Frank Rich: Hammer meet Nail....(NY Times)

[Aviation Pro]

Rich nails the fearful, little, poser scrub right to the wall with his clear, forthright analysis. We must save at least one cell in the Supermax terrorist wing for this ugly troll.



May 31, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack?

By FRANK RICH

AFTER watching the farce surrounding Dick Cheney’s coming-out party this month, you have to wonder: Which will reach Washington first, change or the terrorists? If change doesn’t arrive soon, terrorists may well rush in where the capital’s fools now tread.

The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.

Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.

[democrank]

1. K & R

Another masterful piece of work by Frank Rich.

[KharmaTrain]

2. At Least A Majority Are Aware Now...

In 2002, crashcart got away with this shit, cherry picking his pets in the corporate media...Judith Miller, Timmeh Russert and Faux Noise to convince a majority that Iraq = 9/11. That shit don't fly now...sadly, too late. There are still a "soft middle" that feel torture is "justified"...the last thread of any defense he has to try to nullify the jury and spin his case. The corporate media is doing all it can to assist, but the more the cheneys try to revise history, the more people will start to look closer.

Personally I hope crashcart continues to bang his drum...keeping the public limelight on this important issue and keeping him front and center as the Torquemada of that regime. Hopefully it will finally piss President Obama and Congress to call his bluff...release ALL the records on torture...and his own records as well. Hell, he's asking for it, let's give it to him.

Kudos to Frank Rich for always fighting the good fight...

[Botany]

3. McClatchy News: 10/ 2002 the Bush admin knew Saddam did not have WMDs

..... or at the least had doubts about the WMDs.

From link given in Frank Rich's piece.

Wanna see why Cheney and the dick's daughter are trying so hard to re-write history? They knew all along that that the Saddam was not
a threat and that there was no links between Iraq and 9/11 so the admin. lied to start an unneeded war and tortured people into giving up false
info so as to sell the war. Other links besides the story tell of the bush admin. twisting the intell. facts so as to fit policy. These are war crimes
and need to be punished. (Not in the McClatchy story but w/ in 2 weeks of the anthrax attacks the admin. knew from DNA that the anthrax
that was sent to Tom Daschle and others came from Ft. Dettrick, MD .... so sending Powell to the U.N. in Jan 2002 to hold up a vile and scare
people about Saddam's "mobile biological weapons labs" was a total lie too)




http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq-intelligence/story/8546.html (full story @ link)

Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials

Posted on Friday, September 6, 2002

WASHINGTON — Senior U.S. officials with access to top-secret intelligence on Iraq say they have detected no alarming increase in the threat that Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein poses to American security and Middle East stability.

But some top officials, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, argue that American intelligence can't be counted on
to spot Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical weapons breakthroughs in time to defend against them. Therefore, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other officials say, the
United States has no choice but to remove Saddam before he can use such weapons or give them to terrorists.

[jazzjunkysue]

4. Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-

Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”

[Iwillnevergiveup]

5. Frank Rich

continues to be a godsend.

K&R