Midnight Meme Of The Day

by Noah

You can bet that if that casket held the body of a Russian oligarch and was draped with a Russian flag, Trump's right hand would be over his heart. The allegiances of Putin's Fist Puppet are clear.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

A president walks into a church... Aw, forget the jokes. The president is the joke, the gift that keeps on giving, kinda like gonorrhea.

When Daddy Bush finally did the world a favor and croaked, there was some speculation as to whether or not Traitor Don would be asked to stay away from his funeral like he had been asked to stay away from Barbara Bush's. Imagine how repulsive to the core you have to be to be too toxic for a Bush funeral. This time, he was invited anyway. Such are the ways of Washington. They put up facades of respect, if only for each other.

But enough of the Bushes. That has been and will be for another day.

Little Donnie Trumpanzee wanted to make Daddy Bush's passing all about Little Donnie, and he did. The result has been so many viral memes that I hardly know what to do with them all, so, yeah, I'll play. It's worth it. A picture and a few words or so to tell the story of one of the most vile and venal "things" ever to crawl out of a womb. Tonight's Trump/Bush funeral meme is just the first. Trump couldn't even bring himself to recite words and prayers printed out and handed to him. He either damn well knew that that would focus the attention on himself or just decided that, if the attention wasn't going to be focused on him, he would just sit and sulk in silence. He didn't even try to half-heartedly fake it like he does with singing the National Anthem and God Bless America.

Christians profess to love God and Jesus and all that, but what today's Christians and today's Republicans crave is Trumpism and all its evils. Beware of false prophets.

The World Doesn't Revolve Around Trumpanzee But..."It Was As I A Chill Had Descended On That Front Row" When He Showed Up

The Sound of Music by Nancy Ohanian

Fox News' Chris Wallace came up with the "a hill had descended" line in the station's coverage of George H.W. Bush’s funeral on Wednesday when Trump awkwardly joined the legitimately elected presidents in the front row. He didn't belong-- and it was obvious, even at Fox. "You had seen a lot of chatty talk between the Clintons and the Obamas, the Carters," said Wallace. "But when Donald Trump sat down, the greeting that he was given by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama was about as cold, about as cool as it could have been." Then the previously chatty front row fell silent as they had to endure the usurper among them. Wallace: "And I have to say that where you usually have a presidents club and people that ran against and maybe one beat the other that doesn’t seem to have extended to President Trump when you see them sitting in that front row."

Others noted that the funeral couldn't help but come off like a renunciation of Trump and Trumpism. Dana Millbank at The Washington Post: "Bush’s funeral was so powerful a renunciation of his current successor because it was a celebration of character. Friendship was invoked 21 times by his eulogists. Loyalty, 10. 'Honor,' 'integrity,' 'dignity,' 'decency' and inner peace all recurred. Certainly, Bush could be a fierce partisan and a brutal politician (remember Willie Horton?), but his service in World War II-- he was shot down over the Pacific-- left him with lessons that fueled his generation’s greatness: The opposition is not the enemy. There are causes greater than self. Political defeat is not the worst thing. And American leadership in the world is indispensable... Trump, for whom no cause is greater than self, must have struggled to sit through 90 minutes of something that was not all about him. Rather, it was all about what he is not."

Trump sat grimacing self-consciously and making angry monkey faces all through the ceremony. In his head, he was likely composing his howling-in-the-wind tweets which he likely wished he was sending rather than wasting time at an event that had nothing to do with him and that he clearly didn't want to be at. John Harris, writing for Politico noted that in Washington these days, subtext always becomes text. "The service," he wrote, "was replete with praise for the 41st president that could, with just the slightest nudge of interpretation, be heard as implied rebuke of the 45th president. But only implied, never explicit-- this, unlike almost everything else in American politics today, was not about Donald Trump. And yet it very much was. Speakers rhapsodized about Bush’s natural good cheer and optimism; his willingness to share credit and accept blame; his preference for self-deprecating humor; his gift for personal diplomacy; his loyalty to friends when they were down; his talent at assembling international coalitions; his mistrust of 'unthinking partisanship'; his inaugural address in which he said that Americans must judge our lives by kindness to friends and neighbors rather than the pursuit of 'a bigger car, a bigger bank account'; his commitment to truth and to living up to the obligations of a 'gentleman.' Who wouldn’t admire these traits? Or expect that any president should try to emulate them?"

Another Criminal Dies

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1985

by Gaius Publius

George H.W. Bush's life is a testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.
     —Former president Barack Obama

Rosalynn and I are deeply saddened by the death of former President George H.W. Bush. His administration was marked by grace, civility, and social conscience.
     —Former president Jimmy Carter

Scouring the Web for comments on the death of George H.W. Bush turns up quite a bit of praise from luminaries as widely disparate as the Dalai Lama, Ellen DeGeneres and CIA director Gina Haspel. Mohammed bin Salman paid a visit to Bush senior and was welcomed warmly, spawning this tweet from the former president:

Delighted to join the 43rd President and Jim Baker in welcoming the Saudi Crown Prince His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman and His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Salman to Texas. A wonderful chance to celebrate the long-standing friendship between our two nations. pic.twitter.com/282LAJqWpO

— George Bush (@GeorgeHWBush) April 7, 2018

From lesser lights to greater, from murderers to comedians, the praise continues. 

As usual, the network of those who run the world we merely inhabit have nothing but respect for each other. And why not? They may pick each other off from time to time (both Saddam Hussein and Moamar Khaddafi, were once in high favor), but over the long haul, keeping each member of the ruling circle in a reverential spotlight keeps them all — keeps the circle itself — in reverence as well. Since they operate as a system, the system is honored each time its members, no matter how deadly, are honored as well. And the system sees that the system is always honored.

That's why Bernie Sanders and his new progressive colleagues in the House are so hated. They want to take that system apart. It's why Nancy Pelosi surrendered to the No Labels-financed "Problem Solvers" caucus rather than to those same new progressives and their agenda. The tiny system of people that run the world supports the tiny system of people that run the world, and always will.

For a truer perspective on who those people are and what they do, let's look not to the system's predictable, fawning self-praise, but at less propagandistic comments on the passing of one of its members, former CIA director, former vice president, and former president George H.W. Bush, a man who stood at the center of American power for most of his long adult life.

Again, this is just a sample of those comments on a sample of that life. A true deep dive into his sordid history would take a book.

