq Invasion, Blames Obama

Judge Judy, and all the other Iraq apologists who refuse to go away.

Judge Judy, and all the other Iraq apologists who refuse to go away.

Judith Miller almost destroyed the New York Times when, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, she took false information from Dick Cheney about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons capability. Judith Miller violated New York Times editorial policy by not double sourcing information and pretty much served as the White House’s stenographer reporting whatever propaganda they wished to spew at the media. Cheney, who gave the false information to Miller, would then go on Meet The Press and quote her stories in the New York Times as though an independent journalist had verified Hussein’s nuclear capability. The New York Times eventually apologized for Judith Miller’s shoddy reporting, and fired her. Fox News rewarded Judith Miller’s lack of journalistic ethics with a job. Now as Americans angrily demand who is responsible for getting the Iraqis in this mess she goes on Fox to blame Obama and then at the same time insist that it’s not constructive to blame anyone for Iraq, but if you have to blame someone, blame Obama, don’t blame Dick Cheney or me for reporting his lies as fact. There’s not much we can do to save Iraq, but one of the things we can do to save America is punish Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol and the journalistic parrots who made this mess.

Read More »