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Friday, August 31, 2007

LARRY CRAIG: Another Self-Hating Homo Who'd Rather Be Powerful Among His Torturers than Honest

poor whiney hypocrite-victims .... boo hoo hoo...

They're virulent hatemongers, hypocrites and homophobes. Craig is a self-hating denier who deserves to be outed, abandoned and to go down in FLAMES, as it were.

good riddance. don't let the stall door hit you in the @ss on the way out.

be sure to check out the latest installments on one of the evangelical republican rightwing's other poster boys for homophobic hatemongering hypocrisy --TED "i only got a massage" HAGGARD

his latest antics: joining forces with a REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER to ask for money from their dull headed sheeplike lemming followers
http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/08/families_with_a_mission

more stories in the archives
http://www.google.com/custom?sitesearch=thestranger.com&domains=thestranger.com&q=haggard

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Thursday, August 30, 2007

To All the Homophobes, Hatemongers & Hypocrites

Gay couple become first in Colorado to adopt children

August 29, 2007

On Monday, Morgan and Evinn had no legal parents. Today, they have two — both moms.


"People say they need a mother and a father ... They had a mother and a father — and they abused them."


"People say, they need two parents. We say, they've got two parents," says Jeannie DiClementi, who along with life partner Mary Ross, have become the first gay couple to adopt children together under a new state law. "This is a victory for children."

Colorado already permitted adoption by married couples or by singles — straight or gay. But for singles with partners, the partner has not been able to adopt unless the couple married, which gays can't legally do in Colorado.

In May, Gov. Bill Ritter signed the so-called second-parent adoption law, which allows same-sex couples, as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles and other relatives, to jointly adopt children.

"This law gives children in a one-parent family a chance to grow up in a two-parent home," Ritter said then. "This law will give children a better chance to succeed."

Morgan, 4, and her 21-month -old sister — Ross' great-nieces — desperately needed another chance. Both kids were severely neglected and abused by their young parents, who preferred playing video games to caring for their children, Ross says.

The girls' mother and father, Ross' nephew, had been on the social service radar for years, but efforts to help them proved futile.

how many special-needs children have they adopted? How many of them are foster parents to children who have been neglected and abused? People want to take away the ability for same sex couples to adopt, but I've yet to hear anybody put a plan in place to protect the children

In August 2005, Adams County caseworkers tracked down Ross, 45, and DiClementi, 57, who had moved from Colorado to Fort Wayne, Ind. for new jobs.

At that point, they were the only family members with the resources and stabilitiy to take the girls.

Would they take a special-needs child? And her baby sister, who had serious medical problems?

The couple didn't hesitate.

"Sisters should be together," says DiClementi, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at Purdue University.

By May 2006, both children were living with them in Indiana. But last December, a judge ordered the kids back to Colorado, saying that the county had failed to properly document parental abuse.

"We went through the ceiling. It was unbelievable," DiClementi says. Ross, a social worker, quit her job and left graduate school to move back to Colorado with the children. With the help of friends, who donated furniture and toys, the couple maintained two homes, with DiClementi traveling to Denver every few weeks.

In February, a court-appointed advocate for the children presented the judge with evidence that their birth mother had posted their photos on a Web site she maintained featuring bondage, sadomasochism and violent sex. Both parents subsequently gave up their parental rights, clearing the way for DiClementi and Ross to adopt the girls, which became official Tuesday.

"People say, well, they need a mother and a father," DiClementi says. "They had a mother and a father — and they abused them."

Although the girls have thrived with them, it hasn't been easy. Morgan, who repeatedly banged her head and clawed herself when she first came to them, is still prone to self-injury and has various developmental delays. Evinn suffered a stroke before birth and has respiratory trouble and other physical problems.

"I want to ask some of those critics (of the law), how many special-needs children have they adopted? How many of them are foster parents to children who have been neglected and abused? People want to take away the ability for same sex couples to adopt, but I've yet to hear anybody put a plan in place to protect the children," DiClementi says. "For them, it's not about the children. It's about the politics."

For Ross and DiClementi, it's about making sure two little girls have emotional and financial security if something happens to one of their parents. It's about being able to travel home to Indiana and back to Colorado without asking permission from a court or a county.