George H.W. Bush, the CIA and a Case of State-Sponsored Terrorism

To pick just a single incident, this is from the late Robert Parry, writing in 2000 at Consortium News:

In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.

The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.

In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, 2000, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.

The CIA report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb ripped apart Letelier’s car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row.

A foreign diplomat and a U.S. citizen are murdered in DC on Embassy Row. The deed is planned by Manuel Contreras, a CIA asset who was also simultaneously intelligence chief for the Pinochet government of Chile. And George H.W. Bush, as head of the CIA, performs the cover-up, going so far as to plant false stories among media assets (sorry, CIA-friendly journalists) in places like Newsweek, and going so far as to mislead the FBI in its own investigation.

This is the man Jimmy Carter praised for "grace, civility, and social conscience." Saying a man complicit in murder is gracious is like saying a mafia don is good to his family and kind to old people and animals. Bill Clinton's praise of Bush, "From the moment I met him ... I was struck by the kindness he showed to Chelsea, by his innate and genuine decency, and by his devotion to Barbara, his children, and their growing brood," strikes just this note.

In the same article the word "assessment" appears, a word so enamored of the anti-Trump forces these days. Parry writes:

[T]he CIA – then under CIA Director George H.W. Bush – leaked for public consumption an assessment clearing the Chilean government’s feared intelligence service, DINA, which was then run by Contreras.

Bush "leaked for public consumption" an "assessment" knowingly filled with lies. The CIA has leaked many lying, secret "assessments" for public consumption; it's what they do. If we weren't so desperate to get rid of Donald Trump — and believe me, security-state people like George H.W. Bush are eagerly on board with that effort — we'd be nervous about what a leaked CIA assessment that immediately cast a shadow on an elected president, within a month of his election no less, might augur.

Does the concept of an American Praetorian Guard concern you? It does me.

George H.W. Bush and the Theft of the 1980 Election

The big enchilada in the George H.W. Bush story is the theft of the 1980 election and its aftermath, the Iran-Contra payoff and cover-up. The bones of the story, the original "October Surprise," go like this.

In 1980, when the Iranian hostage crisis was raging and Reagan and Bush were running against incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Oval Office, former CIA director Bush, future CIA director William Casey and others met at least three times with Iranian officials, including a meeting in Paris on October 19, and struck a deal with the Iranian government to extend the holding of 52 American hostages until after the election, thus denying Carter a diplomatic victory (and by the way, extending the suffering of those hostages).

In exchange, Bush and Casey promised that the Reagan administration would secretly sell arms to Iran through a cutout, Israel. Iran had just become involved in a major war with Iraq at the time and was desperate for arms.

Of course, because the arms sales were secret, the Reagan administration had money on its hands it had not gotten from Congress, and it decided to spend that money propping up the Contras, a brutal right-wing resistance army fighting the socialist (of course) Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

It's the secret support of the Contras (a name taken from the Spanish for counter-revolution), which was expressly forbidden by Congress in 1985 under the third Boland Amendment, that caused the story to unravel. The contra money was found, the Iranian arms sales were found, and the 1980 Reagan-Iran hostage deal was both widely suspected and widely feared.

Why feared? If a U.S. president had committed what many would call treason to gain office, what would the effect on the American people be? Would they ever trust elections — or worse, their leaders — again? Proof of Reagan and Bush's act was potentially destabilizing as, say, proof that elements of the CIA had murdered John Kennedy would have been.

Nixon and Treason

The U.S. had in fact faced this problem before — proof that a candidate had committed treason with a foreign government — when outgoing president Lyndon Johnson uncovered similar deeds ("treason" to use Johnson's word) by Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign, and declined to act on it, save to tell Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen to tell Richard Nixon to "cut it out," or words to that effect.

Proof of Nixon's treason didn't emerge until 2008, when the tape of the phone call itself was released and the accusation was later confirmed by conservative writer George Will. By then, of course, the whole affair was old news, something from the last generation's history, and could be reliably assumed to be ignored.

So here. Proof of every part of the October Surprise–Iran-Contra story emerged, though proof of the meeting between Bush, Casey and the Iranians in Paris was predictably contravened by a "secret alibi," yet that story is now widely and predictably ignored by all who praise him. 

Robert Parry and the October Surprise

Robert Parry was the primary reporter investigating the October Surprise connection to the breaking Iran-Contra story (emphasis added):

Though there were early rumors about a secret Republican deal with Iran, the October Surprise mystery didn’t gain much traction until the exposure of secret Iran-Contra arms shipments approved by Reagan to Iran in 1985-86. Suddenly, the notion that Reagan and his Vice President George H.W. Bush would lie about covert dealings with Iran didn’t seem so preposterous.

Essentially, the October Surprise question was whether Reagan’s secret contacts with Iran dated back to Campaign 1980, as a growing number of witnesses — from inside the governments of Iran, Israel, France and the United States — were alleging.

However, when Congress finally agreed to look into the October Surprise case in 1991-92, Republicans were determined to circle the wagons around the then-sitting President George H.W. Bush, who was facing a tough reelection fight against Democrat Bill Clinton.

Rather than welcome any truth-seeking, the Republicans and their media allies went on the attack claiming that the October Surprise case was a baseless “conspiracy theory.”

Elites "circling the wagons" to protect elites, even treasonous ones, is the theme of this piece. Eventually, Democrats and the media shied away from the story, leaving Parry essentially alone with his investigation (links in original):

Parry ... received the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 for his work with the Associated Press on Iran-Contra, where he broke the story that the Central Intelligence Agency had provided an assassination manual to the Nicaraguan Contras (Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare). In mid-1985 he wrote the first article on Oliver North's involvement in the affair, and, together with Brian Barger, in late 1985 he broke the CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US scandal, helping to spark Senator John Kerry's interest in investigating Iran-Contra. The Associated Press had refused to publish the drug trafficking story, and only relented when its Spanish-language newswire service accidentally published a translation. Barger and Parry continued to press their investigation of North even as most of the media declined to follow it up, eventually publishing a story in mid-1986, based on 24 sources, which led to a Congressional committee asking questions of North. After North denied the allegations, Barger was pushed out of the Associated Press, and Parry was unable to publish any further follow-ups to the story until after Eugene Hasenfus' plane (Corporate Air Services HPF821) was shot down in Nicaragua in October 1986. After finding out that his boss had been "conferring with [Oliver] North on a regular basis", Parry left AP in 1987 to join Newsweek, which he left in 1990.

