Bush’s top aide Karl Rove just wrote a memoir, entitled Courage and Consequence, in which he claims that Bush 43 did not mislead the nation about weapons of mass destruction as a way to “lie us” into a war.

Crap! Remember the memoirs by other neocons, such as Douglas Feith, who has denied any responsibility in the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal and really any responsibility for anything altogether?

While defending the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, Rove concedes that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction damaged the administration’s credibility. And he blames himself for failing to set the record straight.

Yes, Karl, please DO blame somebody for not finding stacks and warehouses full of WMDs. You might as well blame yourself too for a very different than expected – by people like you – Iraqi reception of our invading troops. After all, some neocons claimed that the Iraqi people would line the streets and welcome us with flowers and tears in their eyes.

“When the pattern of the Democratic attacks became apparent in July 2003, we should have countered in a forceful and overwhelming way,” wrote Rove. “We should have seen this for what it was: a poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency.”

Rove also comes up with all kinds of lame excuses for the administration’s abject failure after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf coast.

We’ll keep this short and succint: Don’t waste your money buying another neocon memoir.

Technorati Tags: bush, Iraq War, justifying, Karl Rove, Katrina, memoir

The battle of Marja, in Afghanistan’s southern poppy belt has been going on for a couple of weeks now. Some 11,000 U.S. and Afghan troops fighting to defeat a few hundred Taliban fighters won’t really change much in Afghanistan. The greater significance of the battle appears to be in how it is perceived in the rest of Afghanistan and in America.

The operation’s true goals are to convince Americans that a new era has arrived in the eight-year-long war and also to show Afghans that U.S. forces and the Afghan government can protect them from the Taliban.

Marja is indeed a Taliban stronghold and despite the fact that the Talib fighters are seriously outnumbered and even more seriously outgunned, at least nine coalition soldiers have died so far and dozens have been wounded. It is a serious, hard, no holds barred battle on the most basic level.

It is being hoped that a swift victory over the Taliban in Marja, followed by a robust development effort, could sway some Afghan fence sitters.

The important thing to realize is that Marja is not a place of any meaningful strategic, or even tactical importance, that even the quickest of victories there – although that doesn’t appear to be possible any longer – will not really influence the outcome of the war, except that the symbolism of a victory might somewhat help the coalition politically.

What might be more meaningful is actually straightening out the situation in Kandahar, with its tangled political rivalries. Among the local power brokers is Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Karzai has been accused of being a drug kingpin and, also, a paid CIA asset. He has of course denied both allegations.

So, it seems to us, that the battle of Marja is really just an excuse not to tangle with a much more difficult situation in Kandahar as yet. Too bad, that its cost in dead and wounded is as high as it is.

Technorati Tags: afghanistan, battle of Marja, corruption, Kandahar, Karzai, politics, Taliban

From top left: Kue Bui for Newsweek; Andrew Hetherington / Redux; James Keyser / Time Life Pictures-Getty Images; Richard A. Bloom / Corbis; Ahmad Al-Rubaye / AFP-Gettty Images; Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images

Newsweek magazine has a very interesting and lengthy article, entitled “The Return of the Neocons” by David Margolick.

Here’s a short excerpt: “One prominent activist on the libertarian end of the party – who hates what he sees as their costly foreign – policy adventurism and the GOP electoral losses (i.e., the presidency and both houses of Congress) he attributes to them – calls them ‘parasites’: with little electoral power of their own, he claims, they have had to attach themselves to others, like George W. Bush. Comfortably ensconced behind a cloak of anonymity, he bristles, but also marvels, at their endurance and effectiveness, comparing them to ‘an infection that keeps coming back.’ “They’ve perfected this absolutely incredible thing: they announce who they are, how powerful they are, how influential they are, and get people to write articles about them,” he says. “But when their policies are perceived to have caused mass chaos, they don’t exist, they didn’t have anything to do with it, they weren’t there, and they get really snotty. And anyone who attacks them is anti-Semitic.”

Worth a read we think.

Technorati Tags: neocons, Newsweek, return

A day before President Obama’s State of the Union address, we pretty much already know that the Massachusetts Senate election results seemed to have greatly influenced what the president is going to actually address.

