The Political Junkies
archived: 10 - 16 Sep, 2006 Back Next
UPDATED: Sept 14, 2006
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT
Bush is promising to press forward with his privatization of Social Security following the mid-term elections. The Iowa Des Moines Register provides the best editorial reaction to the Republican effort to dismantle Social Security:
President Bush and other
Republicans have recently indicated they'd like to revisit Social Security
reform.
Been there. Done that.
Let's hope our nation's leaders won't waste more time on the tired idea of
allowing American workers to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll
tax into private accounts. Last year, the president campaigned around the nation
to sell the idea of personal accounts. It got nowhere. Most members of Congress
don't want to touch the idea with a 10-foot pole.
There's a good reason for that. Allowing personal accounts in lieu of fully
funding Social Security is a bad idea in search of a problem.
Social Security isn't facing a fiscal crisis. It has a projected revenue
shortfall in 35 years. Even that projection is questionable because it assumes
slow growth in the U.S. economy. But diverting Social Security payroll taxes
into personal accounts may very well create a crisis.
Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system: Today's workers fund benefits for
today's retirees. If today's workers divert money into private accounts, whose
money will be used to pay current benefits? The cost of covering the shortfall
could be at least $1 trillion. Where is that money going to come from in a time
of record deficits?
Americans are already free to use private accounts to invest for retirement
through 401(k)s and IRAs. If politicians really want to shore up Social
Security, they can advocate something less risky and painful, such as lifting
the cap on payroll taxes.
With all the other important issues facing the nation - from lack of affordable
health care to a war in Iraq - why insist on beating this dead horse?
Maybe it's a lack of creativity. Maybe it's that the real issues, such as
promoting creation of more family-supporting jobs, reforming immigration policy
or reining in out-of-control spending on Medicare, lack simple fixes. But
personal accounts in Social Security won't fix anything and could place at risk
the only secure retirement dollars for many Americans.
If Americans want to stop the Republican onslaught on Social Security, the answer is to elect a Democratic Congress this November.
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UPDATE: September 12, 2006
CHENEY & CONDI
Bush’s pit bulls are off the leash and attacking.
The Bush administration offered a combative defense today of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, though Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, acknowledged that the insurgency in Iraq had proved tougher than anticipated.
Mr. Cheney, who predicted in May 2005 that the insurgency was in its “last throes,” said on NBC-TV that there was no question “that the insurgency has gone on longer and been more difficult than I had anticipated. I’ll be the first to admit that.”
Still, he said that 2005, with its positive developments for a nascent Iraqi democracy, would prove to be a turning point.
Separately, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Taliban forces in Afghanistan had also proved more persistent than expected. After the American assault in late 2001 ousted them from power, she said on Fox-TV, “They came back somewhat more organized and somewhat more capable than we would have expected.”
But Mr. Cheney said he remained convinced that invading Iraq was “absolutely” the right thing to do.
Because Saddam Hussein threatened his own people and the region, Mr. Cheney said, he would have urged precisely the same course even if he had known that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
They obviously have not read these recent stories:
Iraq
Situation Called Dire in West Iraq
Anbar Is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says
Top military leaders insist new U.S. strategy is desperately needed in Iraq
Kremlin envoy says Iraq turning into "terrorist corporation"
Afghanistan
British officer resigns over 'grotesquely clumsy' war in Afghanistan
REBELS 'CONTROL HALF OF AFGHANISTAN'
NATO wants reinforcements in Afghanistan
The message that Democrats must carry to all Americans is that Bush and the neoconservatives are not only losing the political battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we are creating the breeding ground in which the next round of jihadists will come.
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UNRAVELING
The web of manipulated intelligence by which Republicans led America to war is unraveling almost daily.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has released a report that confirms what progressive Democrats have been asserting; Saddam had no ties to al-Qaida:
Saddam Hussein rejected overtures from al-Qaida and believed Islamic extremists were a threat to his regime, a reverse portrait of an Iraq allied with Osama bin Laden painted by the Bush White House, a Senate panel has found.
The administration's version was based in part on intelligence that White House officials knew was flawed, according to Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing newly declassified documents released by the panel.
The report, released Friday, discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.
As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, President Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."
Democrats singled out CIA Director George Tenet, saying that during a private meeting in July Tenet told the panel that the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration's case for war despite his own agents' doubts about the intelligence it was based on.
"Tenet admitted to the Intelligence Committee that the policymakers wanted him to 'say something about not being inconsistent with what the president had said,'" Intelligence Committee member Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters Friday.
Tenet also told the committee that complying had been "the wrong thing to do," according to Levin.
"Well, it was much more than that," Levin said. "It was a shocking abdication of a CIA director's duty not to act as a shill for any administration or its policy."
The full report is captivating reading and a link to the report is provided below:
Links to Iraq Intelligence Phase II Reports
Americans learned this week that the Bush administration affirmatively prevented pre-war planning for a post war Iraq:
Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.
In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.
Rumsfeld did replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, after Shinseki told Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq. . . .
On Sept. 11, he said, "life just went to hell."
That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to "get ready to go to war."
A day or two later, Rumsfeld was "telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.
"Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq."
Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, "My gosh, we're in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It's just going to be too much." . . .
Planning continued to be a challenge.
"The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."
Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction.
Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.
"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.
"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."
As the situation in Iraq deteriorates, the Bush administration is “cooking the books” to hide the reality of today’s Iraq:
U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.
In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.
That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.
But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Johnson declined to provide an actual number for the U.S. tally of August deaths or for July, when the Baghdad city morgue counted a record 1,855 violent deaths.
Violent deaths for August, a morgue official told McClatchy Newspapers on Friday, totaled 1,526, a 17.7 percent decline from July and about the same as died violently in June.
The dispute is an important one. With Baghdad violence reaching record levels in July, U.S. commanders warned that the country was tipping toward civil war. They then ordered 8,000 U.S. troops and 3,000 Iraqis to conduct house-by-house searches of Baghdad's neighborhoods in an effort to root out insurgent gunmen and militia death squads in Operation Together Forward.
These growing revelations are having a disastrous effect on America’s ability to conduct foreign policy. Bush has simply squandered American prestige around the world. Transatlantic Trends has polled Europeans and Americans as to their attitudes on various international issues. One critical finding is that Europeans no longer believe that US leadership in world affairs is desirable.
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The dramatic decline in America’s standing in the world is directly related to views of Bush:
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Bush and the neoconservatives fabricated a war in Iraq that is not being won on the ground or in the view of citizens of the world.
Americans can begin to bring an end to this madness only by electing Democratic Party majorities in Congress in November.
NO SYSTEM OF JUSTICE
Bush is pushing Congress to authorize a system of justice where the accused is not permitted to see the evidence against them. JAG lawyers told a House committee that they objected to keeping evidence “secret.” One General squared the issue precisely:
"I am not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognized by civilized people where an individual can be tried and convicted without seeing the evidence against him," said Brigadier Gen. James C. Walker, staff judge advocate to the Marine Corps commandant.
What Bush wishes to create is not civilized; more importantly, not permitting the accused to know the evidence against them has long been the hallmark of totalitarian and communist regimes.
These are the stakes in the 2006 mid-term elections.
Last Update: 09/16/2006