In August 1990, PBS' Frontline asked Parry to work on the October Surprise conspiracy theory, leading to Parry making several documentaries for the program, broadcast in 1991 and 1992. He continued to pursue it after a Congressional investigation had concluded the story was untrue, turning his Frontline research into a book published in 1993, and in 1994 he unearthed "a treasure-trove of government documents" supporting the theory, "showing that the [Congressional] task force suppressed incriminating CIA testimony and excluded evidence of big-money links between wealthy Republicans and Carter's Iranian intermediary, Cyrus Hashemi". In 1996, Salon wrote about his work on the theory, saying that "his continuing quest to unearth the facts of the alleged October Surprise has made him persona non grata among those who worship at the altar of conventional wisdom."

But this is not a piece about Robert Parry. It's a piece about George H.W. Bush.

Was George Bush in Paris in October 1980?

Evidence points to the presence of the future vice-president in Paris for the October meeting. Among others, the pilot of the plane that conveyed the participants places him there:

Russbacher [the pilot] states that Bush, while in Paris, met with Hashemi Rafsanjani, the second in command to the Ayatollah and now the president of Iran, and Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian businessman who was extremely powerful. Arrangements were apparently made to pay Iran $40 million to delay the release of hostages in order to thwart President Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. The $40 million was the beginning of terms that created the Iran-Contra scandal that is now being reopened by Congress.

Russbacher is concerned for his life, but feels that the other pilots will now come forward in a new Congressional investigation.

From the article, Russbacher was also "a member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and worked with the Central Intelligence Agency." Now note this:

[Russbacher] indicates that there is a growing division within the Central Intelligence Agency. "There is no one higher than the CIA, but there are groups within the company (term used by insiders for the CIA) that are very, very strong. And the group or clique that I belonged to, in my opinion, was probably the strongest but there are other factions that are at war with themselves," Russbacher states."You have these groups that are answerable to no one. Well, they are answerable to one man, on top, and he doesn't seem to care how the problems are resolved, just as long as they are taken care of." The man Russbacher is referring to is President Bush.

The only contrary evidence that Bush was not in Paris on October 19, the date in question, was a "secret alibi witness" whose name wasn't released until 2011, after the witness was safely dead. Secret witnesses, of course, can't be interviewed and their evidence tested by the press. 

In 1992, when the story was raging, Bush publicly and angrily demanded that he be cleared. "Bowing to those pressures ... Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, chairman of the House investigative task force, agreed to a curious bargain in which he and a few senior investigators were shown the destination of Bush’s supposed afternoon trip on Oct. 19, 1980, but with the proviso that they never interview anyone who was there or disclose any names. So, without verifying Bush’s alibi, the House task force cleared Bush of going to Paris."

Note the role of a Democrat in covering for Bush.

The "secret alibi witness" was, of course, a Bush family friend who had worked many times with Bush and had in fact been saved by Bush when the Watergate scandal threatened to take him down. More on this part of the story can be found here: "Taking a Bush Secret to the Grave".

So whom do you trust? Ex-CIA chief George H.W. Bush and the witness whose name he worked for decades to keep secret, or the rest of the evidence to the contrary? Elites assert the former in public statements, whatever they privately believe. The rest of us move on with our lives. Thus does the system that rules us retain its power.

Bush's Sins Are Many

Bush's sins are many and great. As head of the CIA in the late 1970s, he "actively supported Operation Condor operations and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America." This means he was an accomplice to a great many murders. In the 1980 election campaign, he committed treason against the U.S. constitution by treating with an enemy and interfering with the negotiations of the elected president.

As president, he betrayed the trust of Mikhail Gorbachev, promising that after the unification of Germany, NATO would not move "one inch forward." NATO has since moved several inches forward...

...so much so that Trump's questioning of NATO during the 2016 campaign counts as one of his own great sins. War with Russia is the course we're on today, and this is one of the causes, that U.S. leaders have wanted this conflict to continue since the Soviet Union fell. Elites protecting elites.

In 1990, the Bush administration led Saddam Hussein, a U.S. ally, to believe that it wouldn't interfere if Iraq punished Kuwait for "slant-drilling" and other offenses by invading Kuwait. Before the Iraqi invasion, April Glaspie, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam Hussein, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Saddam invaded Kuwait. Then the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The strongest impetus for signing the NAFTA treaty prior to 1992 was George H.W. Bush, after which Bill Clinton campaigned for, and ultimately passed the treaty as well. 

In 1992, outgoing President Bush pardoned those in his inner circle who were convicted of crimes in the Iran-Contra scandal. All this with no mention of the vile Willie Horton campaign ads, or the vile elevation of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For all this he is much honored. And every honor he is accorded as a public figure honors the criminals and murderers who hold power over a globalized establishment. Keep this in mind the next time your own favorite elected says of a similar person, "Too bad he died. He was a good man."

GP
 

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

It was appalling enough when Republicans rushed to rename Washington International Airport after Reagan minutes after he died. That was pretty low, but Trump has made old senile, affable Ronnie Raygun somehow look, if not good, almost acceptable as a president, one of the worst presidents for sure, but, almost, a president. So, what will Republicans do when Trump improves the world by leaving it? Obviously, Republicans love Traitor Don. They love everything he stands for. There's nothing Trump can do that will offend or upset a republican and he has proved it on a daily basis. They won't even vote to protect the Mueller Investigation. Even the idea of selling America out to foreign adversaries is just peachy with the Republican Party.

So, why wouldn't Republicans name an airport after their dear leader? Hell, would it shock you if they voted to rename the Moon after Trump?

George H.W. Bush already had an an aircraft carrier commissioned with his name on it in 2009 (not that he deserved the honor). Likewise the USS Ronald Reagan carrier was commissioned back in 2003, but, to me, it seems better, nicer too, to do these things while the person is still alive like they did with the recently departed George H.W. That brings to my mind a big question, two big questions in fact: 1) Should we name something after Trumpanzee right now? And, 2) If so, what? Wine? Well there was a Trump Wine. That quickly went out of business. An airline? That failed too. A football franchise? Nope. Virtually no one remembers the New Jersey Generals, and for good reason. The list of things that have been named after Trump, including his sick joke of a presidency have all failed and failed miserably. Everything named after Trump disappears. Gone.

Ah, I have it! Let's change the name of cancer!

