2004 US Elections

Castro Slams Bush 'Lies and Slanders' on Sex Tours (reuters)
By Nelson Acosta

SANTA CLARA, Cuba (Reuters) - Cuban leader Fidel Castro questioned President Bush's mental fitness on Monday and rejected as "lies and slanders" recent charges by the American that Cuba encourages sex tourism.

Addressing the nation on the anniversary of his initial guerrilla uprising 51 years ago, Castro portrayed Bush as a dangerous religious fundamentalist bent on destroying Cuban socialism. He accused Bush of exhibiting "strange behavior and bellicosity."

"Let's hope, in Cuba's case, God does not instruct Mr. Bush to attack our country," Castro said. "He had better check on any divine belligerent order by consulting the Pope."

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The Arabian Candidate (NY times)
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In the original version of "The Manchurian Candidate," Senator John Iselin, whom Chinese agents are plotting to put in the White House, is a right-wing demagogue modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Roger Ebert wrote, the plan is to "use anticommunist hysteria as a cover for a communist takeover."

The movie doesn't say what Iselin would have done if the plot had succeeded. Presumably, however, he wouldn't have openly turned traitor. Instead, he would have used his position to undermine national security, while posing as America's staunchest defender against communist evil.

So let's imagine an update - not the remake with Denzel Washington, which I haven't seen, but my own version. This time the enemies would be Islamic fanatics, who install as their puppet president a demagogue who poses as the nation's defender against terrorist evildoers.

The Arabian candidate wouldn't openly help terrorists. Instead, he would serve their cause while pretending to be their enemy.

After an attack, he would strike back at the terrorist base, a necessary action to preserve his image of toughness, but botch the follow-up, allowing the terrorist leaders to escape. Once the public's attention shifted, he would systematically squander the military victory: committing too few soldiers, reneging on promises of economic aid. Soon, warlords would once again rule most of the country, the heroin trade would be booming, and terrorist allies would make a comeback.
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Our lies led us into war(Guardian)

The press must also be held to account for falsehoods we reproduced before the invasion

George Monbiot

So Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who claimed that the government had sexed up the intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, was mostly right. Much of the rest of the media, which took the doctored intelligence at face value, was wrong. The reward for getting it right was public immolation and the sack. The punishment for getting it wrong was the usual annual bonus. No government commissions inquiries to discover why reporters reproduce the government's lies.

All journalists make mistakes. When deadlines are short and subjects are complicated, we are bound to get some things wrong. But the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job. If the newspapers have any interest in putting the record straight, they should surely each be commissioning an inquiry of their own. Unlike the government's, it should be independent, consisting perhaps of a lawyer, a media analyst and an intelligence analyst. Its task would be to assess the paper's coverage of Iraq, decide what it got right and what it got wrong, discover why the mistakes were made and what should be done to prevent their repetition. Its report should be published in full by the paper.
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Send In the Gowns(NY times)
By MAUREEN DOWD

The president and the first lady said the twins weren't public figures, yet here are their figures in public.

The strapless sisters are helping a campaign that's increasingly strapped. Barbara and Jenna, glamming like the Hilton sisters, are in gowns in Vogue, and in vogue on the trail, giving Dad some much needed cover by uncovering their shoulders.

With even Republicans like Pat Roberts, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioning whether the president would have launched a war against Iraq if he'd known how weak his case was, Mr. Bush needs all the distractions he can get.

There was faint support yesterday for Mr. Bush's feint on gay marriage. W. thought he had a bit in the maverick's mouth, but John McCain bit back, bolting over to the Democratic side to help embarrass the president by defeating the constitutional amendment that dare not speak its name. Senator McCain scorned the amendment banning gay marriage as "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans." (Well, some Republicans.)

When the British report came out yesterday declaring that Saddam Hussein had no significant W.M.D., or perhaps no W.M.D., Tony Blair accepted "full personal responsibility" for "the way the issue was presented and, therefore, for any errors made."
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All Together Now (NY times)
GUEST COLUMNIST
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

Their faces long with disapproval, the anchors announced that the reason for the war had finally been uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and it was "groupthink," not to mention "collective groupthink." It sounds so kinky and un-American, like something that might go on in a North Korean stadium or in one of those sex clubs that Jack Ryan, the former Illinois Senate candidate, is accused of dragging his wife to. But supposedly intelligent, morally upstanding people had been indulging in it right in Langley, Va.