It's about being able to tell people proudly, "These are our daughters."

source: RockyMountainNews.com

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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Bush Wants $50 Billion More for the War

Bush Likes to Keep Wasting Your Money on Illegal, Unjust Wars While People at Home can GO TO HELL (and to the hospital emergency room if you don't have health care or health insurance).

JUST SAY NO!

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT ASK BUSH & CONGRESS IF THERE AREN'T BETTER THINGS AT HOME WE COULD USE THAT MONEY FOR:

• What about our crumbling infrastructure?

• What about New Orleans?

• What about the 49 million americans (at least) without access to health care and health insurance?

• What about all the decent-paying jobs that have been replaced by minimum wage part time jobs at Wal-mart and Mcdonalds?

• What about seriously restoring our now third-world educational system?

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: WHAT ABOUT THIS:

Let's use that 50 billion dollars to re-create a new:

'Re-Build America Project'

A new type of public/private partnership -- a new WPA that uses all the talent we have here to:
  • create real jobs while re-building, improving, repairing our failing physical and energy infrastructure;

  • get us off of foreign oil (the REAL reason we are in iraq);

  • protect our ports and borders HERE from REAL terrorists not the pretend threats manufactured by racist xenophobes;

  • protect our food supplies and re-build our agricultural food production (and family farm systems);

  • get americans some much-needed health care, and while we're at work and getting health care --

  • you watch america start losing all that weight and lard-asses from the crap cheap fast food working people have to eat while working at crap minimum wage jobs.

  • How come we don't hear any candidates -- not even the Democrats -- (because Jesus knows the Republikkkans would never even think of it much less advocate it) -- but why isn't anyone talking about that kind of plan for america?


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    Tuesday, August 21, 2007

    One Republican President Who Actually Served in War and knew when a war was unwinnable.

    Deserves to be widely circulated and read: Op-ed From the Los Angeles Times

    Remember the guy who warned us about the Military Industrial Complex?



    The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this [military industrial complex] endanger our liberties or democratic processes....Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the HUGE industrial and military machinery of defense with our PEACEFUL methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

    Being more like Ike


    The 34th president and ex-general delivered eight years of peace because he knew when a war was unwinnable.

    By Michael Korda

    August 20, 2007

    It may be possible to forgive a president for failing to understand the present or to foresee the future, but it is harder to forgive a total lack of interest in the past.

    The Bush administration has displayed a peculiar disinterest in previous Republican presidencies, from which there is much to be learned. The president's own father set a good example of knowing when to stop, as when he took the wise step of not advancing to Baghdad. Ronald Reagan proved the immense power of soaring rhetoric. Richard Nixon, if nothing else, provided an object lesson in the perils of continuing to wage an unpopular war. But it is, above all, Dwight D. Eisenhower to whom Republicans should be looking for sound political wisdom these days.

    Part of Ike's great popularity stemmed from his 1952 campaign promise, if elected, to go to Korea and see for himself what was happening. This infuriated Harry S. Truman, who said that if Ike had a plan to end the war it was his duty to give it to the president. Ike ignored him, went, saw and, with the keen eye of a five-star general, surveyed the forbidding terrain. This war wasn't winnable, he determined, at least not without using atomic weapons, not as long as the Chinese were willing to keep on fighting.

    Eisenhower understood that if you can't win a war, the faster you get out of it the better.




    He came home and ended the Korean War in about six months with an armistice that is still in effect today. In short, he understood that if you can't win a war, the faster you get out of it the better. He answered criticism from the right wing of his own party by remarking simply, "The war is over, and I hope my son is going to come home soon."

    Ike had successfully commanded Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa; Husky, the invasion of Sicily; and Overlord, the Normandy invasion; and served as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe and, later, as the first supreme commander of NATO. But like Ulysses S. Grant before him, he believed firmly that American forces should never go to war without a military strategy for victory, the logistics and troops needed to win, and a supreme commander with absolute authority.

    In Ike's view, if a general got what he asked for and couldn't produce victory, he should be fired. But under no circumstances should he be asked to follow a strategy produced "by committee" or be micromanaged by the Pentagon or White House. Ike's orders for Overlord simply began: "You will enter the continent of Europe and in conjunction with the other united nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces." The rest was up to Ike.

    What's more, it was his conviction that a supreme commander must have unified command of land, sea and air forces of all allied nations; for example, during World War II, when the "bomber barons" of the U.S. and Britain tried to keep control of their heavy bombers, Ike threatened Winston Churchill that he would resign his command and go home. They gave in.