Why We Could End Up at War with Russia

Noam Chomsky's latest book (more info here)

by Gaius Publius

Scheduling note: I'll be on travel for much of the next two weeks, so no posting until early July.

We've written in these pages about the history of U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War (examples here and here). We've also written, with trepidation, about how a new, post-Obama "even more muscular" U.S. foreign policy could lead to, frankly, an actual shooting war with Russia (see here).

Now I'd like to point to this comprehensive analysis of post-Cold War U.S. relations with Russia and Eastern Europe via an excerpt from Noam Chomsky's new book, Who Runs the World? (These excerpts are only a portion of a much larger group of excerpts published by Tom Engelhardt in two installments at TomDispatch.com. First installment here, the article from which this excerpt was taken. Second installment here.)

Adam Smith on the "Masters of Mankind" and their "Vile Maxim" — “All for ourselves and nothing for other people”

We'll get to Russia in a moment. First, I'd like to share three introductory paragraphs that deal with the subject of the book's title. As Chomsky points out, states are rarely unitary, ruled from one head, and he makes a very important point about the modern capitalist state as including actors that Adam Smith called, derisively, the "masters of mankind." We would call them the Kochs, the Rubins, the big-money CEO class in general, and, on Wall Street, the "masters of the universe." The money class, in short, that directs our political class, as much or more so than they are directed.

Look for the phrase "masters of mankind" below. Adam Smitth's comment on them is surprisingly modern, surprisingly accurate. Chomsky:

When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.

States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the “vile maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people” -- a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home country and the world.

In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them adopted in good Stalinist style with “fast track” procedures designed to block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental, with the consequences one might anticipate.

“All for ourselves and nothing for other people” sums up the pathology of our real ruling class quite well. It's a recipe for disaster, of course, a recipe for a zero-growth world, but I doubt they're looking that far ahead.

It's also a recipe for war, as you'll see.

The View from Russia: What Happened When the USSR Collapsed

In the extended excerpt from which the above is taken, Chomsky looks at the challenges today in three regions of the world, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Islamic World. Here are his comments on Eastern Europe. Please note carefully the history of U.S.-Russian relations starting from the breakup of the Soviet Union.

If you remember nothing else from reading this, I hope the "view from Russia" remains firmly in your mind. It's not that I'm justifying their behavior. I'm helping you to understand it, so that you can anticipate what kind of response will come back from which kinds of what will look to them like provocation.

Chomsky again, from the middle of Engelhardt's first long excerpt (my emphasis):

The Challenges Today: Eastern Europe

Turning to the second region, Eastern Europe, there is a crisis brewing at the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and judicious scholarly study of the region, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, Richard Sakwa writes -- all too plausibly -- that the “Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the ‘wars to stop NATO enlargement’; the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not clear whether humanity would survive a third.”

The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent Western voices. George Kennan warned early on that NATO enlargement is a “tragic mistake,” and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy error of historic proportions.”

The present crisis has its origins in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were then two contrasting visions of a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In Sakwa’s words, one vision was of a “‘Wider Europe,’ with the EU at its heart but increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and political community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of ‘Greater Europe,’ a vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and Ankara, but with a common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have traditionally plagued the continent.”

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe, a concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives. However, as Russia collapsed under the devastating market reforms of the 1990s, the vision faded, only to be renewed as Russia began to recover and seek a place on the world stage under Vladimir Putin who, along with his associate Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly “called for the geopolitical unification of all of ‘Greater Europe’ from Lisbon to Vladivostok, to create a genuine ‘strategic partnership.’”

These initiatives were “greeted with polite contempt,” Sakwa writes, regarded as “little more than a cover for the establishment of a ‘Greater Russia’ by stealth” and an effort to “drive a wedge” between North America and Western Europe. Such concerns trace back to earlier Cold War fears that Europe might become a “third force” independent of both the great and minor superpowers and moving toward closer links to the latter (as can be seen in Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and other initiatives).

The Western response to Russia’s collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as signaling “the end of history,” the final victory of Western capitalist democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev that NATO forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that a unified Germany could become a NATO member -- a remarkable concession, in the light of history. That discussion kept to East Germany. The possibility that NATO might expand beyond Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even if privately considered.

Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system, sea lanes and pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” sharply different from the official U.N. version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under U.S. command.

Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO. The wording was unambiguous: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized U.S. support for Ukraine’s NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” as a WikiLeaks report revealed.

Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading U.S. establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West,” which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.”

“Who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that “Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it.” That should not be too difficult. After all, as everyone knows, “The United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.”

In fact, the U.S. stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is officially called “successful defiance” of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo -- as happened to Cuba. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been “terminated with extreme prejudice,” to adopt CIA lingo.

As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves and motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as far -- literally -- as questions of survival.

A great deal is indeed at stake. What will another Warrior President do to the world? Will that warrior drag us down further, as we've been dragged down already into the world of a U.S.-created ISIS (or Daesh, as they should be called)?

The View from Russia, in Maps

Again, "The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion." Here's the world as Russia sees it (not just Putin; all Russia). Here's what Europe used to look like. NATO nations are in blue:

Europe immediately before the collapse of the USSR. NATO nations in blue (source).

In contrast, here's what Russia sees today (NATO nations again in blue):

Europe after the collapse of the USSR. NATO nations in blue, NATO applicants in green (source).

German reunification (with a united Germany joining NATO) was agreed to by Gorbachev and the West, and occurred almost immediately, in 1990. By 1991, NATO was looking at expansion, starting with Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The march to Russia's borders hasn't stopped. If Ukraine and Georgia are admitted, the only non-NATO nation on Russia's European border will be Belarus, the former Soviet Republic of Byelorussia.

Imagine, as Chomsky writes, "how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well." Imagine how fast we would have killed that possibility dead — "terminated with extreme prejudice" in Chomsky's phrase.

I'll say this plainly. Russia is a nuclear state, and they've had about enough of U.S. triumphalism and expansion. The next "warrior president," flush with hubris and spoiling for a fight, could get us all killed.

(Note: Many think we're already waging war with Russia economically, a war the Russians haven't begun to respond to aggressively. Yet. Start here.)

GP
 

Holy schnikes! Add "his father's awkward oratory" to "his brother’s mangled syntax and malapropisms," and . . . here's J-e-b!

