Read more from the BBC

read Mr. Bush’s comments here

In his new book, the widely respected Ron Suskind charges that in run up to the war in Iraq, the Bush Administration ordered the CIA to forge a document that would support the claim that there was a connection between the al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Government. If this is true, and there is every reason to believe that it is, then the smoking gun that justifies the impeachment of George W Bush and Dick Cheney may have just turned up.  

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This is an idea that no serious politician can be caught handing out, but there is speculation that some are trying to encourage this line of thinking.

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Ok, one more time for anyone who is still confused. Osama bin Laden a terrorist who lives in a cave; Barack Obama is a Senator with a ridicules name and the favorite to be the next President of the United States. Jon Stewart has more.

This stuff really is out there folks. It’s interesting that as our society may be stepping closer towards an expression of healing and reconciliation, the forces of ignorance and division are simultaneously intensifying under the pressure of moment

Get your “If You Want to Catch Osama You’ve Gotta Vote Obama” sticker here

See the Huffington post story about the GOP Obama/Osama propaganda

The full title of the story was “Obama: bin Laden still free because of GOP”. In fairness to Drudge the author of the piece, the associated press’s Nedra Pickler used this title as well. Obama’s comments on the subject are important and shine light on a seldom spoken truth; the republican conceived war on terror has failed to bring America’s greatest enemy to justice. This is the debate that democrats have been to afraid to have for the last seven years, but it is the right one for the nation. In that spirit one has to commend Drudge for covering it, on the other hand, it is probably never a good idea to have the words “Obama: bin Laden” right underneath a huge picture of the Senator.

Get your “If You Want to Catch Osama You’ve Gotta Vote Obama” bumper sticker here 

Go to A New Day Post’s coverage of Barack Obama 

Read the AP story here

read more here

In a sign that the general election show down really has begun, John McCain’s biggest backer, George W. Bush is out slinging some mud at Barack Obama. The dust up is over Obama’s willingness to meet with leaders from friendly and unfriendly nations. The President and several McCain surrogates are arguing that this position is comparable to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler before WWII.

Read this story at the Huffington post

This should add the all important radical-libertarian-constitutional-internet-fringe. I for one think that if we get to a point where Ralph Nader and Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan and Denis Kucinich all agree on Obama’s candidacy then he has to be the guy, or maybe that should disqualify him, (Isn’t this like one of those books that Thich Nhat Hanh writes about how Jesus and the Buddha are really getting at the same thing?)

We’re not quite there yet; I’ll get back to you.

Go to A New Day Post’s coverage of the 2008 general election

Though George W was inspiring and reassuring when he was standing on that steaming rubble and shouting through the bull horn, what he said (the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon ) wasn’t true. More than six years have passed since 9/11 and our national treasures of blood and gold have been spent on war, but Osama bin Laden remains at large. According to a new congressional report, the Bush administration continues to lack a strategy for bringing the terrorist leader to justice.

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Get your “If you want to catch Osama you’ve got to vote Obama” bumper sticker here

Read more from the Huffington Post here

  This is one of realities greatest hits!

      This guy has carried so much water for the Bush administration that his proverbial fingers are tired and all pruned up, so you have to take what hey writes with those fingers with a grain of salt. He goes on in to rip Obama and has a track record of outlandish moments, even for a Fox New annalist. But he is undoubtedly smart, and in this case, correct.

“Clinton’s problem, however, is that a corkscrew landing under sniper fire is the kind of thing that is hard to forget and harder still for memory to invent. This is confabulation on a pathological scale. A Clintonian scale. And that’s the problem. Barack Obama has been gaining on Hillary in Pennsylvania in part because Tuzla reminds Democrats what they had largely succeeded in banishing from consciousness: the Clintons‘ rather arm’s-length relationship with truth.”

Read this article in the Washington Post

             It has now been five years since the United States military invaded Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction, which he didn’t have, to help terrorist who he wasn’t connected to. That’s not liberal spin, but the conclusion of the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group co-chaired by the former Sec. of State republican James Baker. Now, according to the Department of Defense 3992 Americans have died in the war. Despite Bush adviser Paul Wolfowitz’s prewar assurance that with Iraq, “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction”, Estimates say that the cost of the war is between $700 billion to $2 trillion. Reporting on the issue of Iraqi civilian dead has been shamefully poor but 1000000 is an often pointed to figure. And of course, Osama bin Laden is still at large in Pakistan..

             Five years on, with 97% of the US deaths coming since the president declaired declared “Mission Accomplished”, and with all the original justifications for the war proven false, and the Bush administrations unraveling credibility having left the American people with a true crises of leadership, we as a nation are no closer to an idea of what victory in Iraq would look like. The policy  makers on the war still have no time tables and misses their own benchmarks casually. As Eric Kleefeld of talking points memo points out George Bush’s popularity has fallen 40 points over the five years of the Iraq war. Now as the race to replace Bush heats up, the republican nominee still doesn’t quite have the facts straight. While visiting the Middle East John McCain repeatedly states that Shia Iran is training Sunni Al-Qaida. Not one to be over shadowed, McCain’s Iraq traveling buddy Dick Cheney, when asked by ABC about polls that show two thirds of Americans think the war is not worth it said “so?” that before leavening to go fishing on the yacht of the Sultan of Oman.