    In short, Ike understood the use of force. (And not just in war. He also memorably sent troopers of the 101st Airborne Division in full combat gear, instead of U.S. marshals in suits, to integrate Arkansas public schools.)

    Trying to hold a country the size of Iraq in the middle of a civil war with 160,000 troops would have seemed to him absurd. If you need to use force, you should have enough of it to do the job quickly and completely. Then get the troops home and leave the rest to the politicians and diplomats. That was the American way of war, as Ike and Grant saw it.

    Ike was shrewd enough to avoid getting entangled in France's war in Indochina. "No one," he said, "could be more opposed to ever getting the United States involved in a hot war in that region than I am." As for the Middle East, Ike offered prescient words: the United States had no business transforming itself into "an occupying power in a seething Arab world," and if it ever did so, "I am sure we would regret it."

    There is a reason why Americans "liked Ike." As one of America's greatest generals, he delivered some of the nation's most crucial military victories. Then as president, he delivered, among other benefits, eight years of peace. (The second volume of his presidential memoirs is titled "Waging Peace.") No man elected president, except perhaps Grant, knew better how to wage war -- or understood the basic common sense of never getting into a fight you can't win, or getting into one you can't get out of.

    Maybe it's time for somebody in the White House (and in the Pentagon) to read Eisenhower's "Crusade in Europe" and learn something about command and strategy from a great Republican.


    Original source: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-korda20aug20,1,4116386.story

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    Monday, August 13, 2007

    American Denial: USA Healthcare System is NOT World's Best

    A continuing series about: Primary Reasons Americans Should Reject Bush, Cheney, Rove & the Republicans Now and in 2008



    World’s Best Medical Care?


    NYTimes Editorial

    August 12, 2007


    Many Americans are under the delusion that we have “the best health care system in the world,” as President Bush sees it, or provide the “best medical care in the world,” as Rudolph Giuliani declared last week. That may be true at many top medical centers. But the disturbing truth is that this country lags well behind other advanced nations in delivering timely and effective care.


    Michael Moore struck a nerve in his new documentary, “Sicko,” when he extolled the virtues of the government-run health care systems in France, England, Canada and even Cuba while deploring the failures of the largely private insurance system in this country. There is no question that Mr. Moore overstated his case by making foreign systems look almost flawless. But there is a growing body of evidence that, by an array of pertinent yardsticks, the United States is a laggard not a leader in providing good medical care.


    Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th. More recently, the highly regarded Commonwealth Fund has pioneered in comparing the United States with other advanced nations through surveys of patients and doctors and analysis of other data. Its latest report, issued in May, ranked the United States last or next-to-last compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — on most measures of performance, including quality of care and access to it. Other comparative studies also put the United States in a relatively bad light.



    Insurance coverage. All other major industrialized nations provide universal health coverage, and most of them have comprehensive benefit packages with no cost-sharing by the patients. The United States, to its shame, has some 45 million people without health insurance and many more millions who have poor coverage. Although the president has blithely said that these people can always get treatment in an emergency room, many studies have shown that people without insurance postpone treatment until a minor illness becomes worse, harming their own health and imposing greater costs.


    Access. Citizens abroad often face long waits before they can get to see a specialist or undergo elective surgery. Americans typically get prompter attention, although Germany does better. The real barriers here are the costs facing low-income people without insurance or with skimpy coverage. But even Americans with above-average incomes find it more difficult than their counterparts abroad to get care on nights or weekends without going to an emergency room, and many report having to wait six days or more for an appointment with their own doctors.


    Fairness. The United States ranks dead last on almost all measures of equity because we have the greatest disparity in the quality of care given to richer and poorer citizens. Americans with below-average incomes are much less likely than their counterparts in other industrialized nations to see a doctor when sick, to fill prescriptions or to get needed tests and follow-up care.


    Healthy lives. We have known for years that America has a high infant mortality rate, so it is no surprise that we rank last among 23 nations by that yardstick. But the problem is much broader. We rank near the bottom in healthy life expectancy at age 60, and 15th among 19 countries in deaths from a wide range of illnesses that would not have been fatal if treated with timely and effective care. The good news is that we have done a better job than other industrialized nations in reducing smoking. The bad news is that our obesity epidemic is the worst in the world.