"Global affairs?" says Jeb. "You're asking me? You sure you're not thinking onto somebody else? All I got is that French dude with the hotel maid in New York."

by Ken

One test of a person who stands astride history is his ability to leave his imprint on the language. Usually this would be assumed to be the language he speaks, but in Jeb Bush's case, judging by the speech he gave Wednesday at the luncheon of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, it isn't entirely clear that he has a language.

A lot of the focus so far has been on whether Brother Jeb is or isn't his "own man," relative to his (gulp) presidential pater and big brother, or whether he is someone else's man, or someone is his man, or something. But that is, as they say, the tip of the ice cream. At least I think we can sympathize with his desire to separate himself from his presidential relations.

Not so fast, though. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank was at it again in "Jeb adds to the quotable-Bush canon": observing what politicians do and say -- in this case in particular what the apparent GOP presidential front-runner said, or tried to. I'm just going to jump right to my favorite. It seems that in speaking to a council that is, after all, On Global Affairs, he manned up and acknowledged that his own foreign policy is still not fully formed. At least that seems to be what he had in mind.

"Look," he said (and I think we're all with him so far), "the more I get into this stuff, there are some things [where] you just go, you know, 'Holy schnikes.' "

Excuse me? Holy effing what? ("Schnikes," by the way, is presumably Dana's spelling. But then, there really isn't any way of checking it, is there?)

All these years we've been told that Jeb is the smart Bush, the competent Bush. He did, after all, get through two terms as governor of Florida. Is it possible that the bar for talking isn't much higher there than in, say, Texas?

"Eschewing teleprompter," Dana tells us, Jeb "read his speech quickly and, during the question time that followed, leaned forward in a chair, jacket buttoned and legs spread, swigging water with Marco Rubio's gusto."


IN CASE NOBODY'S STARTED A "BOOK OF JEB-ISMS"

Here are Dana's contributions from Thursday's lunch. The first one came "seconds into his speech."

Iraq, or Iran -- or wherever

“We definitely no longer inspire fear in our enemies. The problem is perhaps best demonstrated by this administration’s approach to Iraq.”

Whoa! He’s going there — right into the failure that pretty much destroyed his brother’s presidency? Bush continued reading from his text, as if for the first time.

“We’ve had 35 years of experience with Iran,” he went on, then realized his earlier mistake. “Excuse me, Iran. Thirty-five years’ experience with Iran’s rulers.”

Dr. Freud would have been amused.

First I think Dr. Freud would want to make sure that Jeb knows the difference between Iraq and Iran. Somehow I'm guessing he doesn't know any more about the one than the other, and that would be very little.


Return of the "nucular" option, but
without the "charm"

He combined his father’s awkward oratory with his brother’s mangled syntax and malapropisms. Like his brother, he said “nucular” instead of “nuclear,” and he hunched over the lectern with both hands on it — but instead of exuding folksiness, as his brother does, he oozed discomfort.

"A catalytic converter for economic growth"
(Great for the ecology?)

A top priority, he explained, is “reforming a broken immigration system and turning it into an economic — a catalytic converter for sustained economic growth.”

Presumably he was reaching for “catalyst” but instead came up with an automotive emissions-control device.

Hey, Russia, you big bully, get your big fat
dependency off of Europe!

“As we grow our presence by growing our ability to produce oil and gas,” Bush went on, “we also make it possible to lessen the dependency that Russia now has on top of Europe.”

Russia’s dependency on top of Europe? It was, in addition to being backward, a delightful echo of his brother’s belief that it is hard “to put food on your family.”

He's just a gladiator

At another point, discussing NATO’s aggressive stance in the Baltics, Jeb explained that “I don’t know what the effect has been, because, you know, it’s really kind of hard to be out on the road, and I’m just a gladiator these days, so I don’t follow every little detail.”

C'mon, people, he's read articles

Asked about the weakening of nation states in the Middle East, he admitted: “I don’t have a solution. I mean, I—I—I’ve read articles, you know, about whether the 1915 kind of breakout of the Middle East and how that no longer is a viable deal.”

The center of his universe?

The former Florida governor recited his foreign policy credentials, such as opening a bank office in Venezuela. He touted a Latin American free-trade agreement and noted that “where Columba and I live is going to be right in the center of the universe of that free-trade agreement.”

He can see Cuba from his house!

Growing up old-ish

Even the money line of his speech, that he’s his own man, received a distracting grace note when he said: “I love my brother. I love my dad. I actually love my mother as well — hope that’s okay.” (It’s unclear who had suggested otherwise.) “I grew up politically, I guess, in the ’80s,” asserted Bush, who turned 27 in 1980.

What kind of name is "BRIC"?

Bush mimicked some of his big brother’s bravado, using phrases such as “enemies of freedom” and “tighten the noose” and “take them out,” and he defended the surge in Iraq. But what brought him closest to his kin were the random oddities in his speech. He declared that “whoever created the terminology BRIC would have to change the name,” without explaining that BRIC referred to emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Is "head of the caliphate" anything
like "head of the class"?

At another point he had trouble coming up with the English name for “Plan Colombia” and explained, “Sometimes my mind switches, and I apologize.” He propounded the curious theory that “the more tepid the economic growth” the less likely NATO members are to “defend themselves” militarily. He said that with President Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, “the rest of the world wonders, am I the pivotee?” And he described the Islamic State leader as “the guy that’s the supreme leader, whatever his new title is, head of the caliphate.”

DANA'S CONCLUSION

"If he keeps talking like this, Americans may say the same ["Holy schnikes!"] of him."


NOTE: Washingtonpost.com's right-wing-brained Jennifer Rubin thinks Jeb was brilliant

Just fabulous, especially the way he wowed the crowd in the Q-and-A with the depth of his knowledge of foreign policy. (Well, he probably does know more about foreign policy than, say, Mike Huckabee or Rick Perry or Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz.) In the interest of fairness and balance, in case you were wondering.

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"Get Your Socks Today!" (You mean to save a lousy 35 bucks you'd pass up these Limited-Edition George H.W.Bush Socks?)

No, they 're not Bert Cooper's sock rejects, they're . . . well, see for yourself. The design is sure, er, distinctive. Get yours now at gop.com.

by Ken

Who says the Republican Party isn't a Party of Ideas? I believe the "makers not takers" at GOP Central have crafted their message for 2015 and beyond.


And there's more good news: "For a limited time, a group of donors will match every dollar you contribute to the RNC. Donate and double your impact today."

