You may know Ted Rall as a editorial cartoonist. (Check out a recent cartoon that suggests why the US might really want to send troops to Liberia.) Ted is also a writer and he's right about George Bush: his tax cuts for the rich and his invasion of Iraq are both failures.
This bizarro Administration does everything bass-ackwards. The recession is hardest on the poor and middle-class, so Bush gives tax cuts to the rich. When an overwhelming invasion force was needed to secure Afghanistan, Rumsfeld sent in a skeleton crew. Now that the citizens of those countries want us to go home, Gen. Tommy Franks has announced that our 148,000-man, $5 billion-a-month occupation army will get bigger and stick around until whenever.
What Rall also points out is that using the CIA's George Tenet as the patsy in Yellowcakegate amounts to a cover-up before there is even a scandal.
Considering the conventional wisdom that Bush's idiocy is mitigated by his brilliant cabinet, Bush opted for a weird defense: I'm not a liar--my staff is incompetent! And so the cover-up began.
In the most transparently brokered deal since Ford's pardon of Nixon, Tenet agreed to take the blame for the Niger imbroglio in exchange for not taking the fall. "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president," said Tenet in a prepared statement. "The president is pleased that the director of Central Intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged," said Ari Fleischer the next day. Bush got his patsy and Tenet kept his job. But career CIA staffers are furious at Bush for sticking them with the blame for a snafu they specifically tried to talk him out of. This is just beginning.
Lying about Niger yellowcake pales next to Bush's other evil chicanery: hobbling the U.S. economy with debt, feeding corporate corruption, opening concentration camps for Muslims and bombing thousands of people to death. But those acts are almost too monstrous to comprehend. Americans easily understand the myriad of little lies--the faked Jessica Lynch "rescue," the phony Saddam statue toppling and now the Niger uranium story--and how they add up to the character of a man unworthy of the office he holds.
Speaking of Jessica Lynch, she is scheduled to be released July 22 from Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
She is scheduled to make a brief press statement in Elizabeth, then travel via a military motorcade to her home in nearby Palestine, about 70 miles north of Charleston. She will not take questions from reporters, and will not address specifics of her capture and rescue, (family spokesman Randy) Coleman said.
This comes from FOXNews, which mentions nothing about the controversy behind Lynch's so-called "rescue." FOX does call Lynch a hero, which seems to be typical in the Southern press, i.e. Bush Country.
Interesting sidenote: More than 200 Google news items refer to Randy Coleman as the "family spokesman." As far as I can tell, only two cite his regular job title: Communications Director for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety. I wonder, who is paying his fees to work for the Lynch family?
Could it be that the story of the Jessica Lynch "rescue" has gone away? I doubt it. Her handlers can't keep her away from the press forever. This is a story that is bound to be told, and only Lynch can tell it.
