Monday, October 23, 2006

Dear Diane:

Having listened to your critique of the Iraqi War, my feeling regarding your approach is that it is far too general to appeal to a voting base that's remained, nationally, firmly against the war at a 70% for a long enough period now to not be considered anomalous.
Consider only the surge of Ned Lamont, which was perhaps, in retrospect, too premature to be sustained given the tactical adjustment capabilties of Lieberman and his ability to raise money, but nonetheless, one that speaks to the public's almost undying thirst to end the war.

In terms of coming across as " too general," what I mean is Vietnam. Take note of the fact that the President has also alluded to Vietnam in his reference to the Tet Offensive.

Rove's prepared - believe it. Strategically speaking, does this imply a possible last minute withdrawal by the President to spur support for Congressional Republicans because he knows that he's down in the polls ? Don't put it past him.

Has your campaign prepared for that eventuality as a worst-case scenario ? If not, there's still 9/11 and the President's National Emergency, predicated largely upon and directed at not only the presence of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which could also be said about at least 59 other countries, but 9/11. This President apparently believed that Saddam had something to with 9/11, which the 9/11 Commission firmly dispelled even though the President refuses to retract.

Why Iraq then with 59 other nations harboring Al-Qaeda ? Is it xenophobia ? " ' Saddam's Sunni, so I guess he must support bin Laden. ' "

It reminds me of the time Reagan went on national television and denied that he had transferred arms to the Iranians, right before admitting it, again on national TV, only a short time later. The one thing we can say about Reagan though, is that he did admit it.

What would LLoyd Benson say to George W. Bush ? " You look too much like Dan Qayle for me to believe you're not a scratch handicap."

How would W respond ? " You're number 1 Lloyd ? "

And Michael Moore ? " How's your sand game coming along, W ? "

" Ask the Iraqis."


That was right before Iran-Contra broke and we were soon to discover that apparently either Reagan or Bush believed that since the Iranians had released hostages to President Reagan within 48 hours of his taking office in 1981, after having held them for 444 days from 1979 to 1981, thorougly destroying Jimmy Carter's presidency, the Iranians were going to tell Hezbollah to release the hostages that they'd taken.

That didn't work, but to this day we claim that Iran has some sort of influence over Hezbollah, supports terrorism and thus, that it's okay to threaten Iran rather than engage in vigorous diplomacy which, yes, a Democratic House would be capable of achieving. Democrats have been down 4-0 since the Supreme Court elected Bush; in that time, our country has been attacked, there have been two wars, neither of which produced bin Laden, Saddam is on trial for genocide that allegedly occurred in 1982 after his motorcade was attacked by terrorist insurgents, which apparently neither Rummy nor Reagan or Bush knew about; Rummy was selling weapons to Saddam in 1982, why would he sell weapons to someone who'd committed genocide ? Reagan didn't even know about the Iranian weapons transfer; how would he be aware that Saddam, who was nearly assassinated, like Reagan himself, like the Pope, had allegedly committed genocide ? Why would he not have sympathized with Saddam ?

Bin Laden is pretext.

So, 20 years later, the President has attacked Saddam, who did not possess WOMDs and was not the perpetrator of 9/11 even though he might be Sunni, even though the President continues to mislead the public, continues to refuse to concede to his error, an illegal invasion, thereby dividing the Pentagon's resource capabilities in terms of its most important, yet least discussed objective: capturing bin Laden after failing to do so at Tora Bora.

Is that a good reason to dump Rummy ? Well, if Rummy is treated as the " eccentric old uncle " by other members of the cabal, if he truly is ignored, if like Congress and the public, he's not been able to get good intelligence himself, if Tommy Franks told Rummy that we didn't need the extra 90,000 troops in Iraq, then how is it Rummy's fault ? The answer is that it isn't all Rummy's fault. Certainly Americans are angry at Rummy for the torture that has generated animosity at Americans worldwide; angry that he didn't put a stop to this sick and sadistic practice; rape and torture and senselss violence in the name of what ? Oil ? Greed ? Democracy ?
Jeffrey Sachs, for one, claims that it's all about oil, that there's nothing ideological at all, no principle whatsoever involved, other than Dick's insatiable lust and greed for oil. Feed your greed, until your belly's full; feed your greed while you feed us bull.

But should we be that quick to can Rummy ? Well, the talk in Washington has been that Jim Baker, famous for the " count, recount, yet another recount, " tirade that led to the Supreme Court refusing to allow the votes of regular Americans to be counted by regular citizens of Broward and Dade, not merely those invested in Saudi oil wealth, those mysterious government officials who red carpeted the bin Ladens out of the U.S. after 9/11 at a time when Bush could have captured Osama. Makes you wonder whether this cabal has actually ever severed its ties to Osama dating back to the 1980s, one of the main reasons why we have the problem with terror we do today.

Yes. It's Bush himself who got us involved with Osama. It's Bush who never solved the problem. It's Bush who started this illegal war by invading a leader that Reagan supported. And now Bush wants to spend more of your hard-earned tax dollars to draft your kids to go get some more oil for Dick and his friends.

Let's not forget that it was a National Emergency that led us into Vietnam, one that was never terminated after Korea, until 1973, which led to the National Emergency Act of 1976, which was amended by the Supreme Court in 1983 to, again, create the conditions for the " Next Vietnam " to which the President himself, in his references to the Tet Offensive, has conceded his own failed policies in Iraq have led.

Hence, in conjunction with the two worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, 1983 and Bush v. Gore, which elected a President who declared a National Emergency that cannot be terminated ( without serious measures), the Supreme Court and its President have indeed, as the President himself has admitted, created the Next Vietnam. Are you going to let Bush draft your children now that he's spent all of your hard-earned tax dollars, ones that could have been used to ensure that Pell Grants kept pace with that of tuition inflation ?

What we need is to bring the troops home and start addressing the question of 9/11 and why it happened. How is it that the Director of the CIA claims to have told Condi Rice about 9/11 months prior to its occurrence and to have it on tape, while she claims that no such meeting ever occurred and the President claims that the CIA did not tell him ? While our current Republican-controlled Congress has been supressing it, misleading the American people, just as it did on WOMDs, a lie that the President told to get re-elected, to engage us deeper and deeper into a quagmire that now includes Iran, now includes Korea and could even include the 59 other nations inw which the President might suspect al-qaeda could be located; that question can be answered by a Democratic House of Representatives rather that systematically ignored and supressed by our current cabal of war-mongers who now want to attack Iran and Korea.