Yes, the electoral walls will come tumbling down as Republicans at all levels in all 50 states begin chanting this new message, which speaks to the country's economic malaise as well as its underlying confidence in America's future. Yes, it's afternoon in America. Let's say it all together now:

"Donate $35 or More to Get Your Socks Today"

Or, even pithier, "Get Your Socks Today!" I believe the new slogan is drawn from Rep. Paul Ryan's hot-off-the-presses manifesto The Way Forward, but I can't say for sure since I haven't actually read the book. (I've put it on my list of "Possible Things To Do" for the day when hell freezes over.) But I know that part of Pauly R's "way forward" is that from now on Republicans, instead of soliciting votes only from white males, is going to be competing for every single vote in the country, and sure enough the Republican National Committee's Socks Offer states:

We need your help to fully fund the RNC’s 50-state, Party-building plan that is vital to expanding our Republican Majority in the U.S. House, winning back the U.S. Senate and electing more GOP governors in the 2014 mid-term elections.

I know you're thinking that I'm just making this all up, or that I've maybe cribbed it from The Onion. Or maybe that this Web page is a relic from the dawning days of the Internet. But no, just go to the gop.com front page, and see if you don't see the Magic Socks.

STOCK UP! GET YOUR EMPLOYEES TO DONATE,
AND PEOPLE YOU FIND IN THE PHONE BOOK

Logical as it might seem, I don't think you can get additional pairs of socks by donating multiples of $35 -- say, $105 for a three-pack. But what you could do is have your friends donate, and your employees, and recently deceased people in your town, and people you find listed in the phone book. (You probably still have a phone book lying around.) Just so you know, everyone who contributes has to list their employer and occupation, which the RNC say it's "required by law to report." However, "if you are currently not working you may enter 'Retired' or 'Not Employed'." Hey, it's not as if the FEC is going to check or anything!

I suppose you could spread holiday cheer by donating in the names of all your friends and relations. (Then perhaps you could get them to pass the socks on to you! You don't think they'd actually consider wearing anything so hideous, do you?)

So remember, Get Your Socks Today®! Because if anything says "the way forward," it's blindingly grotesque socks commemorating that GOP icon George H.W. Bush!

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"Nous Ne Sommes Plus Vos Macaques!"-- Anti-Racist Words That Moved The U.S. Power Structure To Murder A Nation's Founding Father

All little boys grow up under the impression that their country is the best in the whole wide world-- except in the U.S. where we grow up not even knowing that there is a whole wide world out there aside from the land of the free and the home of the brave. So when did I start recognizing that my own country was every bit as bad-- if not worse-- than every other political cesspool through time and space? My atheist dad helped by explaining how religion was an effective system that kept working people from killing the rich crooks who oppressed them. And my socialist grandfather helped by explaining why the U.S. was taking the wrong side in Cuba right around the time I was crossing over into teenagedom. But the ultimate moment of realization came for me just about 50 years ago on the nose.

I wasn't even 12 when I first heard of Patrice Lumumba, then in the midst of agitating for independence for the Congo from the brutal and inhuman captivity of the Belgian royal family. On June 23, 1960 Lumumba was elected Prime Minister on the newly independent country but on Independence Day celebrations (June 30) the Belgian fascists tried one last humiliation by leaving the new Prime Minister off the program. Instead, King Baudouin tried to talk about how wonderful his country's savage and violent regime in the Congo had been. Lumumba took the stage and gave a more reality-based speech that horrified Western conservatives, as reality-based speeches often do:

For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force... We are no longer your monkeys!

The Belgians helped provoke a secessionist movement-- and civil war-- in Katanga, the mineral rich province they intended to hold onto for as long as they could. On September 15 the CIA backed a coup d’état by Joseph Mobutu, who promptly arrested Lumumba. Mobutu turned him over to the Katanga right-wing rebels where he was murdered by a firing squad commanded by Belgian army officers. Belgians later tried to destroy the evidence of the murder in sulfuric acid but some kept teeth and bullets from the body as souvenirs.

A few weeks ago, we looked at how the Nazi-oriented Dulles Brothers and their Republican Party allies illegally smuggled thousands of Eastern European Nazi war criminals into the U.S. for political purposes. But that isn't all the Dulles Brothers were up to after World War II.

Declassified U.S. cables from the year preceding the assassination bristle with paranoia about a Lumumba-led Soviet Communist takeover. The CIA was hatching plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and was accused of fomenting coups and planning assassinations worldwide. And Lumumba clearly scared the daylights out of the Eisenhower administration. "In high quarters here, it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will [have] disastrous consequences... for the interests of the free world generally," CIA Director Allen Dulles wrote. "Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective."

Even out of office, Lumumba remained under the microscope of Western spy services. His ties to Moscow frightened Washington. His fierce anti-colonialism unnerved Brussels. Belgium finally got its chance at Lumumba after Congolese authorities arrested him in December 1960. Belgian officials engineered his transfer to the breakaway province of Katanga, which was under Belgian control. De Witte reveals a telegram from Belgium's African-affairs minister, Harold d'Aspremont Lynden, essentially ordering that Lumumba be sent to Katanga. Anyone who knew the place knew that was a death sentence.

Firing squad. When Lumumba arrived in Katanga, on January 17, accompanied by several Belgians, he was bleeding from a severe beating. Later that evening, Lumumba was killed by a firing squad commanded by a Belgian officer. A week earlier, he had written to his wife, "I prefer to die with my head unbowed, my faith unshakable, and with profound trust in the destiny of my country." Lumumba was 35.

The next step was to destroy the evidence. Four days later, Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother cut up the body with a hacksaw and dissolved it in sulfuric acid. In an interview on Belgian television last year, Soete displayed a bullet and two teeth he claimed to have saved from Lumumba's body.

What remains unclear is the extent, if any, of Washington's involvement in the final plot. A Belgian official who helped engineer Lumumba's transfer to Katanga told de Witte that he kept CIA station chief Lawrence Devlin fully informed of the plan. "The Americans were informed of the transfer because they actively discussed this thing for weeks," says de Witte. But Devlin, now retired, denies any previous knowledge of the transfer.

Either way, Lumumba's death served its purpose: It bolstered the shaky regime of a formerly obscure colonel named Joseph Mobutu. During his three-decade rule, Mobutu would run his country, bursting with natural resources, into the depths of poverty. It took a civil war to oust him, and Congo has seen little peace since. Today, at least five countries are fighting in Congo and Lumumba's son, an opposition leader, spent several weeks in a Kinshasa jail cell on politically motivated charges.

