1 Boring Old Man

Mike Allen, Cheney’s Chief Spokesman
The Daily Dish
Andrew Sullivan
30 Dec 2009

There he goes again, the mouthpiece for Rove and Cheney, believing his "access" as a stenographer makes him a journalist. It doesn’t. It makes him a stenographer. Allen gussies up his source’s bile with a few fig leaf sentences and a gesture from a Democratic rebuttal. But he also offers the entire Cheney statement – a classic Dolchstoss attack on the president as a traitor – in full. I hope Allen gets his page-views. But shouldn’t the Cheneys be paying him rather than Politico?

So what’s an old man to do nursing a bad Middle Eastern cold on a gray cold day when the news is gloomy and the concentration center is too viral to read a book or watch tv? Orbitz Golf is the most I can muster. It kept popping up at random times, so I ran it down. It’s here. I’ve got it down to 2 holes in one and one 2 shot.

• Hole 1: Put the point of the ponytail on the right inside bumper, then move it to the right 1 or 2 pixels. Use full force on the swing. Hole in one!
• Hole 2 – First Shot: Put the join between the ponytail  and the shirt on the line as shown. Back off on the swing a pixel or 2. If you don’t back off slightly, you’ll end up on the corner. Unmakable.
• Hole 2 – Second Shot: Putt it in [the one shown just made it].
• Hole 3: Put the point of the ponytail on the top of the inside upper bumper, then move it up ever so slightly. Use full force on the swing. Another hole in one.

Iran holds pro-government rallies
Al Jazeera
12/30/2008

Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to gather across Iran for a series of state-sponsored rallies designed as a show of strength following days of pro-opposition demonstrations. Wednesday’s demonstrations in Tehran and several other cities, come as Iran’s police chief vowed to "crush" opposition gatherings. "In dealing with previous [opposition] protests, police showed leniency," General Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, Iran’s police chief, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying. "But given that these currents are seeking to topple [the ruling system], there will be no mercy. "We will take severe action. The era of tolerance is over. Anyone attending such rallies will be crushed."

Government forces: Opposition websites reported that some state-owned factories had allocated transport for employees to take them to the pro-government rallies, while traditional bazaars have closed for the day in some cities. Alireza Ronaghi, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Tehran, said: "The main thing that we all expect is a huge rally in support of the government, especially in support of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "Those who are going to be in the demonstration today are annoyed at the fact that some [opposition] demonstrators on Sunday have insulted the supreme leader and chanted slogans against his position."

Al Jazeera, like other foreign media, had faced restrictions reporting on the opposition protests in Iran, but those restrictions have been eased in time for the Wednesday’s planned protests. Eight people were killed in Sunday’s anti-government protests which coincided with the marking of Ashoura, Shia Islam’s holiest event. Police arrested hundreds of protesters during anti-government rallies and many more opposition aides and supporters in the days that followed. Police chief Maghaddam said that 300 of the 500 "rioters" arrested over the weekend were still in detention and that more were likely to have been detained by other security agencies.

Foreign powers blamed: Iran’s government has condemned the opposition protests and blamed the unrest on foreign influences, including Britain, the US and Israel. A statement from the government said: "The offensive slogans have made the pious Iranian nation sad and the Zionist world happy and in practice they, as pawns of the enemies, have furnished a red carpet for the foreigners who are aiming at the nation’s security. "The knowledgeable people of Islamic Iran will once again put the lackeys of global oppression in their place and will blind the eyes of sedition."

In their turn, international powers have criticised Tehran over the nature of its crackdown on the protests. Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Washington-based think-tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera the West was facing a "delicate situation" in Iran. "On one hand the United States and European countries should continue to condemn human rights abuses in Iran – they should want to be on the right side of history when they see people courageously struggling for democratic change," he said. "On the other hand, this is an internal Iranian drama which is unfolding and they don’t want to walk into a trap of tainting the independence of the opposition movement."

