Downing St. Memo heats up + BUSH WANTED to INVADE in 1999 + Tears for America

DOWNING the PRESIDENT: Finally after a month and a half, the cowed press dared to ask Bush about the Downing St. Memo on the event of a joint press conference with Tony Blair. Bush of course, denied it, without a qualm, "There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush said. , and for the first time Blair did too: "No," Blair added, "the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all." Now, you can't nondeny some scandal for 6 weeks and then suddenly deny it. But I guess it's easier to pee when your standing in a waterfall, and Bush's profligate lying rubs off on all he comes in contact with.

A growing chorus is calling for investigations of this sterling evidence for lying America into a counterproductive war- John Conyers just held House hearings- 3 hours June 17 on C-SPAN. In the cheap high school thuggery that is their hallmark, Repubs denied Dems a room anywhere, so they packed themselves into a tiny basement room for this vital hearing on a scandal worse than Watergate. Repubs also held 11 important votes simultaneously, desperate to prevent this story from getting legs- it won't even be saved in Congressional Record! CIA's Ray McGovern, Joe Wilson, and founder of AfterDowningSt.org, were joined by almost every notable liberal Dem Congressman. I believe talk of impeachment will build to a dull roar in 1-2 years as 1000 more troops are sacrificed to George's imperial visions.

How miserably the war is actually going can be read in a front page WashPost story. DSM stories have appeared in Orlando Sentinel, St. Petersburg Times, Knight Ridder (who carried it originally). A new followup story in The Times (of London)
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BUSH WANTED TO INVADE in 1999: Incredible important story by Russell Baker about Bush biographer (yanked off My Charge to Keep, when Bush spilled too many beans.) Many incredible revelations about National Guard story too. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1028-01.htm

-----"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade...if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade." -----

As I said in my seminal article: FIRM of MIND, SOFT on FACTS : March 2003
---Again and again GB2 has tried to tie Saddam with Osama: Saddam supports him, he gives Al Qaida refuge, he’s about to finish a nuclear bomb. All lies. OBL hates Saddam, he is an unbeliever who’s annihilated Moslem leaders along with any others who could lift a finger in opposition. Worse, he’s done it in the heart of the Islamic world, at the very cradle of civilization. OBL would boil him in oil, if given his druthers. Trumped up evidence, repackaged long past its freshness date, till it stinks with the corruption of this regime. Saddam had aluminum tubes for nuclear fabrication: not really; Iraq was buying uranium from Niger: the papers were forged. ("Fine," said Colin.); prohibited missiles: not if loaded with a warhead (they destroyed the short range missiles anyway); dangerous drones: actually ramshackle junk (though this might be an Iraqi scam). The truth is- Bush planned to invade Iraq, to outdo and avenge his father, to kill a persistent irritant, to guarantee a stable source of oil, to cow the world… before he became President (new proof 6/2005) . All rationales, all reasons, all explanations, are window dressing on a clumsy thuggish foreign policy, one opposed by 98% of the world (not all their leaders, who can be bought and bullied). If Saddam was stripped naked and staked to the ground in the western Iraq desert, it wouldn’t be enough to stop Bush’s Wanton War. -----

As far as I know, I'm the only centrist writer to claim that Bush planned this before 9-11, yet another prescient analysis.
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DON''T CRY for ME, George: If you didn't see the amazing spectacle of Ohio Sen. George Voinovich attacking Bolton, as tears streamed down his face on the Senate floor, see video here. You must ask yourself- what would make a US Senator publicly cry while doing his Advise and Consent duties. Answer: brutal threats by the Bushmen that they would destroy his position, his works, his family. Nothing illustrates the festering sickness at the soul of this corrupt administration and hence America itself, than this display of Imperial cruelty and idle power.

Sometimes, amidst all the prevarication, Bush accidentally tells the truth:
See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)” - Bush in Greece, NY