[Mb-civic] A Response to MUST READ-what Bill sent

[Michael Butler]

You are right on. It applies to both parties. It is up to us, the voters, to
make this change.
Thanks
Michael

> If only Moore had created a documentary, rather than a docu-drama, the
> Truth (e.g., cover for the Bin Laden family) would have shaken the
> Nation to reform.
> 
> We have to remove the emotive and divisive nature of politics Michael.
> It's not Democrats versus Republicans, it's all of us realizing that
> there will be no integrity in the White House until there is an
> accountable, open dialogue in this Nation.
> 
> Although the corruption runs deep, the cesspool is shallow compared to
> elsewhere.  Nonetheless, stink is unappealing at any level.
> 
> Love - Mike 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Butler [mailto:michael at michaelbutler.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 07, 2005 11:24 PM
> To: SPECIAL from Michael Butler
> Subject: FW: MUST READ-what Bill sent
> 
> 
> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: Michael Butler <michael at michaelbutler.com>
> Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 15:43:26 -0800
> To: Civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>, HAIR List
> <mb-hair at islandlists.com>
> Subject: MUST READ-what Bill sent
> 
> Message: 5
> Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 07:18:32 -0500
> From: William Swiggard <swiggard at comcast.net>
> Subject: [Mb-civic] Deconstructing Cheney - James Carroll - Boston
>   Globe    Op-Ed
> To: mb-civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
> Message-ID: <436F4618.4020105 at comcast.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Deconstructing Cheney
> 
> By James Carroll  |  November 7, 2005
> 
> THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and
> obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the
> long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. He
> began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald
> Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs
> to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's
> ''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that
> Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity,
> the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two
> set out to gut the program-- the beginning of the Republican rollback of
> the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall.
> 
> When Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he again
> tapped Cheney as his deputy. Now they set out to destroy detente, the
> fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.
> Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War
> bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to
> refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key
> to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age.
> Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from
> the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central
> America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's
> response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war
> against Panama.
> 
> As Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the nonviolent dismantling of the
> Soviet Union, Cheney warned Bush not to trust it. When the justification
> for the huge military machine over which Cheney presided disappeared, he
> leapt on the next casus belli -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
> Hussein, a former ally, was now Hitler.
> 
> Against Cheney's own uniformed advisers (notably including Joint Chiefs
> Chairman Colin Powell), he forged Washington's choice of violence over
> diplomacy. The first Gulf War, remembered by Americans as justified, was
> in fact an unnecessary affirmation of military might as the ground of
> international order, just as an historic alternative was opening up. US
> responses in that period, mainly shaped by Cheney, stand in stark
> contrast to Gorbachev's, who, refusing to call on military might even to
> save the Soviet Union, was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks.
> The unsentimental Cheney, eschewing human rights rhetoric, was explicit
> in defining America's Gulf War interest as all about oil. (The oil
> industry having made Cheney rich.) Cheney's initiatives, more than any
> other's, defined the insult to the Arab world that spawned Al Qaeda.
> 
> With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable
> that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road
> appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit
> in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The
> true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the
> national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as
> vice president) showed itself for a moment.
> 
> The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room,
> Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air
> Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut
> Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's
> absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the
> president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There
> was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make
> an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.
> 
> At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an
> instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war
> on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to,
> and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side),
> Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running,
> he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney
> ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney
> fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the
> war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for
> which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the
> chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.
> 
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11
> /07/
> deconstructing_cheney/
> 
> ------ End of Forwarded Message
> 
> 
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