At the time Lumumba was a hero to progressive young Americans and the CIA's involvement in his deposition and murder was a wake-up call for many, myself included.

Last week my friend Melody reminded me that January 17 was the 50th anniversary of the cold-blooded murder of Patrice Lumumba by the CIA and their Belgian and Katangan stooges. Allen Dulles claims Eisenhower ordered him to have Lumumba killed. Melody wrote that "the events really were important in shaping the fate of the Congo, and Africa in general [and are] a reminder that the US has had it's hand in all sorts of dirty deeds. Although the U.S. media has always chosen to ignore what the CIA did in the Congo and the anniversary was resolutely ignored in this country (NY Times excepted this time), she suggested that DWT readers take a look at the story last week in the Guardian:

Between 1961 and 1973, six African independence leaders were assassinated by their ex-colonial rulers, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, who was killed 50 years ago today.

Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of newly independent Congo, was the second of five leaders of independence movements in African countries to be assassinated in the 1960s by their former colonial masters, or their agents.

A sixth, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, was ousted in a western-backed coup in 1966, and a seventh, Amilcar Cabral, leader of the west African liberation movement against Portugal of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde or PAIGC) in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, was assassinated in 1973.

Lumumba's death in 1961 followed on from that of the opposition leader of Cameroon, Felix Moumie, poisoned in 1960. Sylvanus Olympio, leader of Togo was killed in 1963. Mehdi Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan opposition movement was kidnapped in France in 1965 and his body never found. Eduardo Mondlane, leader of Mozambique's Frelimo, fighting for independence from the Portuguese, died from a parcel bomb in 1969.

The loss 50 years ago of this group of leaders, who all knew each other, and had a common political project based on national dignity, crippled each of their countries, and the African continent. The effects are still evident today.

Ben Barka and Cabral were revolutionary theoreticians-- as significant as Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Their influence reverberated far beyond their own continent. At the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, organised by Ben Barka before his death, Cuban leader Fidel Castro's closing speech referred to "one of the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, Comrade Amílcar Cabral, who instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and the success of his struggle for liberation."

The Third World Movement, challenging the economic and political world dominance of the colonial powers, the US, and the neocolonial leaders favoured by the west, would have two short decades of ambition and optimism despite the long shadow of its great leaders' deaths.

Today, it is impossible to touch down at the (far from modernised) airport of Lubumbashi in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo-- in 1961 known as Elizabethville, in Congo (then renamed Zaire)-- without a shiver of recollection of the haunting photograph taken of Lumumba there shortly before his assassination, and after beatings, torture and a long, long flight in custody across the vast country which had so loved him. This particular failure of the United Nations to protect one man and his two colleagues was every bit as significant as that in Srebrenica in 1995, when 8,000 men and boys were killed.

Lumumba's own words, written to his wife just four months after the exhilaration of independence day in the capital Kinshasa are a reminder of who he was and why he meant so much to so many people then, and still does today.

"Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets… a history of glory and dignity."

Lumumba would not have been surprised that his successor, Joseph Mobuto was the US strategic ally in Africa for 30 years. Congo was too rich, too big, and too important for the west to lose control as they would have had Lumumba lived.

How ironic that Mobuto was succeeded by Laurent Desire Kabila, whose 10th anniversary of assassination, by his own guards, falls just one day before Lumumba's?

UPDATE: Russ Baker Wants To Make Sure We're Aware Of The Bush Connection

Baker points out that the CIA was a sponsor of Mobutu's and that George H.W. Bush later welcomed the savage kleptocrat and tyrant to America as "one of our most valued friends." Three days after Lumumba was murdered, JFK was sworn in as President of the United States and Baker's nook, Family of Secrets makes a hard to deny case for the involvement of the CIA, Dulles and... George H.W. Bush. From Baker's WhoWhatWhy:

In my book, Family of Secrets, I cite evidence that the elder Bush was deeply involved in C.I.A covert operations during the time in which both assassinations took place. I document his close ties to mining interests comparable to the ones Lumumba himself had angered-- by declaring, as Hochschild recounts, that it was not enough for the Congolese to gain political independence from colonial rule, but that “Africans had to also benefit from the great wealth in their soil.”

More troubling are the many inconsistencies and gaps that I discovered in accounts by Bush and others concerning his activities on and around the day of the assassination, all of which are extensively documented and footnoted. These include:

•    Bush’s noted inability to recall where he was on November 22, 1963;

•    his longtime friendship with George de Mohrenschildt, a mentor and confidant to Lee Harvey Oswald;

•    a declassified FBI memo identifying Bush as a C.I.A officer working with Cuban exiles at the time of the assassination;

•    FBI records documenting a call Bush himself placed to the Bureau on Nov. 22 from a location near Dallas, offering to identify a possible triggerman in the assassination-- a man Bush knew far better than he revealed at the time, and who he knew could not have been the triggerman

•     Barbara Bush’s revelation in her 1994 book, Barbara Bush: A Memoir, that the Bushes were having lunch the week of November 22 with Alfred Ulmer, an old friend who, research shows, was one of the C.I.A.’s experts in deposing leaders.

•    Bush’s close relationship with the military intelligence official whose unit and unit members played an astonishing array of roles on November 22, from forcing their way into the lead car of Kennedy’s motorcade to providing the interpreter who framed Marina Oswald’s statements in a way that implicated her husband.

How do we thank Justice David Souter for his service?

"The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we're in, whatever we are doing, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed by what we do. And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right."

-- David Souter, after being sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in 1990

"'I have written the following reply,' Souter said dryly [in response to Chief Justice Roberts], as if preparing to read a dissent. A ripple of laughter went through the courtroom. 'You quoted the poet, and I will, too, in words that set out the ideal of the life engaged, "where love and need are one,"' Souter read. 'That phrase accounts for the finest moments of my life on this court, as we have agreed or contended with each other over those things that matter to decent people in a civil society.'"