• "…demonstrators on Sunday have insulted the supreme leader and chanted slogans against his position"
• "…condemned the opposition protests and blamed the unrest on foreign influences, including Britain, the US and Israel"
• "…offensive slogans have made the pious Iranian nation sad and the Zionist world happy and in practice they, as pawns of the enemies, have furnished a red carpet for the foreigners who are aiming at the nation’s security"
• "…knowledgeable people of Islamic Iran will once again put the lackeys of global oppression in their place and will blind the eyes of sedition"

Cheney Joins Hypocritical Attacks On Obama’s

‘Low Key Response’ To Failed Terrorist Attack
ThinkProgress
12/30/2009

… But in a statement given to a different Politico reporter, former Vice President Dick Cheney harshly criticized Obama’s “low key response“:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

Cheney’s claim that the Obama administration’s response to the attempted airline bombing is “trying to pretend we are not at war” is especially hypocritical because one of the Bush administration’s first public comments on the 2001 attempted shoe bombing specifically called it a “law enforcement” issue. At a press conference five days after the incident, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld brushed off questions about Richard Reid’s failed bombing by saying, “That’s a matter that’s in the hands of the law enforcement people and not the Department of Defense.” “And I don’t have anything I would want to add,” said Rumsfeld…

The key to literary success? Be a man – or write like one
Washington Post
By Julianna Baggott
December 30, 2009

^{This fall, Publishers Weekly named the top 100 books of 2009. How many female writers were in the top 10? Zero. How many on the entire list? Twenty-nine. I wish I were scandalized, or at least surprised. I’m not. I understand the invisible prejudice – from the inside out. I’m a woman, but I’ve been a sexist, too. In my grad school thesis, written at 23, you’ll find young men coming of age, old men haunted by war, Oedipus complexes galore. If I’d learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can’t be a man, write like one. No one told me this outright. But I was told to worship Chekhov, Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Carver, Marquez, O’Brien… This was the dawn of political correctness. Women were listed as concessions. In the middle of my master’s, a female writer took center stage with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award – E. Annie Proulx. Ah, there was a catch. She was writing about men and therefore like a man.}

^{I ran out of things to say about men, however, and began my career writing about women. When I started as a poet, I was told – many times – not to write about motherhood because it would be perceived as weak. I didn’t listen. But when I invented the pen name N.E. Bode for "The Anybodies," a trilogy for younger readers, I had to choose to be a man or a woman. The old indoctrination kicked in. I picked man. The trilogy did well, shortlisted in a People magazine summer pick, alongside Bill Clinton and David Sedaris. I was finally one of the boys.}

^{I could understand Publishers Weekly’s phallocratic list if women were writing only a third of the books published or if women didn’t float the industry as book buyers or if the list were an anomaly. In fact, Publishers Weekly is in sync with Pulitzer Prize statistics. In the past 30 years, only 11 prizes have gone to women. Amazon recently announced its 100 best books of 2009 – in the top 10, there are two women. Top 20? Four. Poets & Writers shared a list of 50 of the most inspiring writers in the world this month; women made up only 36 percent. When asked about its choices this year, Publishers Weekly said it chose books that "stood out" and weren’t trying to be "politically correct," as if this were the only reason female writers could have gotten on the list. Or is it that we have stamped the publishing industry post-feminist and can now slide back to comfortable stereotypes?}

^{What are the stereotypes that drive these biases? Over the years, I’ve developed many theories. Let me offer one here. I often hear people exclaiming that they’re astonished that a particular book was written by a man. They seem stunned by the notion that a man could write with emotional intelligence and honesty about our human frailties. Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be experts on emotion. I’ve never heard anyone remark that they were surprised that a book of psychological depth was written by a woman. So men get points for simply showing up on the page with a literary effort…}

^{What are the best books? The answer is always subjective, and I’m not a literary arbiter. But the message I received from this year’s lists was painfully familiar. It forced me to explain to my students – the next generation of writers – that the men in the class have double if not five times the chance of this kind of recognition. I’ll hand over the statistics and explain that an industry kept afloat by women is sexist. I’ll confess to my own sexism. And I’ll tell them that we have failed, but they don’t have to.}

---

^{Julianna Baggott is an associate professor at Florida State University’s creative writing program. Her most recent novel is "The Ever Breath."}

A couple of things occurred to me immediately. I’m tired of political correctness and the idea of "invisible prejudice." Those concepts have achieved the phase of paradigm exhaustion [Kuhn], the phase when a new paradigm begins to lose its explanatory power and people try to squeeze things into an idea where they don’t fit anymore. Julianna Baggott assumes that the differences she laments are prejudice – maybe, maybe not. Was my annoyance her own blatant sexism? I doubt it. I’m sort of used to hearing that over the years [though I admit that her victim stance and contemptuousness do grate].