This is a surprise? Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it's hard to find any thinking these days that doesn't qualify for the prefix "group." Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it's the "team player" with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone "out of step with the American people." Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program.

This summer's remake of the "Stepford Wives" doesn't have anything coherent to say about gender politics: Men are the oppressors? Women are the oppressors? Or maybe just Glenn Close? But it does play to the fantasy, more widespread than I'd realized, that if you were to rip off the face of the person sitting in the next cubicle, you'd find nothing but circuit boards underneath
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The selection trail (Guardian)
The Senate investigation of pre-war intelligence repeated the mistakes it was designed to address, reports Julian Borger

Picture this scene. It is February 4 2003, the evening before Colin Powell, the secretary of state, is due to appear before the United Nations to make Washington's case for war in Iraq.

One of the aces up his sleeve is a claim that Saddam Hussein has developed new mobile biological warfare laboratories. Vivid graphics have been produced to illustrate the fearsome (and as it turns out, entirely imaginary) threat. It is to be one of the most dramatic moments at a turning point in history.

But, back in his darkened office, a military intelligence officer is growing increasingly anxious. He personally knows the principal source of the mobile laboratory story, an Iraqi defector codenamed Curve Ball. In fact, as far as this officer is aware, he is the only senior American official to have met him and he came away from that meeting with serious doubts. For one thing, Curve Ball appeared to be an alcoholic.
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Bush Seeks Shift in Logging Rules(NY times)
WASHINGTON, July 12 - The Bush administration on Monday proposed scuttling a Clinton-era rule that put nearly 60 million acres of national forest largely off limits to logging, mining or other development in favor of a new system that would leave it to governors to seek greater - or fewer - strictures on road construction in forests.

The announcement abandoning the so-called roadless rule was made by Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman in Boise, Idaho, where opposition to the rule issued by President Bill Clinton as he was leaving office was most pronounced. Ms. Veneman described the proposal as a way to sidestep the tangle of litigation over building roads through national forests and to improve local participation and federal flexibility in determining the use of national forests.
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Policy, Politics and Pressure(NY times)
WASHINGTON, July 9 Although the Senate Intelligence Committee found no evidence that the Bush administration had tried to coerce the C.I.A. to produce exaggerated prewar warnings about Iraq's weapons programs, its findings did little to still the furious debate about whether the White House and the Pentagon tried to influence the agency's conclusions.

The White House took comfort in the committee's report on Friday, but it was clear from the arguments still raging across Washington that the administration's dealings with the Central Intelligence Agency will remain a politically volatile issue through the election campaign.
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Key Bush Military Service Files Destroyed (reuters)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microfilm records related to President Bush's service in the Air National Guard three decades ago were accidentally destroyed when the military tried to improve its files, the Pentagon said on Friday.

Payroll records of large numbers of service members, including Bush, were ruined in 1996 and 1997 in a project to save large, brittle rolls of microfilm, Defense Finance and Accounting Service spokesman Bryan Hubbard told Reuters.

Bush's whereabouts during his service as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard in the United States during the Vietnam War have become an election-year issue, with some Democrats accusing him of shirking his duty.
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Ill-Serving Those Who Serve(NY times)
The Pentagon's decision to press 5,600 honorably discharged soldiers back into service, mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the latest example of President Bush's refusal to face the true costs of pre-emptive war. As with other stopgap measures to paper over the poor planning of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, this one demands more from those who have already given the most: volunteer soldiers and their families. And because this call-up comes uncomfortably close to conscription, it highlights more than other emergency deployments the callousness of the administration's failure to budget for an adequate number of ground troops.

Last week's mobilization decision involved the Army's Individual Ready Reserve, a pool of 117,000 former officers and soldiers who have completed their active or reserve duty, but still have time left on the eight-year contracts they signed when they enlisted. Given the urgency of the need for more troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can see why tapping that ready reserve was so tempting. But that urgency is of the administration's own making.
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Bye-Bye, Bush Boom(NY times)
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: July 6, 2004

When does optimism — the Bush campaign's favorite word these days — become an inability to face facts? On Friday, President Bush insisted that a seriously disappointing jobs report, which fell far short of the pre-announcement hype, was good news: "We're witnessing steady growth, steady growth. And that's important. We don't need boom-or-bust-type growth."

But Mr. Bush has already presided over a bust. For the first time since 1932, employment is lower in the summer of a presidential election year than it was on the previous Inauguration Day. Americans badly need a boom to make up the lost ground. And we're not getting it.
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