    Quality. In a comparison with five other countries, the Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States first in providing the “right care” for a given condition as defined by standard clinical guidelines and gave it especially high marks for preventive care, like Pap smears and mammograms to detect early-stage cancers, and blood tests and cholesterol checks for hypertensive patients. But we scored poorly in coordinating the care of chronically ill patients, in protecting the safety of patients, and in meeting their needs and preferences, which drove our overall quality rating down to last place. American doctors and hospitals kill patients through surgical and medical mistakes more often than their counterparts in other industrialized nations.


    Life and death. In a comparison of five countries, the United States had the best survival rate for breast cancer, second best for cervical cancer and childhood leukemia, worst for kidney transplants, and almost-worst for liver transplants and colorectal cancer. In an eight-country comparison, the United States ranked last in years of potential life lost to circulatory diseases, respiratory diseases and diabetes and had the second highest death rate from bronchitis, asthma and emphysema. Although several factors can affect these results, it seems likely that the quality of care delivered was a significant contributor.



    Patient satisfaction. Despite the declarations of their political leaders, many Americans hold surprisingly negative views of their health care system. Polls in Europe and North America seven to nine years ago found that only 40 percent of Americans were satisfied with the nation’s health care system, placing us 14th out of 17 countries. In recent Commonwealth Fund surveys of five countries, American attitudes stand out as the most negative, with a third of the adults surveyed calling for rebuilding the entire system, compared with only 13 percent who feel that way in Britain and 14 percent in Canada.



    That may be because Americans face higher out-of-pocket costs than citizens elsewhere, are less apt to have a long-term doctor, less able to see a doctor on the same day when sick, and less apt to get their questions answered or receive clear instructions from a doctor. On the other hand, Gallup polls in recent years have shown that three-quarters of the respondents in the United States, in Canada and in Britain rate their personal care as excellent or good, so it could be hard to motivate these people for the wholesale change sought by the disaffected.



    Use of information technology. Shockingly, despite our vaunted prowess in computers, software and the Internet, much of our health care system is still operating in the dark ages of paper records and handwritten scrawls. American primary care doctors lag years behind doctors in other advanced nations in adopting electronic medical records or prescribing medications electronically. This makes it harder to coordinate care, spot errors and adhere to standard clinical guidelines.


    Top-of-the-line care. Despite our poor showing in many international comparisons, it is doubtful that many Americans, faced with a life-threatening illness, would rather be treated elsewhere. We tend to think that our very best medical centers are the best in the world. But whether this is a realistic assessment or merely a cultural preference for the home team is difficult to say. Only when better measures of clinical excellence are developed will discerning medical shoppers know for sure who is the best of the best.




    With health care emerging as a major issue in the presidential campaign and in Congress, it will be important to get beyond empty boasts that this country has “the best health care system in the world” and turn instead to fixing its very real defects. The main goal should be to reduce the huge number of uninsured, who are a major reason for our poor standing globally. But there is also plenty of room to improve our coordination of care, our use of computerized records, communications between doctors and patients, and dozens of other factors that impair the quality of care. The world’s most powerful economy should be able to provide a health care system that really is the best.



    Source: NY Times Editorial


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    Sunday, August 12, 2007

    What's Wrong With America? Why Americans Should Not Elect ANY Republicans to ANY Office Again.

    An Important Reminder About What's at Stake in 2008


    AFL-CIO Democratic Debate, Aug. 7, 2007


    A retired steelworker who was forced to retire due to a disability and who lost his pension and his health care coverage asks John Edwards what's wrong with America and what will you do to change it? Edwards responds with what he'd do and stresses the importance of unions and universal health care.




    Run time: 02:44
    direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaBvGEklBvg

    Clearly Edwards meant this gentleman is an example of the consequences of Republican policies including: Greed; Profits Before People; Accountability is for Suckers; American Voters are Suckers; Americans Vote Against Their Own Economic Interests in the Hysteria of Right-Wing Hate and Fear... and many others -- which ones come to mind for you?





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    Friday, August 10, 2007

    The LOGO Debate: Why Marriage Is NOT The Only Question

    Watched the majority of the Human Rights Campaign + LOGO Presidential Candidates Forum last night.

    Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic has "A Reported Blog on Politics" with a post-HRC/Logo entry entitled The LOGO Debate: Marriage Is The Question which really was mainly an overview of what the candidates said, mainly about the issue of gay marriage.