I ended up thinking that the thing that really bothered me about this article is a sin that I commit on this blog almost daily. If you are a person who supports Dick Cheney in any dimension, it wouldn’t take you two sentences of many of my posts about him to know that you couldn’t talk to me. My mind is set in concrete. He’s a bad guy, period. While I really do believe that [and will until my last days], I’m aware that I’m doing that thing that so bothers me about Julianna Baggott – simplifying and demonizing.

Obama Curbs Secrecy of Classified Documents
New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
December 29, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information. In an executive order and an accompanying presidential memorandum to agency heads, Mr. Obama signaled that the government should try harder to make information public if possible, including by requiring agencies to regularly review what kinds of information they classify and to eliminate any obsolete secrecy requirements.

“Agency heads shall complete on a periodic basis a comprehensive review of the agency’s classification guidance, particularly classification guides, to ensure the guidance reflects current circumstances and to identify classified information that no longer requires protection and can be declassified,” Mr. Obama wrote in the order, released while he was vacationing in Hawaii. He also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives to speed the process of declassifying historical documents by centralizing their review, rather than sending them in sequence to different agencies. He set a four-year deadline for processing a 400-million-page backlog of such records that includes archives related to military operations during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Moreover, Mr. Obama eliminated a rule put in place by former President George W. Bush in 2003 that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Instead, spy agencies who object to such a decision will have to appeal to the president…

Which brings us to the Cheney Energy Task Force [National Energy Policy Development Group], initiated on January 29, 2001, eight days after the inauguration. Cheney met with the leaders of the oil, gas, and coal industry – but refused to release the proceedings. He fought releasing the proceedings all the way to the Supreme Court and won. All we really know about the Task Force is that the Energy Executives were there and that their maps showed the oil fields of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – all chopped up into areas for future exploration. This is just one of the pieces of evidence that the Invasion of Iraq was for oil, not WMDs or al Qaeda ties, because it way antedates 9/11. Will those records be released as part of Obama’s Executive Order? Let’s hope! The Republicans need an encounter with their own recent and checkered past.

What I hope this order means is that Obama has finally had his fill of trying to deal with the Republicans by making nice. He’s tried it for nearly a year, and has gained nothing. This order could’ve been signed on January 22nd, 2009. I don’t know if he waited because he hoped for some Republican support, or whether he’s pathologically careful. I’m no judge of such things because I was ready for the secret documents to be released then. Whichever the case, I’d like to see the Cheney Energy Task Force proceedings heading our way soon.

US, Israel staged Iran protests: Ahmadinejad
By Agence France-Presse on AFP
12/29/2009

TEHRAN — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad branded Sunday’s anti-government protests as a "nauseating play" staged by the United States and Israel, state news agency IRNA reported.

"Iranians have seen lots of these games. Americans and Zionists are the sole audience of a play they have commissioned and sold out," he said on Tuesday in reaction to the protests, in which eight people were killed.

"A nauseating play is performed," he said.

Opposition ‘deserve death’
Straits Times – Singapore
Dec 30,2009

TEHERAN — INFLUENTIAL Iranian cleric Ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi on Tuesday branded opposition leaders as ‘enemies of God’ whose punishment under Islamic sharia law is death, Fars news agency reported. ‘Leaders of sedition are Mohareb [the enemies of God],’ Ayatollah Vaez Tabasi, the representative of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Khorasan province, was quoted as saying by Fars.

‘In our judiciary, the verdict for Mohareb is clear and they deal with it within law,’ he said. His statement is the strongest threat yet to have been issued against opposition leaders who have rejected the June re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as fraudulent. – AFP

The number of protesters and revolutionaries killed during the Iranian Revolution range between 3,000 to 60,000. Ayatollah Khomeini stated that "60,000 men, women and children were martyred by the Shah’s regime," but estimates compiled by a researcher (Emad al-Din Baghi) at the Martyrs Foundation (Bonyad Shahid) come to only 2,781 killed in the 1978 and 1979 clashes between demonstrators and the Shah’s army and security forces, which if true mean that Iran suffered remarkably few casualties compared to contemporary events such as the South African anti-apartheid movement.

