Tide turns on Dubya's wreck Sydney Morning Herald By Mike Carlton, April 22, 2006
SYDNEY, NSW, is a long way from Washington DC but, even at this distance, it is clear that the Bush Administration is falling to pieces.
In recent weeks, scanning the political coverage in the mainstream US media and sampling the blogs has been to watch a flood tide ebbing to reveal a rotting, skeletal hulk. It is the George W. Bush ship of fools, stuck in the mud for the world to see in all its mendacity, its incompetence, its faith-based stupidity.
It is possible, at this late stage, that even Bush himself has begun to realise something is wrong. That oddly simian face is ashen, the eyes leaden. The voice is shrill and its tone defensive.
"I'm the decider and I decide what's best," he squawked to reporters in the White House rose garden the other day, as the screws turned tighter on his disastrous Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Can you imagine Roosevelt, Eisenhower or Kennedy blurting something like that?
Rummy is looking knackered too, with six retired generals going public to agree that he is "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically", to quote one of them.
These men would have been junior officers in Vietnam, veterans of the all-American nightmare they now see replicated in Iraq. They don't want the mad old warmonger doing it over again in Iran. As former Marine Corps Lieutenant-General Gregory Newbold wrote in Time magazine: "… we must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it".
But the Middle East quicksands are not all that is killing Bush's presidency. Domestically, the rot is wide and deep. It is a budget deficit blowing out towards $US700 billion this financial year as Dubya juggles to fund his war while stealing from the American and immigrant poor to bestow tax cuts on the rich.
It is criminal sleaze in Washington, with the Republicans' favourite influence peddler, Jack Abramoff, headed for jail, and one of Bush's closest Texan buddies, the disgraced House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, not far behind him.
It is arrogant, Nixonian trampling of the law to order the wiretapping of American citizens and the leaking of national security secrets. It is the rape of the environment to enrich big business, especially big oil. And resonating with ordinary Americans most of all, it is the loss of the city of New Orleans - not by Hurricane Katrina but by the bottomless incompetence of the feds' post-apocalypse response.
This is a trash presidency, founded on lies and knavery, fraud and ignorant ideological crackpottery.
KARL ROVE is another faux-Texan wheeler-dealer sometimes described as Bush's brain, a courtier most often seen superglued to the presidential right ear. Pink and pudgy, he looks like one of Disney's three little pigs, although infinitely more smug.
Rove was shunted sideways this week in a shuffle of the White House deck chairs which also saw Dubya's press secretary lose his job. His new assignment will be to divert the Republican Party from the coming train wreck of the Congressional mid-term elections this November.
That will be crucial to the survival of this gang. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there would be a good chance of them moving to impeach Bush for high crimes and misdemeanours.
The famous Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein raised just that possibility in a recent article in Vanity Fair magazine. "We have never had a presidency in which the single unifying thread that flows through its major decision-making was incompetence stitched together with hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale," he wrote.
Exactly. Compared to this lot, Bill Clinton was John the Baptist.
THE next question is this: what will the Howard Government do when Bush and co decide to bomb Iran?
On past performance, Australia will be the kiddie on the sideline, panting to join the team: "Pick me, pick me." That, of course, is how we wangled our way into Iraq.
To quote the admirable US Marine Lieutenant-General Newbold again: "My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions - or bury the results."
As we have seen, John Howard and Lord Downer are terrific at casual swagger, although neither has ever heard a bullet go pffwt-pzzz through the rubber trees. Luckily, they have not had results to bury. But next time we might not be so easily conned. After the never-ever GST, children overboard, Iraq, WorkChoices, AWB and now Papua, Howard has lost public trust. The moment we hear him blather that no decision has been made for war, that everyone is working for a peaceful solution to the Iran crisis - that's when we know the SAS is already there.
When the shoulders go back, the chin goes up and the lower lip juts out, you know the Prime Minister is lying.
Dinner with Her Maj? In your dreams
THE QUEEN, God bless her, marked her 80th birthday by inviting me to Windsor for dinner. It was out of the blue and a bit embarrassing, I admit. When I protested on the phone that I had only a T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots - the dinner jacket at the dry cleaner - she gave a silvery laugh and told me to pop over anyway. And a lovely night it was: the two of us tete-a-tete, although Philip did drop in afterwards for a snifter in the George IV drawing room. (Splendid Canaletto above the Adam fireplace.)
Her Majesty was waspish and witty as ever. In fact, she was in the middle of raunchy joke about Gough and Margaret and John and Janette when my alarm clock went off with its brain-splitting clamour and I found myself staggering robotically out of bed, pre-dawn, to do a breakfast radio show.
To the best of my knowledge I have never dreamed about the Queen before, and I haven't a clue what brought it on. Yes, I know, there's a truckload of Freudian and probably Oedipal symbolism here, but I remember reading somewhere that dreaming of Her Maj is quite a common phenomenon, especially with baby boomers. We have known her all our lives.
Lamentably, we never got to the punchline of the Whitlam-Howard sauciness. But I can reveal that the royals have no time at all for Professor David Flint. Philip found him curled up beneath the table and sooled the corgis onto the poor old dear.
