Everyone should read this article. Frank Rich delivers a stirring assessment of the cause and effects of Scooter Libby's trial and the entire underhanded effort of the White House et al to 1. Get us into war with Iraq and 2. Cover up its mistakes and messes after the fact. Rich alerts us to the creation of the White House Iraq Group(WHIG) composed of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and others, whose task it was to concoct lies and a sexy credible story to sell to the all-too consumeristic American public as a great reason to go to war with Iraq.(Lesson: Stop Buying Everybody's bullshit and stop this wreckage which is our consumer culture). With this effort in their hands Libby, Rove, et al played the nuclear war game, invoking the fear of nuclear war and nuclear holocaust if Saddam Hussein wasn't removed (oh, the same as if all the Communist weren't imprisoned, the Negroes quelled, and the Welfare mothers kicked off of the dole).
This effort worked until actually put into effect when America LOST THE WAR IN IRAQ and all the shit started to fall apart. Then it was time to lie and do other bullshit stuff. When Valerie Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson came out and refuted George Bush's claim that Iraq was buying depleted uranium from Libya and was therefore destroying Bush's entire reason for war, WHIG--and Mr. Scooter Libby most incriminatingly, decided it was time to use some tried and true practices from Nixon and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover by blowing Valerie Plame's CIA cover and trying to discredit her and her husband in any way they could( anyone remember the actress Jean Seberg who was active with the Black Panther Party and how J. Edgar Hoover decided to leak to the press that the child that Seberg was carrying was fathered by a Black Panther and not by her husband, which caused her to go into early labor and have a stillborn child? Anyone remember her suicide about a decade later?) So this little underhanded effort on the part of Cheney, Rove, Libby, et al would have worked had it not been for whatever brave journalists who still have their integrity intact who forced the question which has now resulted in Libby being convicted of perjury. Now, what Rich does here is also interesting in that he ties all of this (because it is all connected) into the scandals of this new escalation of the war (with a "surge" and then several other calls for additional troops after that) and the horrific treatment of the veterans who come back here maimed and otherwise injured at a poorly funded Walter Reed Hospital or a Bethesda, Maryland because Bush, Cheney, et al have spent a billion dollars on a warplane and not on healthcare. And with this poor treatment of the recent veterans (not to mention the old ones) we also have the Bush Administration trying to tidy up it's shit and make everything "look" rosy and using all of its power to do so. Selling this war, make it smell good, and deliver it in the most capitalistically effecient way possible(sex, greed, and violence). Rich talks about the trumped up stories of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman that were put front and center on the White House's banner.
And this is how the Bush administration is attempting to cover up the mess which is spilling out of Iraq. Firstly, it banned all photographs of the dead coming back from Iraq in any news media and secondly, it shut up the solders; when this mess known as the war in iraq first started you could hear soldiers voicing their complaints and disagreements all over NPR--then there was nothing, and there still nothing to be heard. Then, the Bush administration has started to censor coverage and depictions of veterans in the media-- they don't show the wounded in military hospitals at all, the wounded only arrive at these hospitals at night. Also, Bush has decided and made it his policy not to attend U.S. military funerals for fear that media attention might come to all of it. Alas, there was incident in which Bush was honoring an amputee from this current war with a medal and another soldier was told he was not welcome to the ceremony when he announced that he would be wearing short pants and not long pants(which would cover his amputated leg) to the ceremony. You even had General Kiley, the Sergeant General of the army, blaming the presence of rats and roaches in the veteran's rooms at Walter Reed Hospital on "the well-feed, well taken care of" soldiers bring food into their rooms. All of this is boiling to a head. People are taking notice (Rich talks about Cher's frantic phone call to CSPAN in October of 2003--I watched that program on television as it happened--where she was asking why the wounded veterans were not being seen or talked about in the media) and people are beginning to demand accountability.
I hope this glass house is broken. I hope we can finish off this most wicked administration and the most wicked system for which it works( capitalism, patriarchy, the militery industrial complex, whatever you call it). We need to bring about a just peace in the world where the lives of the vulnerable and the ordinary are not at the mercy of the vile and the inhumane. We need to envision a new world.
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