Wow. Well, if this isn’t a sterling case of psychological projection at work?

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday the world faces “a new type of fascism” and likened critics of the Bush administration’s war strategy to those who tried to appease the Nazis in the 1930s.

Who are these ‘appeasers’ you speak of, Mr. Rumsfeld. You mean those of the like of Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, who was on the board of directors of the Nazi-owned Union Banking Corporation, shut down in October of 1942 under the Trading With The Enemy Act. He was also actually a business partner of Fritz Thyssen, the chief financier of Hitler and his rise to power. There are countless other examples of ‘conservative’ American businessmen applauding Hitler, and encouraging business and ‘appeasement’ of him into the war. The GOP is on record for openly discouraging attempts to confront him during that entire period, seeing him as a positive for Germany and the world. You mean that kind of appeasement of the Nazis, Mr. Rumsfeld?

Speaking to several thousand veterans at the American Legion’s national convention, Rumsfeld recited what he called the lessons of history, including the failure to confront Hitler. He quoted Winston Churchill as observing that trying to accommodate Hitler was “a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.”

“I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism,” he said.

New type of ‘fascism’, as opposed to the more generally understood form of it which you are so clearly practicing?

“Can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased?” he asked.

The certainly cannot, which is why there is a tireless effort on behalf of those who believe in the the promise and ideals of this nation to actually see them lived up to, and to rid our nation of warmongering extremists who believe the rest of the world should be bludgeoned into submission to our every corporate board of directors whim.

“Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America - not the enemy - is the real source of the world’s troubles?”

Rumsfeld spoke to the American Legion as part of a coordinated White House strategy, in advance of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to take the offensive against administration critics at a time of doubt about the future of Iraq and growing calls to withdraw U.S. troops.

Rumsfeld recalled a string of recent terrorist attacks, from 9/11 to deadly bombings in Bali, London and Madrid, and said it should be obvious to anyone that terrorists must be confronted, not appeased.

Of course, but how this is done is the issue at hand. When confronted with a yellow jacket nest in my garage, I don’t go after it by simply swinging wildly at it with a baseball bat. There might be a better way to make sure it is effectively removed without releasing a hundred more, and getting myself stung to death in the process. But that wouldn’t be macho enough for you, nor make you and your friends filthy rich from the military-corporate complex you so effectively control and profit off of.

“Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths and lies and distortions being told about our troops and about our country,” he said.

That is exactly what many of us are trying to do, Mr. Rumsfeld. If you would stop spinning so many myths and lies, too numerable to name here (though just starting with your claims about knowing exactly where WMDs were in Iraq, tying Bin Laden to Hussein, and lying about the death of a real American, Pat Tillman, would be a good start).

Rumsfeld made similar arguments in Reno about doubters of the administration’s approach to fighting terrorism, saying too many in this country want to “blame America first” and ignore the enemy.

No one is ‘blaming America first’, as you so disingenuously assert here. We blame you, and your effort to conflate your ruling clique with the nation is a hallmark trait of the very fascism who seem to want to project upon your personal enemies (which are anyone who questions your absolute rule).

Rumsfeld and his clique are ill. Truly, clinically ill.

Read The Full Piece Here

Keith Olbermann goes above and beyond the call of duty with this excellent essay and much needed public declaration regarding Rumsfeld’s musings. He calls forth the spirit of one of America’s greatest citizens, Edward R. Murrow, and narrows in on the fact that yes, there is fascism, indeed. Watch The Video Here

William Rivers Pitt weighs in on this issue as well with his take on just who are the ‘Fascist Appeasers’

Update: Frank Rich weighs in with this eviscerating historical reminder about the actual appeasement of these ‘fascists that Rumsfeld and his clique have had over the years. The chutzpah of these people know no bounds, obviously relying on American’s propensity to amnesia to bail them out once again.

Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance With the Nazis

Wow.

I really question whether I have the nerve and the principles to do something like this. Even if this person had certain safety valves in place (publishing opportunities, other income, major savings to fall back on, etc…) it does not detract from the sheer ballsiness of the act. Lord knows we need a lot more people doing it today.

Dear Father Leahy,

I am writing to resign my post as an adjunct professor of English at Boston College.

I am doing so — after five years at BC, and with tremendous regret — as a direct result of your decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be the commencement speaker at this year’s graduation.

Many members of the faculty and student body already have voiced their objection to the invitation, arguing that Rice’s actions as secretary of state are inconsistent with the broader humanistic values of the university and the Catholic and Jesuit traditions from which those values derive.

But I am not writing this letter simply because of an objection to the war against Iraq. My concern is more fundamental. Simply put, Rice is a liar.

For cynics who feel this is of no consequence, and what did this single individual really change by taking this self-sacrificing action, its worth remembering what Russian author and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remarked to colleagues who questioned the wisdom and effectiveness of his going public with his anti-Soviet writings: I may not be able to change what is happening, but it is not going to happen with my complicity.

Amen.

Read the full letter by Steve Almond Here

Wow. This guy is pissed.

A telling sign of the sad state of America’s reputation and profile in the world today.

Courtesy of ESPN Magazine….