This disturbing notion is gaining eyeballs by the minute:
Bush Defector To Demolish 911 Lies On May 6 4-18-6
The former top economist in Bush's Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds, will speak out on the 9/11 inside job at the State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison on Saturday, May 6th. The film Loose Change will be shown, and refreshments served, starting at 1 p.m, and Reynolds will speak at 3:00 p.m.
Dr. Reynolds, who holds three U.W.-Madison degrees, and who is currently Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, will present evidence that top Bush Administration officials orchestrated the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, and the murder of almost 2,500 Americans, as a pretext for initiating their pre-planned "long war" in the Middle East.
"While more Americans doubt the 9/11 story every week, evidence abounds that many have a mental block against rational examination of the evidence about 9/11" writes Dr. Reynolds in a recent article. This mental block, he thinks, amounts to willful ignorance-not just about 9/11, but about history.
"Governments throughout history have provoked or staged attacks on their own people to serve the powers behind the throne ('the money power'), glorify themselves, engage in vast government spending, reward friends, exert domestic control, stimulate the juices of war, annex neighbors and pursue vast geostrategic rearrangements (the 'global domination project)" Reynolds asserts. He notes that every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on the "Operation Northwoods" plan to murder Americans in fake "Cuban terrorist" attacks in 1962. The planned Operation Northwoods murders of ordinary Americans in fake terrorist bombings and a fake "airliner shoot-down" would have involved hundreds of military and intelligence personnel. Yet the existence of Operation Northwoods was successfully kept secret from the American people for forty years until James Bamford revealed it in his book Body of Secrets, published in January 2002.
Though government officials have historically been able to successfully conceal their fake or arranged war-trigger attacks long enough to avoid being hanged for treason, Reynolds thinks the 9/11 cover-up has already unraveled. "Skepticism about conspiracy, small or large, is somewhat beside the point in the case of 9/11 because the official Osama-and-Nineteen-Young-Arabs (ONYA) conspiracy tale is so farcical and impossible. Nearly everyone in America has easy access to the internet and hundreds of websites expose the 9/11 fraud." (Morgan Reynolds, "Conspiracy and Closed Minds on 9/11": http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911 )
Reynolds argues that the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 were destroyed in a manner that can only be explained by controlled demolition with pre-planted explosives-which should not be surprising, since no steel framed high-rises have ever collapsed in the way the three World Trade Center buildings did for any other reason. In his article "Why Did the World Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?" Reynolds writes that among the many features of the WTC demolitions that suggest explosives, rather than jet-fuel fires, are:
1. Fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.
2. The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were small.
3. WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.
4. WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams (pp. 68-9).
5. In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC lease-holder, recalled talking to the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 and said, ".maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.
6. FEMA, given the uninviting task of explaining the collapse of Building 7 with mention of demolition verboten admitted that the best it could come up with had "only a low probability of occurrence."
7. It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.
Professional demolition, by contrast, can explain all of these facts and more. Demolition means placing explosives throughout a building, and detonating them in sequence to weaken "the structure so it collapses or folds in upon itself". In conventional demolitions gravity does most of the work, although it probably did a minority on
9/11, so heavily were the towers honeycombed with explosives.
1. Each WTC building collapse occurred at virtually free-fall speed (approximately 10 seconds or less).
2. Each building collapsed, for the most part, into its own footprint.
3. Virtually all the concrete (an estimated 100,000 tons in each tower) on every floor was pulverized into a very fine dust, a phenomenon that requires enormous energy and could not be caused by gravity alone (".workers can't even find concrete. 'It's all dust,' [the official] said").
4. Dust exploded horizontally for a couple hundred feet, as did debris, at the beginning of each tower's collapse.
5. Collapses were total, leaving none of the massive core columns sticking up hundreds of feet into the air.
6. Salvage experts were amazed at how small the debris stacks were.
7. The steel beams and columns came down in sections under 30 feet long and had no signs of "softening"; there was little left but shorn sections of steel and a few bits of concrete.
8. Photos and videos of the collapses all show "demolition waves," meaning "confluent rows of small explosions" along floors (blast sequences).
9. According to many witnesses, explosions occurred within the buildings.
10. Each collapse had detectable seismic vibrations suggestive of underground explosions, similar to the 2.3 earthquake magnitude from a demolition like the Seattle Kingdome (p. 108).
11. Each collapse produced molten steel identical to that generated by explosives, resulting in "hot spots" that persisted for months (the two hottest spots at WTC-2 and WTC-7 were approximately 1,350o F five days after being continuously flooded with water, a temperature high enough to melt aluminum (p. 70). ("Why Did the Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?" by Morgan Reynolds: http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911 )
The apparent demolition of the three skyscrapers, and a perhaps inadvertent statement by heavily-insured WTC landlord Larry Silverstein that WTC-7 was "pulled" (slang for "demolished") can be viewed on many 9/11 truth DVDs and web-videos, including Loose Change, 9/11 Eyewitness, 9/11 and the American Empire, (Dr. David Griffin), and 9/11 Revisited (Dr. Steven Jones). Dr. Reynolds' articles on 9/11 and other matters can be found at http://nomoregames.net . The videos, and further information about Dr. Reynolds' May 6th speech, are available from the event's sponsor, the Madison-based Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth: http://mujca.com
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