I hesitated to circulate this item, as it's pretty rough stuff, but I
suppose that if the New York Times can publish it, I can circulate it.
Like Scooter Libby I can always blame it on someone else, in this case
John Whitbeck, who is pretty much beyond the reach of our law (which I
am not), but in case of trouble I can fall back on the "fall guy
defense," and maybe John will come back here to help mastermind my defense.
This is no tougher than many of the signs and caricatures displayed at
the March Against the War in Washington yesterday, and I hope to provide
you all with a vicarious view of the event (now called a virtual view by
the new technology) in the form of 285 photographs taken by our son
Chris, a professional photographer who covered the March for his
personal website and other interested parties.
Bob Keeley
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Maureen Dowd: "Daffy Does Doom" (NYT)
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 18:57:45 +0300
On John Whitbeck and (Chris K. Sent previously)
TO: Distinguished Recipients
FM: John Whitbeck
Transmitted below is an appreciation of Vice President Dick Cheney from
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Surely, it is long overdue for the men in white coats to take Mr. Cheney
into care -- for his own safety and for the safety of America and the world.
Once a new Vice President is confirmed in office (as Gerald Ford was
after Spiro Agnew copped a plea and resigned), the reality-based
community and the medical community can move on to the nutcase-in-chief
-- not a viable option so long as Vice is lurking in the line of
succession but urgent if and when he is not.
*DAFFY DOES DOOM*
/By Maureen Dowd/
/The New York Times/
Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to
denounce the vice president as "delusional." It was shocking, and Sen.
Durbin should be ashamed of himself.
Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional
doesn't begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over
daftness of the man.
Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly
wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and
continued to insist he's right in the face of overwhelming evidence to
the contrary?
It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions
destroying America's reputation in the world, exhausting the U.S.
military, failing to catch Osama, enhancing Iran's power in the Middle
East and sending American kids to train and arm Iraqi forces so they can
work against American interests.
Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the
guise of exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.
You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of
the way, to remain in complete denial about Iraq's civil war, to have a
total misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to
the American mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.
In a democracy, when you run a campaign that panders to homophobia by
attacking gay marriage and then your lesbian daughter writes a book
about politics and decides to have a baby with her partner, you cannot
tell Wolf Blitzer [of CNN] he's "out of line" when he gingerly raises
the hypocrisy of your position.
Cheney acts more like a member of the James gang than the Jefferson
gang. Asked by Wolf what would happen if the Senate passed a resolution
critical of The Surge, Scary Cheney rumbled, "It won't stop us."
Such an exercise in democracy, he noted, would be "detrimental from the
standpoint of the troops."
Americans learned an important lesson from Vietnam about supporting the
troops even when they did not support the war. From media organizations
to Hollywood celebrities and lawmakers on both sides, everyone backs our
troops. It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably
because they worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway
around the world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture
or the inevitable insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of
their fumbling management of Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to
criticizing the troops. Quel demagoguery.
"Bottom line," Vice told Wolf, "is that we've had enormous successes,
and we will continue to have enormous successes." The biggest threat, he
said, is that Americans may not "have the stomach for the fight."
He should stop casting aspersions on the American stomach. We've had the
stomach for more than 3,000 U.S. deaths in a war sold as a cakewalk.
If W. were not so obsessed with being seen as tough, Cheney could not
influence him with such tripe.
They are perpetually guided by the wrong part of the body. They are
consumed by the fear of looking as if they don't have guts, when they
should be compelled by the desire to look as if they have brains. After
offering Congress an olive branch in the State of the Union, the
president resumed mindless swaggering. Asked Friday why he was
ratcheting up despite the resolutions, W. replied, "In that I'm the
decision maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded
disaster." (Or preordained it.)
The reality of Iraq, as The New York Times' brilliant John Burns
described it to Charlie Rose this week, is that a messy endgame could be
far worse than Vietnam, leading to "a civil war on a scale with
bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we're seeing now," and a
"wider conflagration, with all kinds of implications for the world's
flow of oil, for the state of Israel. What happens to King Abdullah in
Jordan if there's complete chaos in the region?"
Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.
He assumes that the more people think he's crazy, the saner he must be.
In Dr. No's nutty world-view, anti-Americanism is a compliment. The
proof that America is right is that everyone thinks it isn't.
He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone
in the wilderness must be a prophet.
To borrow one of his many dismissive words, it's hogwash.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: March on the Capitol yesterday to demand that the United
States end its war in Iraq Photographs
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:32:11 -0500
From: Christopher Keeley, LICSW
March on the Capitol yesterday to demand that the United States end its
war in Iraq Photographs
http://intervention.org/antiiraqwar.htm
285 - march on the Capitol yesterday to demand that the United States
end its war in Iraq Photographs
© Keeley 2007 goto
http://intervention.org/antiiraqwar.htm
Chris
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