Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Bin Laden: from ‘Evil One’ to Unmentionable One:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
President Bush (

news –

web sites) used to call him “the
evil one” but in recent months Osama bin Laden (

news –

web sites) has become the
unmentionable one, replaced by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (

news –

web sites)
as the chief enemy of the United States.

I’ve mentioned the planned coup against FDR before, but it’s worth revisiting especially since I found another site about it.

Smart kids. Great news. From the Seattle Times:

WASHINGTON — Despite a threefold increase in advertising in recent years, efforts by the U.S. military to bolster its recruitment ranks are bearing little fruit, a study released yesterday says.

Why on earth would you want to work for some militaristic bureaucracy? Most of us have higher hopes. As the US no longer fights to defend itself, a ‘job’ in the military no longer has honor nor deserves respect.

Based on the Hicks definition of populism, it can therefore be stated that there are two fundamental propositions of conservatism:

(1) That government should stand aside and not protect the poor and the needy from exploitation by the rich and the greedy; and

(2) That in order to accomplish the first proposition, government must be plutocratic instead of democratic.

America’s corrupt system of legalized bribery to fund its public elections makes our system of government a plutocracy. Plutocracy simply means government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. But America’s particular brand of plutocracy is even more insidious to freedom and justice than a simple plutocracy. That’s because it’s not just based on power and privilege for the rich–it’s based on power and privilege for the corporate rich. That’s why I call the American system of government “corpocracy.” The conservative ideology supports and reinforces America’s corpocracy the same way the communist ideology supported that of the Soviet Union for over 70 years. It also employs the same propaganda techniques to fool the people.

The purpose of any ideology is to stop people from thinking. When people buy into an ideology, they have checked their brains at the door. They accept a package of beliefs based on the wrapping of the package rather than by examining the contents. That is what the conservative ideology seeks to accomplish–to get people to stop thinking, and to persuade them to accept the complete package without ever opening it and examining the contents. And it’s why people need to understand more about the conservative ideology in order to protect themselves and their interests from it, as well as to protect the interests of society as a whole.

From ConservativeWatch.com

Finally, a spot of potentially good news. The Mirror had an article, BUSH STANCE ON IRAQ CRUMBLING, which described the widespread lack of support for an invasion of Iraq. Maybe untold thousands won’t be killed for oil after all. If that’s true it would be a rare and fleeting victory for peace.

The Pentagon participated in a pretty disturbing briefing on Saudi Arabia. It shows a little of what’s going on in the Mideast that no one is talking about. The real reasons behind the march to war on Iraq. From Slate’s The PowerPoint That Rocked the Pentagon:

Diplomatic china rattled in Washington and cracked in Riyadh yesterday when the Washington Post published a story about a briefing given to a Pentagon advisory group last month. The briefing declared Saudi Arabia an enemy of the United States and advocated that the United States invade the country, seize its oil fields, and confiscate its financial assets unless the Saudis stop supporting the anti-Western terror network.

I understood most of the presentation, but can you explain the final slide:

Grand strategy for the Middle
East
• Iraq is the tactical pivot
• Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot
• Egypt the prize

Why those three things and why is Egypt the prize?

MAP OF THE MIDEAST

Granted this 19 year old, Forrest Gabor, has to be pretty stupid, but can writing a letter to George Bush which says “I can’t wait to see you die” really be considered a valid death threat? The kid is 19. It’s quite likely he will live long enough to get his wish. Besides that, he’s ALREADY in prison for sending an alleged death threat to Bill Clinton. (He just got an additional four years) And besides that, there are probably a number of Americans who feel the same way. Not me, of course, nor anyone I know of, but it’s certainly to be expected. I’m sure plenty of people felt the same way about Clinton. It just seems a little extreme. Don’t they really have anything better to do? I thought there were real terrorists out there. We’ve seen them question people with suspicious posters and give a polygraph to a guy who wrote an editorial for his school newspaper where he prayed that God would smite Bush. It has become ridiculous and it makes it appear that the powers that be in the US are paranoid and overly preoccupied with sedition and governmental overthrow. This, despite the fact that the Declaration of Independence explicitly approves overthrowing a corrupt government.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Two laptops containing ‘classified’ war plans were lifted from CentCom in Florida. Fifty-one pigs are hot on the case. Fifty-one cops for 2 laptops? The laptop thefts might be related to leaks to the New York Times. Big Brother is gonna be mad as heck. Courtesy of the Tampa Tribune:

Outside of military theaters of operation, such large-scale OSI deployments are nearly unprecedented, Richmond said. In the agency’s most celebrated cases, seldom have more than one or two specialists been brought in from other bases, and those investigations generally involved homicides or tracking down fugitives.

“It’s pretty unusual to bring in a large, large contingent of agents like this,” Richmond said. “It’s pretty far from the norm. I’m not aware of any [investigations] on this scale.”

Any time the military or the government screws up this way or gets screwed in this way it really makes my day. It means the control apparatus is not invulnerable. They have their weaknesses. One of the principal weaknesses is the inefficiency and stupidity of bureaucratic institutions.

Hilarity courtesy of HereInReality.com…the Bush kids are a bunch of screwups. Let’s face it, all the Bushes are screwups, and yet people still vote for them. If there is a God, He must have one sick sense of humor.

Related:

• Bush Family Values Photo Album

From Japan Times:

She said the resolution for the U.S. attack on Afghanistan was unlike past declarations of war or resolutions to use force. It granted very broad powers to the president, authorizing him to use force against unnamed persons, nations and groups within an infinite time frame, she said.

“I could not support such a broad grant of war-making authority to the president,” she said. “Only Congress can declare war, based upon our constitution.”

Although all appropriate steps must be taken to bring the perpetrators to justice and to prevent possible terrorist attacks, Lee said, the U.S. should not resort to military actions that involve the loss of more innocent lives.