    Ambinder writes that " It’s helpful to look at this debate through two lenses: the hopeful lens of the gay community and the skeptical lens of the pundit who is always peering around the corner at the general election."

    One commenter wrote: "The LGBT community will never accept John Edwards as long as he keeps up with his stump speech about how "conflicted" he is over gay marriage."

    But as Ambinder writes "...gay marriage – that’s the holy grail for many (though by no means all) of the gay community."

    I couldn't agree more. And that's what I wrote at Marc's blog too:

    Am I disappointed that Edwards is not more 'developed'? Sure, but I have not completely dismissed his viability as an electible presidential candidate. I for one am not a single issue voter, or okay, i am RARELY a single issue voter.

    Something I would argue is valuable to keep in mind about what John Edwards does bring to the table: Economic Justice issues for working and middle class folks -- that includes most of us in the GLBT community, some are far more privileged and economically elite, but most of us are not.

    Here's why I believe Edwards should not be completely dismissed: His focus on the economy and economic justice, health care and his national economic stimulation plans to put people to work for more than minimum wage and to make sure workers no longer suffer while the richest and greediest -- the friends of Bush and Cheney -- become even wealthier at the expense of all the rest of us.

    When the majority of regular working people begin experiencing and reaping economic benefits which currently are not available to most working people, zero to poor people and most are not being experienced by many other middle class working families -- i.e. the less stressed, less crunched they feel and the less economically stressed they actually are -- the more open to change, the more generous their attitudes in many areas toward social progress, social justice including GLBT issues.

    Kevin Phillips and others have well-documented Republican administrations' devastation to working families (especially pointed beginning with Reagan) -- it has become far worse under Bush Cheney despite the happy talk. Look what is happening in the financial markets right now. None of these people give a crap about whether middle class, working, much less poor people have houses, health care or jobs. All they care about is whether their investments make profits. That is the real republican mandate. They obfuscate that truth and hide it from the stupid evangelicals with emotional sleights of hand to keep them from understanding and knowing their own economic issues.

    How/Why do we fail to understand the same thing?

    While their own economic survival is at stake -- which it very much is at this point in our country -- It is harder for people to feel generous and tolerant toward others.

    When people feel/believe/know/experience the very real economic devastation this administration has wrought on working people and on this economy for the past seven years (helped along by Bill Clinton's kowtowing to the global profiteers and multinational corporations via NAFTA), they do not/are not feeling very 'secure' and thus less tolerant, less generous, less sure about what this means for them.

    Couple that with the mean-spirited divisiveness -- the republicans have known exactly how to keep americans divided, stressed, fighting, fragmented and NOT focusing on the most foundational important issues, especially the utter lack of concern that the republican party truly has for anyone but the truly wealthy. Right now they are demagoging the color of brown people and immigration BECAUSE it takes our eyes off the economic devastation they have inflicted upon this citizenry.

    I do not condone Edwards' lack of progress in the marriage issue (Hillary and Obama are no better in their explanations), but I believe there are underlying foundational issues -- ECONOMIC ISSUES, THE ECONOMY, ECONOMIC JUSTICE -- to consider which have a critical impact on how people view/experience/talk/feel about not only OUR issues, but others such as: WAR, DOMESTIC SECURITY, IMMIGRATION, INTERNATIONAL POLICIES...etc

    These are especially interconnected and extremely linked to how working families are doing economically (in addition to the leadership of our so-called leaders, grassroots efforts, personal relationships that folks have with their GLBT family members and friends....)

    There are historical trends (yellow scare, brown scare, civil rights, womens rights, gay rights) which are deeply linked to economic (and educational and legal) progress as experienced by the masses in industrial societies.

    I'm actually far more concerned about first tackling economic justice, health care, restoring pensions and benefits to retirees and workers, getting jobs to inner city -- and RURAL -- citizens and youth....because if our economic foundation crumbles further (like our infrastructure is doing), you can bet there will little or no mass support for OUR issues -- which will seem irrelevant to many many people.

    If the republicans and their toadies continue to destroy the working families of this country (including GLBT families), there will continue to be accelerating, even more rapidly growing legions of our fellow citizens who are living in perpetual violence, despair, base indignities, who have children who are starving, dying, murdering, being murdered, parents who cannot get health care or elder care ... this is the road we are headed down at this moment unless there are major changes toward putting people in this country back to work at jobs that pay more than McDonald's or Walmart pittances.

