Tuesday, February 19, 2013
In case you missed it here is "Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War" narrated by Rachel Maddow
If you did not get the chance to watch this last night I urge you to take the time to watch it here, It is too important to miss in my opinion.
One of my strongest reactions while watching this last night, was to the sheer hypocrisy of the Republican party. Many of who DARE to criticize President Obama's decisions to end the Iraq War, after supporting the start of it so aggressively while ignoring the fact that the reasons given for going in were based on shaky, if not false, information.
If they had any sense of honor they would have all stepped down from their political positions years ago.
And speaking of shameful we have the insanity of John McCain DEMANDING more information about the four American deaths in Benghazi, while the blood of 4,486 dead United States military members drips from his old arthritic hands.
If ANY member of the Senate should have seen what was happening and put a stop to it, it was ex POW John McCain. But what did he do? He continued to push for an extension of the war well past the point where virtually everybody else had deemed it unnecessary, and wrong.
In a perfect world I would see George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, executed for treason after being tried for war crimes. But I would also like to see John McCain stripped of his office and thrown into jail as well, for supporting a criminal war and ignoring information that he knew to be false.
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The day we watched bombs falling on Baghdad, I knew with 100% certainty that this was a titanic mistake, and a huge conspiracy to bring down Saddam Hussein.
ReplyDeleteThat invasion and attack of a sovereign nation that posed no threat to the USA or our allies was an unforgivably criminal act
GW Bush, and all his conspirators (Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith) should be tried as war criminals for their heinous participation in this travesty.
Why isn't that happening?
DeleteGeorge W. Bush: The 9-11 Interview (2011)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke_OgE_V6tQ
What does it take to bring these folks to justice? President Obama and VP Biden obviously don't appear interested in going ahead w/further investigation and going after them as war criminals. Is there automatic protection from one president to the next?
ReplyDeleteI would love to see Cheney (especially) hung for all to see. I think he was the mastermind behind this bullshit war.
Americans need to get Republicans out of Congress and office on national, state and local levels throughout the country. They are doing nothing more than harming the nation! They are a horrible party there is no doubt about it!
Is there automatic protection from one president to the next?
DeleteIt appears that is the case. They have a unique and uniquely protected brotherhood.
I wonder what the response was with the powers that be after watching that last night? I would think there would have been shivers....I wish we had more true journalists like David Corn out there not afraid to show the light on these criminals. Another truth not exposed was they really expected to take over the oil in Iraq which they thought would pay for it all. The reality was not only did that not happen....but they made possible the recruitment of tons of USA haters to form the great terrorist network we have today. Instead of Iran and Iraq being enemies....they now have a common bond. To say these guys are war criminals...it goes so far beyond that. They reshaped thousands of lives here and there for who knows how many years. Trillions of dollars wasted, thousands of lives lost, families torn apart..and look who is running the country again? Republicans dragging us into the ditch over and over, when will this country wake up and vote these assholes out?
ReplyDeleteGryphen, I applaud you for posting the program "Hubris" here. I hope those who did not see it and especially younger persons who 12 years ago might not have realized what was happening will watch it. I cannot though. I know that I would be very, very upset. I know that my blood pressure would go up and I would be sick. I felt the hate rising in me last night as I read comments made by some who did watch it. See I knew what was happening. I know where I was standing when I heard we were indeed going to war (weeks before we did) from a confidential source. I can remember and still feel the knot in the pit of my stomach at that moment. After the "war" began, any mention of it was enough to make me tear up. Within the first year I attended the funeral of the brother of one of my son's friends and I was so sad, and mad. I did my best for the next 6-8 years to just put Iraq out of my mind. Then we elected President Obama and one of the first things he did was to start bringing our troops home. Thank you Lord.
ReplyDeleteI want the same things you have listed above. I want to see Cheney especially, also Bush, Rice, et al. brought up on war crime charges. I won't even put here what I would like to see Cheney subjected to, but we'll start with waterboarding, ok?
O/T but our buddy Nate Silver Says Marco Rubio is as Unelectable as Mitt Romney Was
ReplyDelete...Silver goes on to say, “What makes matters tricky for Mr. Rubio is that, at the same time he is hoping to persuade Republican party insiders that he deserves their support, he will also need to maintain a reasonably good image with the broader electorate lest his electability argument be undermined. This may lead to some strange positions, such as when Mr. Rubio recently critiqued President Obama’s immigration proposal despite its many similarities to his own.”
In other words, a Republican candidate of any color may still have to adopt the 2012 losing strategy of Mitt Romney. Go hard right fringe during primary season to secure the nomination, then try to fox trot your way back to the center so you can appeal to the mainstream.
http://www.politicususa.com/nate-silver-rubio-inelectable-romney.html
When Bush made his announcement of the start of the second Iraq war, I turned to my girlfriend and said: "Welcome to the new Vietnam war."
ReplyDeleteThat's right ... and probably one reason my stomach tied itself in knots on hearing we were going to war; I am of the Vietnam era.
DeleteMe, too, Daisydem. me, too. Cost me a brother.