“For security reasons, the US team bus was the only one of 32 team buses at the World Cup that was not adorned with its country’s flag.”

Hmm, wonder why? People in the States seem to want to plaster it on just about anything and everything. Guess they figured those socialist Europeans must just hate freedom. And if ‘they’ hate us ‘because of our freedoms’, then that might explain why the Bush administration is making such efforts to eliminate those very same American freedoms we too often take for granted. That way, if we don’t have those freedoms of ours any longer, then ‘they’ won’t hate us anymore and won’t attack us.

E.J. Dionne Jr. states it pretty well here…

The patriotism of the conservative goes unquestioned. But the progressive and the reformer have a problem with what passes for unadulterated patriotism. By nature, the reformer is bound to insist that the country, however glorious, is not a perfect place, that it is capable of doing wrong as well as right. Most reformers guard their patriotic credentials by moving quickly to the next logical step: that the true genius of America has always been its capacity for self-correction. I’d assert that this is a better argument for patriotism than any effort to pretend that the Almighty has marked us as the world’s first flawless nation.

Read his complete essay from The Washington Post Here

Sen. Pat Roberts is a coward and a sycophant to power. Here he proves his mighty metal as a steward of America, ‘the home of the brave’.

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you and may posterity forget that ye were once our countrymen.”
  -  Samuel Adams

America, as a bastion of liberal democracy sure is a nice idea, but God forbid if someone actually might get hurt in its defense or practice.

It might be worth recalling some of the words of one of America’s most notable Founders, Mr. Patrick Henry. Senator Roberts, may I introduce you Here?

My German born mother who adopted this country, America, as her own when I was but a baby, grew up in WWII Nazi Germany. My mother raised me to love and cherish our democracy. She more than most Americans knew how truly special it is to live under a system that respects the life and freedoms of the individual. She was a person who understood the meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. She understood very clearly what it was to grow up under a government that restricted/banned individual freedom of speech, or the freedom to assemble.

You tried Mom, but I didn’t understand.

As a young adult I enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp. In my idealistic and naive youth I remember thinking that the USA was the champion of freedom and if ever we were committed to war the reasons would be sound and just. And if I were to die while protecting our shores or even the rights and privileges of the oppressed in other parts of the world, then so be it. After all we “are the good guys.” Eight years later after marriage and the birth of our daughter I decided to leave the service and devote myself to my family and the American dream.

I was a little wiser, but I still didn’t understand.

In my thirties I worked hard, was lucky enough to find decent work with good pay. I paid my bills, and taxes. I voted. After each election cycle I turned my thoughts to other things, leaving the running of our country and democracy to our elected officials. They will know what is best. After all, they represent me, an American citizen. They will act in my best interest.

I still didn’t understand.

I’m now in my forties. I began to take notice. I’m not sure what it was, but I think it was the Republican party’s attempt and success of derailing any form of real governmental progress during the Clinton administration over what in my eyes should have been a private matter between President Clinton and his wife. Why were the Republicans so ready to put the governing of the American people on the back burner while they spent millions upon millions of our money trying to impeach him? Why did they hate him so? The government coffers had a huge surplus, and the economy at the time was booming. Something was going on, there were obviously other forces, other agendas at work here. For the first time in my life, I began to pay attention.

I was beginning to understand.

The rest is history. We have a president that was placed in office by the Supreme Court of the United States. We have an administration that condones the use of torture, and has been condemned by Amnesty International for human rights violations. (An organization that the USA in the past had been all too eager, rightfully so, to quote when pointing the finger at other oppressive governments, but conveniently rejects when the finger is pointing at us.) We have an administration that allows warrant-less spying on its citizens in direct violation of our Constitution. We have an administration that openly expresses its right to “pre-emptive” military attacks on sovereign nations. No country in the world is safe as long as you have an administration that is willing to cook the books with regard to bogus intelligence. We have a president who feigns open debate while his audiences are either pre-screened‚ “Bush friendly” or are in uniform and bound by duty to honor their “Commander-In-Chief.” I would remind those in uniform that their first duty is to protect the Constitution of the United States.

We have an administration that will do business with the oppressive tyrants of the world as long as it is in “America’s interest” while professing to the rest of the world that we adhere to the rights of all people to be free. We have an administration that currently represses free speech by shuffling dissenting protest off to cordoned off “free speech zones” or by passing ordinances that revoke the right to peaceful assembly as was done outside of his Crawford, TX, ranch. As Cindy Sheehan now knows, one is not even allowed to wear a T-shirt expressing dissent without risking arrest.

This list could go on for many more pages, from the corporate controlled media to the robbery of the American treasury by our elected officials. From no bid contracts to war profiteers like Haliburton to the unconstitutional “Patriot Act.”

But I now know what my mother tried so hard for me to understand when I was younger. That Democracy can never, ever be taken for granted. It needs to be loved and caressed. It needs to be cherished. And the citizens of this nation need to demand that its principles will be adhered to. For to ignore it we will lose it. Be a citizen and follow the very important issues that are a part of our world today. Follow them closely (and use internet/library sources to further investigate what you hear from the mass media). Contact your elected officials and let them know where you stand. Be a part of our democracy, get involved!

