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Archive for November, 2006

irrelevant…

Iraq’s Premier Abruptly Skips a Bush Session Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and King Abdullah II of Jordan abruptly backed out of a meeting with President Bush on Wednesday, leaving the White House scrambling to explain why a carefully planned summit meeting had suddenly been cut from two days to one. The decision […]

down memory lane: the Cheney years…

This table is a brief summary of the article Hail to the Chief in the Sunday Boston Globe about Dick Cheney’s political career. There’s also a good article, The Curse of Dick Cheney, in Rolling Stone: Year President Position Comments 1969 Nixon Assistant, Office of Economic Opportunity Hired by Donald Rumsfeld to impose greater political […]

down memory lane: my year of cognitive dissonance…

I feel a bit like I did a year or so ago when I read about Judith Miller, Laurie Mylroie, the Niger Forgeries, Plame’s outing, A,E.I., P.N.A.C, and the Downing Street Memos. It took me a while for the whole thing to sink in, that Bush and his Administration had wanted to go to war […]

down memory lane: the Clinton years and George the 2nd

Don’t you know these guys were ticked off when Clinton got elected and stayed in office for eight years? They did everything in their power to shut him dowm. Clinton’s focus was on a different axis, the growing Terrorist Organizations in the Middle East. The Reagan/Bush refugees were outraged that he was worried about Al […]

down memory lane: George the 1st…

But our support of Iraq didn’t end with Reagan. It continued with President George H.W. Bush at an even more remarkable pace. Here are just a few parts of an article by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas in the L.A. Times in 1993. The whole article is chilling [and there are plenty of other sources […]

down memory lane: WWII thru Reagan…

In World War II, England and the United States forced the Shah of Iran to abdicate in favour of his son, fearing that Iran would side with the Nazis. The younger, pro-Western Shah ruled Iran until 1979 when he was deposed in the Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Iranian Hostage Crisis in […]

blunder?

Jimmy Carter: "Iraq Invasion…One Of The Greatest Blunders That American Presidents Have Ever Made"…   … BLITZER: It doesn’t sound like he’s moving away from that neo-conservative ideology from earlier, does it? CARTER: No, but one of the most ridiculous and humorous things that I’ve seen lately is the neo-conservatives moving away from George Bush […]

no Newt!

Gingrich raises alarm at event honoring those who stand up for freedom of speech Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists’ ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message. "We need to get ahead of the […]

group-think…

A post by Steve Clemmons of the Washington Note about a conference he’s going to in Vienna on the role of think-tanks in government got me to thinking about theories of groups. Winfred Bion was a Psychoanalyst in England who thought deeply about group processes. His thinking has become important to group therapists of all […]

about Iraq’s Civil War

"…to point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon…" "existence precedes essence" "if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck…" Whether it’s a Zen saying, a tenet of Existentialism, or a sarcastic quip, the wisdom remains the same. What you call something doesn’t […]