DeleteIf you asked John McCain where is his outrage of 130+ Americans who died recently from bad spinal steroid injections. His reply would be "HuH"
ReplyDeleteVice President Joe Biden will be participating in a Facebook Town Hall hosted by Parents Magazine on Tuesday as the administration continues its push to reform the nation's gun laws. Watch live below, at 3:30pm ET:
ReplyDeletehttp://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/biden-holds-facebook-town-hall-on-gun-violence
O/T Something ol' Baldy sure couldn't do:
ReplyDeleteBarack Obama, Editor
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/barack-obama-editor/273284/
O/T but these fucking idiots should NOT be allowed to make laws for anyone in this country!
ReplyDeleteAlabama Republican says a baby 'is the largest organ in a body' because she's a moron
...But Alabama state Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin (R-of course), who is sponsoring a bill to impose a number of restrictions on abortion providers, has dreamed up a doozy of a scientific theory that puts even Akin to shame. The Montgomery Advertiser reports:
“When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in a body,” McClurkin said in an interview Thursday. “That’s a big thing. That’s a big surgery. You don’t have any other organs in your body that are bigger than that.”
Um ... uh ... WHAT?!?!? As Katie J.M. Baker at Jezebel scoffs, "My liver, heart, and skin are all very excited that we are now giving organs personhood rights, although the latter is slightly upset about losing out on its 'largest organ in the human body.'"
Rep. McClurkin, who was obviously absent from school the year they taught science, thinks abortion is "big" organ-removing surgery and therefore, should be classified and restricted as such.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/19/1188250/-Alabama-Republican-says-a-baby-is-the-largest-organ-in-a-body-because-she-s-a-moron
I would ask this Women just what does this(Big) organ do for the body? Now as I learned, an organ does something,cleaning the body, the bood stream, the kidneys,the lungs for cleaning the air you breath,.This big organ takes your blood, your food intake,uses the air you breath,makes you gain weight,causes high blood pressure,preeclampsia,and morning illness. An organ, is supposed to be a helping organ,again I ask:what good does this very big organ do for the body?
Delete“Former Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has joined Harvard University as a visiting scholar,” reads the Currant’s “report.”
ReplyDelete“According to an official press release, the conservative pundit and reality television star will teach four courses over three years at Harvard’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass., beginning in fall 2013,”
http://www.mediaite.com/online/is-sarah-palins-next-move-harvard-university/
Thanks Gryphe for posting this.I knew back then it was all hype to get us to invade.I caught a lot of shit for speaking my beliefs back then.What a fucking waste.
ReplyDeleteRachel Maddow's "Hubris" special tonight on the run-up to the Iraq war was very fine as far as it went--in showing the Bush administration lies, with the help of George Tenet and the CIA, and Colin Powell at the UN and on and on. But the media complicity--and enabling--got only about 30 seconds in the hour: one reference to a cooked NYT front-page story and a brief Mike Isikoff critique of the media at the very end. I understand that her focus was on the White House and Pentagon but still a viewer who did not closely live that sad era might ask, "How did they get away with it?" Or: "Why did so many in the public go along with it?" Needless to say, there was no MSNBC criticism of NBC's role in all this.
ReplyDeleteAs it happens, I wrote a fairly well-known book about the media crimes a few years back that's still relevant today. It's called So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq. The blurbs for the book follow. It features a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by Joe Galloway. This interview covers some of my main points. Here I am on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, but I also sat with Bill Moyers and Jim Lehrer.
"Greg Mitchell has given us a razor-sharp critique of how the media and the government connived in one of the great blunders of American foreign policy. Every aspiring journalist, every veteran, every pundit—and every citizen who cares about the difference between illusion and reality, propaganda and the truth, and looks to the press to help keep them separate—should read this book. Twice."— Bill Moyers
“The profound failure of the American press with regard to the Iraq War may very well be the most significant political story of this generation. Greg Mitchell has established himself as one of our country's most perceptive media critics, and here he provides invaluable insight into how massive journalistic failures enabled the greatest strategic disaster in the nation's history.”— Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com writer and author of A Tragic Legacy and How Would a Patriot Act?
"With the tragic war in Iraq dragging on, and the drumbeat for new conflicts growing louder, this is more than a five-year history of the biggest foreign policy debacle of our times—it's a cautionary tale that is as relevant as this morning's headlines. Read it and weep; read it and get enraged; read it and make sure it doesn't happen again."— Arianna Huffington
"Anyone who cares about the integrity of the American media should read this book. Greg Mitchell asks tough questions about the Iraq war that should have been asked long ago, in a poignant, patriotic, and thoughtful dissection of our war in Iraq. Mitchell names names and places blame on those who’ve blundered. Examining the most complex issue of our time, he connects the dots like no one else has."— Paul Rieckhoff, Executive Director, Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America and author of Chasing Ghosts
http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.ie/2008/04/ordering-so-wrong-for-so-long.html
The boneheads cannot even admit it was a bad idea.......hoping to rewrite history I guess......
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this. We watched it as a family, we never censored nor whitewashed these wars with out kids, and we were amazed at the relevant questions they asked... it wasn't that long ago, and I'm surprised how much this piece brought me back, and Rachel just scratched the surface, a damn good job packed in 46 minutes, I could have watched two or three hours and still held interest.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, it's beside me why Darth Cheyney and Pretzel choker GWBush aren't sitting in Gitmo, or worse.