    That is why I will still listen to what John Edwards has to say despite his lack of progress at this point -- he has the capacity to learn and grow -- just like Obama, just like Clinton -- and one of these three -- or hell if only Gore would jump in, i'd support him -- but more than likely one of these three (none of whom has the perfect position on our issues) is likely to be the candidate. Sure I'd love Kucinich, but it's not realistic.

    I for one am sick of the evil of the republican demagogues and if Edwards can win key voters in key states that Hillary and Obama can not, then his economic justice and health care platform combined with his commitment to full legal rights, is a major step in the right direction. I have no doubt that just as america will come along over the next five years (like Gravel stated), Edwards will grow too.

    I could be wrong, but that's my take on things at this point. I'm not willing to count Edwards out yet.

    Ambinder's Atlantic blog on the topic is here, my specific comments (mostly the same as above) here. And HRC Back Story Blog has some analysis and linked stories, too.





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    Tuesday, August 07, 2007

    Something I've Been Wondering About

    Okay, pondering if you will.


    With the recent news of media empire maven Rupert Murdoch recently gobbling up the Wall Street Journal and adding it to his ever-growing empire, I keep wondering this:

    Why are so many (supposedly independent-minded) Americans so very willing to be told:
    what to think, what to watch, what to buy, what to read and especially who to vote for by a mega-wealthy old, white AUSTRALIAN guy?



    Hmmm?


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    Frank Rich: Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death

    FRANK RICH: Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death

    Gerald Ford spoke the truth when he called Watergate “our long national nightmare,” but even a nightmare can have its interludes of rib-splitting farce.

    None were zanier than the antics of Baruch Korff, a small-town New England rabbi who became a full-time Richard Nixon sycophant as the walls closed in. Korff was ubiquitous in the press and on television, where he would lambaste Democrats and the media “lynch mob” for vilifying “the greatest president of the century.” Despite Nixon’s reflexive anti-Semitism, he returned the favor by granting the rabbi audiences and an interview that allowed the embattled president to soliloquize about how his own faith and serenity reinforced his conviction “deep inside” that everything he did was right.

    Clearly we’ve reached our own Korffian moment in our latest long national nightmare. The Nixon interviewed by the rabbi sounded uncannily like the resolute leader chronicled by the conservative columnists and talk-show jocks President Bush has lately welcomed into his bunker. For his part, William Kristol even published a Korffian manifesto, “Why Bush Will Be a Winner,” in The Washington Post. It reassured us that the Bush presidency would “probably be a successful one” and that “we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome” in Iraq. A Bush flack let it be known that the president liked this piece so much that he recommended it to his White House staff.

    Are you laughing yet? Maybe not. No one died in Watergate. This time around, the White House lying and cover-ups have been not just in the service of political thuggery but to gin up a gratuitous war without end.

    There is another significant difference as well. Washington never drank the Nixon Kool-Aid. It kept a skeptical bipartisan eye on Tricky Dick throughout his political career, long before the Watergate complex had even been built. The charmed Mr. Bush, by contrast, got a free pass; both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and both liberals and conservatives in the news media were credulous enablers of the Iraq fiasco. Now a reckoning awaits, and the denouement is getting ugly.

    The ranks of unreconstructed Iraq hawks are thinner than they used to be. Some politicians in both parties (John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Gordon Smith) and truculent pundits (Peter Beinart, Andrew Sullivan) who cheered on the war recanted (sooner in some cases than others), learned from their errors and moved on. One particularly eloquent mea culpa can be found in today’s New York Times Magazine, where the former war supporter Michael Ignatieff acknowledges that those who “truly showed good judgment on Iraq” might have had no more information than those who got it wrong, but did not make the mistake of confusing “wishes for reality.”

    But those who remain dug in are having none of that. Some of them are busily lashing out Korff-style. Some are melting down. Some are rewriting history. Most seem more interested in saving their own reputations than the American troops they ritualistically invoke to bludgeon the wars’ critics and to parade their own self-congratulatory patriotism.

    It was a rewriting of history that made the blogosphere (and others) go berserk last week over an Op-Ed article in The Times, “A War We Just Might Win,” by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. The two Brookings Institution scholars, after a government-guided tour, pointed selectively to successes on the ground in Iraq in arguing that the surge should be continued “at least into 2008.”