Under mounting pressure to curb government spending, the president is to propose in his State of the Union address a three-year freeze on federal funding that is not related to national security. That being clearly a concession to public concern about government spending and which could dramatically curtail Obama’s legislative ambitions.

The freeze would take effect in October and limit the overall budget for agencies other than the military, veterans affairs, homeland security and certain international programs to $447 billion a year for the remainder of Obama’s first term.

On the surface it sounds like a step ahead, doesn’t it? But do your math. $447 billion per year, as compared to the ever-rising national debt – as of today already surpassing $13 trillion…

At the same time, when “overseas contingency operations” expenses are added to the U.S. defense budget, it comes up to $663.8 billion for 2010 alone. As a matter of fact, the real figure is even higher, reaching between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion in fiscal year 2010.

All in all the 2009 U.S. military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined and is variously calculated as being some nine times larger than the military budget of China. The United States and its close allies are responsible for about two-thirds of the world’s military spending – of which, the U.S. is responsible for the majority of the expenditures.

Understandably, this is a huge and seemingly never-ending source of income for our overbuilt defense industry. Seemingly the very appropriate warning of President Dwight Eisenhower went unheeded. Eisenhower three days before the end of his second term has warned among other things about the military/industrial complex, saying: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

If Eisenhower only knew how much the influence of the military/industrial complex has grown since his day…

At least it could seem to be a step in the right direction for President Obama to propose some saving measures in the State of the Union address. Unfortunately, the spending freeze will only address about 1/8 of our total budget and might actually cut into programs and operational budget of needed and necessary agencies, in many case to the detriment of us all.

Meanwhile, we still have well over 100,000 troops in Iraq, along with an even larger number of mercenaries, are beefing up our forces and spending for the most likely unwinnable war in Afghanistan and are maintaining the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the FBI, recently made famous by the discovery that it has been collaborating with telecom companies to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for four years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or simply asking for them.

Let’s not forget the case of the Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares, who learned that the FBI used an online photograph of him to create an image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today.

The image using Llamazares’ photo appeared on a wanted poster updating the U.S. government’s 1998 photo of the al Qaeda leader.

FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman acknowledged that the agency used a picture of Llamazares taken from Google Images.

Let’s hope that we are not rewarding incompetence, with ever-larger budgets.

Meanwhile, we don’t really know where more than $3 trillion in bailout money has disappeared to and whether it has done anybody – besides the people and the corporations, who have caused the crisis – any measurable good.

As the popular saying goes: “easy come, easy go”.

Technorati Tags: bailout, defense budget, military/industrial complex, money, President Obama, spending freeze, State of the Union address

It isn’t hard to question the judgment, motives, and sanity of Joe Lieberman, the so-called independent senator from Connecticut, who has almost single-handedly derailed any meaningful health care reform legislation.

The strange thing is that for years Lieberman has been a strong advocate of universal health care. Campaigning for vice-president in 2000, he first proposed resolving the plight of the uninsured by allowing them to buy into Medicare and Medicaid – a plan he endorsed even in September 2009 in an interview with a Connecticut newspaper.

Yet when that very same plan was added to Senate health care legislation, Lieberman told Majority Leader Harry Reid that he could not support it. He also threatened to invoke the power of a one-man filibuster to prevent the legislation from even coming to a vote on the Senate floor.

It could in part be simple revenge. Ever since being rejected by the Connecticut Democrats in the 2006 primary, and somehow getting re-elected as an Independent, Lieberman’s been itching for payback. He endorsed John McCain for president, campaigned for him practically full-time and even spoke at the Republican National Convention, declaring Barack Obama as unqualified to be president.

For such a petty man and such a big ego, what better way there is to get even than to derail the president’s number one legislative priority, even if it means leaving 47 million Americans without health insurance?

As we always said, there’s no substitute for backbone, decency, honesty and intelligence.

And in closing, a very telling cartoon, by Bob Rogers from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Thanks to Cher from AskCherlock for pointing it out to us.

Technorati Tags: backbone, democrats, Health Care reform, Independent, Lieberman, mccain, obama, senate