Friday, November 04, 2005

MORE NOTABLE QUOTATIONS

"This administration seeks for Congress to grant it the power to use America's military to enforce domestic order and impose martial law. President Bush stated, "I think the president ought to have all options on the table, all assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant." That ought to bother us deeply; so deeply that we take decisive action and let our elected officials know that this proposed action is a step too far."

"The Militarization of Health Care: Bird Flu and the Posse Comitatus Act", Jill S. Farrell, Counterpunch, November 5/6, 2005


"When a GOP strategist suggested last weekend that the President fire Rove, Bush exploded."

"'You go to hell,' he screamed at the strategist. 'You can leave and you can take the rest of these lily-livered motherfuckers with you!' The President then stormed out of the room and refused to meet further with any other party leaders or strategists."

"Bush's escalating temper tantrums and his intransigence on political issues increase Republican worries about the long term effects on both his presidency and the party's prospects in upcoming elections."

"'Right now, George W. Bush is the Republican Party's chief liability,' says a GOP strategist who has advised Presidential campaigns for 30 years. 'The entire political future of the party and perhaps the nation now rests on the shoulders of a President that no one - Democrat or Republican - believes in or trusts.'"

"GOP Leaders to Bush: Your Presidency is Effectively Over", Doug Thompson,Capitol Hill Blue, Novermber 4, 2005


"Cheney's office is the Pandora's Box of the Bush administration campaign to invade Iraq. Most of the planning as to both the waging and selling of the war occurred under his direction, along with that of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. It was Cheney who played the point in beating up the CIA for its unhelpful analysis of the non-threat posed by Saddam, and Cheney along with his Defense Department pals who effectively circumvented the CIA by setting up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon to funnel the administration the kind of intelligence it wanted, largely courtesy of their longtime double-dealing stooge, Ahmed Chalabi."

"The CIA leak investigation: Bigger fish, deeper water", Steve Perry, The City Pages, 11-2-o5

"In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security--including vital decisions about postwar Iraq--were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less...."

"The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet...."

"Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38 percent and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White). It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time."

"The White House Cabal", Lawrence Wilkerson,
L.A. Times 10-25-05


"Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a Jewish-German émigré from the Nazi regime who eventually landed at the University of Chicago where he developed a following that has achieved enormous prominence in American politics. Among his students were Paul Wolfowitz who has openly acknowledged that he is a follower of Straus as has the godfather of neconservatism, Irving Kristol. Irving Kristol begat William Kristol, the director of operation for the DC neocons, editor of the Weekly Standard and "chairman" of the Project for the New American Century, which laid out the plans for the Iraq War. (PNAC also opined in 2000 that a Pearl Harbor-like event would be necessary to take the country to war, and one year later, presto, we had the strange and still mysterious attack o September 11.) For his part Paul Wolfowitz begat Libby, in the intellectual sense, when he taught Libby at Yale. Others stars in the necon firmament are Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and lesser figures like Abram Shulsky, director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, created by Donald Rumsfeld. Shulsky, also a student of Strauss, was responsible for fabricating the lies masquerading as intelligence that were designed to get the U.S. into the war on Iraq. While the neocons have a passion for the Likud party and Zionism, they also count among their number not a few pre-Vatican II Catholics and an assortment of cranks like Newt Gingrich and John Bolton and crypto fascists like Jeanne Kirkpatrick."

"The Philosophy of Mendacity", John Walsh, www.counterpunch.com, November 2, 2005

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