    The hole in their argument was gaping. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said honorably and bluntly in his Congressional confirmation hearings, “No amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference” in Iraq if there’s no functioning Iraqi government. Opting for wishes over reality, Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack buried their pro forma acknowledgment of that huge hurdle near the end of their piece.

    But even more galling was the authors’ effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as “analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” That’s disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration’s incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of “Mission Accomplished.”

    You can find a compendium of their past wisdom in Glenn Greenwald’s Salon column. That think-tank pundits with this track record would try to pass themselves off as harsh war critics in 2007 shows how desperate they are to preserve their status as Beltway “experts” now that the political winds have shifted. Such blatant careerism would be less offensive if they didn’t do so on the backs of the additional American troops they ask to be sacrificed to the doomed mission of providing security for an Iraqi government that is both on vacation and on the verge of collapse.

    At least the more rabid and Korff-like of the war’s last defenders have the intellectual honesty not to deny what they’ve been saying all along. But their invective has gone over the top, with even mild recent critics of the war like John Warner and Richard Lugar being branded defeatist “pre- 9/11 Republicans” by Mr. Kristol.

    It’s also the tic of Mr. Kristol’s magazine, The Weekly Standard (and its Murdoch sibling The New York Post), to claim that the war’s critics hate the troops. When The New Republic ran a less-than-jingoistic essay by a pseudonymous American soldier in Iraq, The Weekly Standard even accused it of fabrication — only to have its bluff called when the author’s identity was revealed and his controversial anecdotes were verified by other sources.

    A similar over-the-top tirade erupted on “Meet the Press” last month, when another war defender in meltdown, Senator Lindsey Graham, repeatedly cut off his fellow guest by saying that soldiers he met on official Congressional visits to Iraq endorsed his own enthusiasm for the surge. Unfortunately for Mr. Graham, his sparring partner was Jim Webb, the take-no-prisoners Virginia Democrat who is a Vietnam veteran and the father of a soldier serving in the war. Senator Webb reduced Mr. Graham to a stammering heap of Jell-O when he chastised him for trying to put his political views “into the mouths of soldiers.” As Mr. Webb noted, the last New York Times-CBS News poll on the subject found that most members of the military and their immediate families have turned against the war, like other Americans.

    As is becoming clearer than ever in this Korffian endgame, hiding behind the troops is the last refuge of this war’s sponsors. This too is a rewrite of history. It has been the war’s champions who have more often dishonored the troops than the war’s opponents.

    Mr. Bush created the template by doing everything possible to keep the sacrifice of American armed forces in Iraq off-camera, forbidding photos of coffins and skipping military funerals. That set the stage for the ensuing demonization of Ted Koppel, whose decision to salute the fallen by reading a list of their names in the spotlight of “Nightline” was branded unpatriotic by the right’s vigilantes.

    The same playbook was followed by the war’s champions when a soldier confronted Donald Rumsfeld about the woeful shortage of armor during a town-hall meeting in Kuwait in December 2004. Rather than campaign for the armor the troops so desperately needed, the right attacked the questioner for what Rush Limbaugh called his “near insubordination.” When The Washington Post some two years later exposed the indignities visited upon the grievously injured troops at Walter Reed Medical Center, The Weekly Standard and the equally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page took three weeks to notice, with The Standard giving the story all of two sentences. Protecting the White House from scandal, not the troops from squalor, was the higher priority.

    One person who has had enough of this hypocrisy is the war critic Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations who is also a Vietnam veteran, a product of the United States Military Academy and a former teacher at West Point. After his 27-year-old son was killed in May while serving in Iraq, he said that Americans should not believe Memorial Day orators who talk about how priceless the troops’ lives are.

    “I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life,” Professor Bacevich wrote in The Washington Post. “I’ve been handed the check.” The amount, he said, was “roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning.”

    Anyone who questions this bleak perspective need only have watched last week’s sad and ultimately pointless Congressional hearings into the 2004 friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman. Seven investigations later, we still don’t know who rewrote the witness statements of Tillman’s cohort so that Pentagon propagandists could trumpet a fictionalized battle death to the public and his family.

    But it was nonetheless illuminating to watch Mr. Rumsfeld and his top brass sit there under oath and repeatedly go mentally AWOL about crucial events in the case. Their convenient mass amnesia about their army’s most famous and lied-about casualty is as good a definition as any of just what “supporting the troops” means to those who even now beat the drums for this war.

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