“That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
- Theodore Roosevelt

Mike Baker
Xenia, OH

Gotta hand it to the guy. This takes a little bit of courage. Of course, it would have been helpful had he become more aware of some of the stark realities around this corporate conglomerate disguised as a human being, to paraphrase Ralph Nader, but I am glad to have him on board with the rest of the ‘reality based community’.

An Apology From A Bush Voter
By Doug McIntyre
Host, McIntyre in the Morning
Talk Radio 790 KABC

There’s nothing harder in public life than admitting you’re wrong. By the way, admitting you’re wrong can be even tougher in private life. If you don’t believe me, just ask Bill Clinton or Charlie Sheen. But when you go out on the limb in public, it’s out there where everyone can see it, or in my case, hear it.

So, I’m saying today, I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that he’s the worst President, period.

He went on to make some salient points here…

We’re being governed by paper-mache patriots; brightly painted red, white and blue, but hollow to the core. Both parties have mastered the cynical arts of media manipulation and fund raising. They’ve learned the lessons of Watergate and burn the tapes. They have learned to divide the nation for their own gain. They have demonstrated the willingness to exploit any tragedy for personal advantage. The contempt they have for the American people is without parallel.

This is painful to say, and I’m sure for many of you, painful to read. But it’s impossible to heal the country until we’re willing to acknowledge the truth no matter how painful. We have to wean ourselves off sugar coated partisan lies.

With a belated tip of the cap to Ralph Nader, the system is broken, so broken…

Read The Full Apology Here

The Bureaucracy Strikes Back: Fallen Legion 3

There just seems to be no end to the politicization of *everything* with the Bush administration.

Here are more disturbing examples documented by Nick Turse of the TomDispatch.

In the first installment of this series, I offered 42 names to begin what now seems an endless - and ever-growing - list of top officials as well as beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their government posts in protest or were ridiculed, defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arm tactics, cronyism, and disastrous policies. In the second installment, I added what turned out to be a modest 175 further casualties to the rolls of “the Fallen.” With this latest installment, TomDispatch’s tally of the battling bureaucracy’s casualties stands at approximately 243 - and rising (so please continue to send your suggestions of deserving legionnaires to: fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com).

Despite this toll, now into the hundreds and counting, it seems that we’ve barely scratched the surface. In fact, since the last installment, other commentators have increased our knowledge of these folks by digging into what Tom Engelhardt has aptly called the Bush administration’s “war with the bureaucracy” - a battle between the Bush administration and the career civil servants (sometimes even Bush’s own appointees), who constitute “the only significant check-and-balance in our system since September 11, 2001.”

In one such effort, Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr., and Evan Thomas, writing for Newsweek chronicled a Palace Revolt - a secret war waged not by black-ops troops in the wilds of Waziristan, but behind closed doors in Washington where “loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees fought a quiet battle to rein in the President’s power in the war on terror.” They profiled a number of the unlikely rebels, including:

Read the list here

A newly discovered memoir by a German classified as “Aryan” describes the insidious early spread of Nazism and how hard it was to resist.

Charles Taylor writes in Salon about a book on how fascism can destroy a society from within, and how seemingly respectable societies allow for such events to transpire. I know it seems like a cliche anymore these days, but it is a lesson we are overdue in heeding with meaningful seriousness.

Here are just a few of the key points outlined in this review, though this is a highly recommended and relevant essay, that effectively and accurately puts the onus of responsibility on the course of events of a nation and society on all of its members, not just a few rogue leaders.

By not limiting his definition of history to the stories of the powerful (who are often presumed to be the only ones to make it), Haffner is, I think, committing an act of resistance. It isn’t just that Haffner is acknowledging political and historical reality (”The most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large”), but that he is insisting on the democratic idea that people are not merely “objects of history.” Writing in the midst of a crushing dictatorship, Haffner is saying that defiance can come even from an individual who simply refuses to accept the “truth” of the political rhetoric that is put before him.

The question that always springs from accounts of Hitler’s Germany is “Why didn’t the Germans resist?” Some of the reasons have long been obvious. There is a natural human instinct for survival, however odious the forms it takes or the lengths it may go to. And there is also the understandable refusal to believe that the worst will come to pass. Again and again in “Defying Hitler” Haffner’s acquaintances talk of the Nazis as clowns who, because they cannot help revealing their true natures, are destined to fall out of power.

Haffner’s endorsement of the idea that even dictators are powerless without the consent (or at least the passivity) of the masses means that “Defying Hitler” has no time for quibbling about how much the Germans knew and when; he was there shortly before World War II broke out, after all. Haffner takes it for granted that Germans knew about the brutality of Nazi rule — brutality that, logically, would only increase as the state consolidated its power — and that they lacked the will to resist it.

——————

This, then, is the chapter that none of the film versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” have given us: what life feels like to the pods, a fleeting taste of how easy it would be to submit, how pleasant to see the world through the eyes of the young Nazi who addresses them one morning: “What dismal faces you’re all making, in such glorious weather — and with such a satisfying occupation.” What a relief it would be to sleep.

Read The Full Article Here