-- Dana Milbank's Washington Post account of retiring Justice Souter's response to Chief Justice John Roberts' reading of a letter to Souter from his eight current colleagues as well as his longtime former colleague, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- and the justice's parting words

by Ken

In his Washington Post piece Milbank went on to write:

Because of Souter's quiet ways (he uttered all of 200 words in his farewell yesterday), it's easy to forget how different the country would be today if this unmarried recluse from the North hadn't decamped long ago to join the court's liberal wing. Had he remained the conservative that President George H.W. Bush thought he was getting when he nominated Souter in 1990, there's every possibility that abortion would be illegal in the United States today, that the Ten Commandments would be displayed throughout schools and courthouses, and that the law of the land on any number of issues -- guns, terrorism, race -- would be different.

Before yesterday's session began, William Suter, the clerk of the Supreme Court, stood in the chamber in his tails and vest, giving a talk to a group of visitors. "Politics is over here," Suter said, holding up one fist. "Law is over here," he said, holding his other fist apart. Would that it were so. Everybody who has heard of Bush v. Gore knows that the justices have at times been as political as their counterparts across the street in the Capitol.

But Souter refused to play his assigned partisan role in the court's battles -- and he defied the conservatives one final time yesterday. As the five other Reagan and Bush appointees formed a majority to say that New Haven, Conn., discriminated against white firefighters, Souter joined the two Clinton appointees and John Paul Stevens in a dissent accusing the majority of a "confounding" opinion that "misconceives one of our nation's principal civil rights laws."

It's been a busy day, and a contention-filled one, and so it's been left till now to say good-bye to a real American hero. A hero of mine anyway. A man who came almost literally out of nowhere. Had anyone besides New Hampshire home-state colleague then-Sen. Warren Rudman heard of Souter when Rudman recommended him to President George H.W. Bush to replace one of the great justices in the Court's history, retiring 84-year-old William J. Brennan? (The two NH pols went back a ways. In 1971 then-state Attorney General Rudman had picked Souter, an assistant AG, to be deputy attorney general.)

Naturally we all assumed the worst. Wikipedia reminds us:

The nine senators voting against Souter included Ted Kennedy and John Kerry from Souter's neighboring state of Massachusetts. These senators, along with seven others, painted Souter as a right-winger in the mold of Robert Bork. They based their claim on Souter's friendships with many conservative politicians in New Hampshire. Their allegations failed to influence the other 90 senators. The press called him the "stealth justice" and reported that his professional record provoked little real controversy and provided very little "paper trail." President Bush saw this lack of a paper trail as a positive for Souter, because one of President Reagan's nominees, Bork, had recently been rejected by the Senate partially because of the availability of his extensive written opinions on issues. Bush claimed that he did not know Souter's stances on abortion, affirmative action, or other issues. The National Organization for Women opposed Souter's nomination and held a rally outside the hearings to oppose his selection. The then-president of NOW, Molly Yard, testified that Souter would "end... freedom for women in this country." Souter was also opposed by the NAACP, which urged its 500,000 members to write letters to their senators asking for Souter's defeat. Despite this opposition, Souter won an easy confirmation compared to those of later Republican appointees.

Souter spoke of his admiration for the conservative Justice John Marshall Harlan II of the Warren court, as well as for liberal Justice William Brennan of the same court, during his confirmation hearings. The Wall Street Journal described the events leading up to the appointment of the "liberal jurist" in a 2000 editorial, saying Rudman in his "Yankee Republican liberalism" took "pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House chief of staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle." Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had "suspected all along" that Souter would not "overturn activist liberal precedents." Sununu later said that he had "a lot of disappointment" about Souter's positions on the court and would have preferred him to be more similar to Justice Antonin Scalia.

Well, I've learned a lot about Senator Rudman that I didn't know at the time. It was a great, history-making recommendation he made, and for 19 years we've been beyond fortunate to have this quiet, unassuming man serving on our highest court. It's generally reported that he became increasingly unhappy with the poinsonous partisan divide in Washington, which of course has become pretty hard to escape on the Supreme Court, and it's hard not to honor his feeling that he's had enough, just as it's hard not to honor his wish not to cling to his seat, but to retire still in relative good health to go back home to enjoy his retirement years.

Boy, will he be missed.

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Next time you hear a Republicrackpot (or Bush Dog Dem) yammer about "fiscal conservatives" and "tax-and-spend liberals," shove this in his/her face

The colleague who passed along this dazzling cartoon (as usual, click on it to enlarge) appended this note: "This really hits a message right out of the ballpark." Yes indeed! -- Ken

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Ask President Nixon: How do you feel about Al Gore sharing the Nobel Peace Prize?

"Former vice president Al Gore and a United Nations panel that monitors climate change were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for their work educating the world about global warming and pressing for political action to control it."
--Howard Schneider and Debbi Wilgoren, on washingtonpost.com this morning

We didn't even have to contact former President Richard Milhous Nixon to Ask President Nixon for comment about Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize. The old dickster couldn't wait to unburden himself:

Jesus God in heaven! It was bad enough when that little prick Jimmy Carter glommed onto a Nobel. That whining, holier-than-thou showboat. I mean, anybody can give the world peace by just not making war. What's the trick to that?

I did it the hard way, though, by making damn sure every crackpot Commie knew I'd bomb the bejeezus out of anybody looked at old Uncle Sam the wrong way. But did anyone give me a Nobel Prize? No-o-o-o!

Little Al Gore?! His old daddy was bad enough--a whining liberal loser. But Little Al? The guy who managed to get elected president and then watch the other slob take his place in the White House? And the other slob was an ignorant pile of protoplasm like the little Bush boy. Only thing that saved him was his daddy sent my old people--my old people and my kind of people, people who know how to get things done--into Florida to save his sorry ass.

I always thought the little Bush boy's daddy was a Grade A creep--it was like you could run your hand right through where he was standing and there wasn't a damn thing there. But the little Bush boy, jeez! They might as well have put an eggplant in the Oval Office.

Little Al Gore! You remember when he had to have some woman dress him in beige so people would think he's more of a man? Christ, if they gave a Nobel Prize for whining, that they should give to Al Gore.

The only good thing about it is that it's got to fry the little Bush boy's patoot, and his incorporeal daddy's, seeing the guy who beat him get the Peace Prize. He's probably saying, "Well, if they give him the Peace Prize, I should at least get the War Prize!"

Christ, is that W dumb or what? He probably thinks a Nobel Prize is what Prince Charles gives his horse-faced wife every two or three months. Of course, that W's such a pansy, he probably hasn't done that since, well, has anybody DNA-tested those idiot Bush twins to see if they're actually related to him? The idea of even Laura the Librarian getting in the same bed with that lump is enough to make a dead president croak.