TPM.com on the war and McCain

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          Some in the media and opposition operatives have been working hard to bring into focus Barack Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright, his retired pastor from the United Church of Christ in Chicago, whose controversial comments the senator has denounced. But in a time when Obama’s connection to Wright, is coming to be a big story we should remember the role that neoconservative ideologues and evangelical fanatics played in the approach of the Bush administration. If the media and rival campaigns think that the political integrity of a candidate’s spiritual adviser is worth investigating, then they should look closer at the people from whom John McCain is taking council.

            For seven years now the foreign policy of the United States seems to have been loosely based on one organizing principle, ‘don’t’ mess with Texas’. Now that the Bush years are drawing to a close, many around the country are hopeful that our next president will have a more sophisticated world view than does the current occupant of the oval office. Most people assume that the next Commander-in-chief will bring to the office, an understanding of the world that is more nuanced, one painted with more shades of gray and less black and white; not so fast.

            If John McCain is elected the country might be in for more of the same. Though he is known as a reformer and a maverick, and though conservatives are quick to point out all the ways he has failed to tow the party line (on immigration, torture, campaign finance, tax cuts or the rich), indications are that McCain may not be free from the type of absolutist dogmatic ideology that ruined the Bush administration.

            Recently Rod Parsley, one of the evangelical preachers who McCain counts as an spiritual adviser, said that America should aim to destroy Islam. Now that really is a daunting goal, perhaps not as daunting as when George W. Bush’s pledge to wipe evil of the face of the earth; he couldn’t even get it out of his White House.  But Islam is the one of the world’s largest religion with over a billion adherents. Maybe that is what McCain has in mind for the troops he says he might keep in Iraq for the next hundred years. However most educated adults understand that a war with Islam is the last things anyone should want.This is the stuff that makes s everyone from Ron Paul to Ralph Nader go nuts. This is just an idea, but what if we keep the American Government out of the business of regulating what people believe about what happens after you die.

            As David Corn of Mother Jones points out, Parsley calls Islam an “antichrist religion” and charges that Mohammad “received [his] revelations from demons”. Perhaps somehow there is still some debate about the inherent ethnocentrism, foolishness and disrespect contained in those words, but this must is for sure, it clearly makes you politicaly dangerous for a Presidential Candidate to stand with.

           Parsley is not the only fundamentalist fanatic that McCain has courted in his attempt to win over the  Republican party’s evangelical fringe. We shouldn’t forget about McCain spiritual adviser John Hagee, who called the Catholic Church “the great whore”. If Sen. McCain wants to have any chance of appealing to moderate voters in the general election, he must distance himself from these phonies who use their ‘spirituality’ as a front for their hateful, intolerant, bigotry. What do you know? Here’s one of those things that really is black or white; either you reject the political support of hateful Fanatics or you don’t.

Read David Corn’s article in Mother Jones mentioned above

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            It goes without saying that Congressman King’s “dancing in the street” comment was reprehensible, as are any attacks that play on the American people’s fear, or that appeal to racism or sexism or ethnocentrism. But i think it is important to remember how we got here. During this drawn out democratic primary race, the blueprint for how to tear down Barack Obama is being written, not by Karl Rove but by the Clintons. This is when you want to be able to say to a Nader voter, “See this is why you have to vote democrat,  only the republicans would stoop so low” but you can’t because it is a line of attack that the Clintons unleashed. 

Obama responds to King’s comments

          Famously Bill Clinton claimed on 11/27/07 that he had been against the war in Iraq “from the beginning.” Which raises the question, how could he tell when he had become against the war from the start? Was he against it when Hillary voted for it as a US senator? Was he against it when he was president and he regularly bombed Iraq for a weapons program that FBI agent George Piro, recently said Saddam faked hoping to deter an Iranian invasion? And what were his thoughts when theWashington thinktank the Project for the New American Century ( including soon to be G.W. Bush administration officials: Rumsfeld, Armitage, Bolton, Wolfowitz, and Perle) sent him a letter in January 1998 asking him to invade Iraq? Was he against the Sanction imposed on Iraq all during the 1990’s that caused untold hardship, sorrow, and death to civilians all across  Iraq? Wasn’t it when his wife started running for president that he decided he had always been against the war in iraq from the start?

“That’s right. Osama bin Laden hasn’t been captured, much less killed, and Gen. Musharraf’s reign over Pakistan is on the brink of chaos, but we still rely on him to find bin Laden in that nation, and still, until now nobody here has found time to mention it. And now, you’re supposed to be embarrassed for having suggested that if Musharraf won’t act, you will? Nonsense.  Prior to your discussion of the subject, Sen. Obama, I reviewed the transcripts of the first seven presidential debates (almost 15 hours!) and could find only one substantive question about Pakistan put to any of the candidates, and that came from someone in the audience. That’s why I blame the other candidates for not talking in detail about what they would do to find bin Laden if elected, and shame on the media for giving those candidates a free pass.  

I certainly don’t profess to have the answers about what we should be doing in Pakistan to finally find and kill bin Laden, and I don’t know whether you do, Sen. Obama. But I welcome your attempt at leading the discussion.”

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 “If You Want to Catch Osama You’ve Gotta Vote Obama”