After the revolution human rights groups estimated the number of casualties suffered by protesters and prisoners of the new Islamic regime to be several thousand. The first to be executed were Members of the old regime – senior generals, followed by over 200 of the Shah’s senior civilian officials – as punishment and to eliminate the danger of coup d’État. Brief trials lacking defense attorneys, juries, transparency or opportunity for the accused to defend themselves were held by revolutionary judges such as Sadegh Khalkhali, the Sharia judge. By January 1980 "at least 582 persons had been executed." Among those executed was Amir Abbas Hoveida, former Prime Minister of Iran. Between January 1980 and June 1981, when Bani-Sadr was impeached, at least 900 executions took place, for everything from drug and sexual offenses to `corruption on earth,` from plotting counter-revolution and spying for Israel to membership in opposition groups. In the 12 months following that Amnesty International documented 2,946 executions, with several thousand more killed in the next two years according to the anti-regime guerillas People’s Mujahedin of Iran.

Karl Rove granted divorce in Texas
Politico
By MIKE ALLEN
12/29/09

Karl Rove, former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, has been granted a divorce in Texas after 24 years of marriage, family spokeswoman Dana Perino said. “Karl Rove and his wife, Darby, were granted a divorce last week," said Perino. "The couple came to the decision mutually and amicably, and they maintain a close relationship and a strong friendship. There will be no further comment, and the family requests that its privacy be respected.” The Roves were married in January 1986.

A family friend told POLITICO: “After 24 years of marriage, many of which were spent under incredible stress and strain during the White House years, the Roves came to a mutual decision that they would end the marriage. They did spend Christmas together with their son, and they plan to spend time together in the future. They maintain a strong friendship, and they both feel that that friendship is a source of comfort and inspiration for their friends and family.”

Rove’s 608-page memoir, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” is due out from Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions on March 9.

Henneberger Piece Foreshadows Trouble in Rove’s Marriage
FishbowlDC
By Betsy Rothstein
Dec 29, 2009

Politics Daily prints an excerpt of a "rare" interview that editor-in-chief Melinda Henneberger had with Darby Rove (soon to be ex-wife of Bush Advisor Karl Rove) in 2000 when she wrote for The New York Times.

In this foreboding quote from Darby Rove, Henneberger reveals possible trouble in the couple’s marriage: "He’s learned to lay back a little bit when he and Andrew play chess," she told me, "but even in croquet he’d be hitting my ball so far I was crying on vacation."

Read more about the Roves here.

Then, as now, I came back thinking about the neoconservative obsession with "regime change" in Iraq and Iran. They wanted that desert with all their hearts. While the PNAC letter to President Clinton in 1998 is well known [they’ve pulled the web site again but I keep a copy handy], there are a few other references that remain more obscure:

January 26, 1998 The Honorable William J. Clinton President of the United States Washington, DC Dear Mr. President: We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.  In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat.  We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.  We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor. The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished.  Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons. Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat. Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy. We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council. We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk. Sincerely, Elliott Abrams   Richard L. Armitage    William J. Bennett Jeffrey Bergner   John Bolton   Paula Dobriansky Francis Fukuyama   Robert Kagan   Zalmay Khalilzad William Kristol   Richard Perle   Peter W. Rodman Donald Rumsfeld   William Schneider, Jr.   Vin Weber Paul Wolfowitz   R. James Woolsey   Robert B. Zoellick

Defending Liberty in a Global Economy
Delivered at the Collateral Damage Conference
Cato Institute
June 23, 1998
by Richard B. Cheney

^{I believe that economic forces have driven much of the change in the last 20 years, and I would be prepared to argue that, in many cases, that economic progress has been a prerequisite to political change. The power of ideas, concepts of freedom and liberty and of how best to organize economic activity, have been an essential, positive ingredient in the developments in the last part of the 20th century. At the heart of that process has been the U.S. business community. Our capital, our technology, our entrepreneurship has been a vital part of those forces that have, in fact, transformed the world. Our economic capabilities need to be viewed, I believe, as a strategic asset in a world that is increasingly focused on economic growth and the development of market economies.}

^{I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we have to choose between "commercial" interests and other interests that the United States might have in a particular country or region around the world. Oftentimes the absolute best way to advance human rights and the cause of freedom or the development of democratic institutions is through the active involvement of American businesses. Investment and trade can oftentimes do more to open up a society and to create opportunity for a society’s citizens than reams of diplomatic cables from our State Department.}

^{I think it’s important for us to look on U.S. businesses as a valuable national asset, not just as an activity we tolerate, or a practice that we do not want to get too close to because it involves money. Far better for us to understand that the drive of American firms to be involved in and shape and direct the global economy is a strategic asset that serves the national interest of the United States…}

Full text of Dick Cheney’s speech at the Institute of Petroleum Autumn lunch, 1999
London Institute of Petroleum
by Dick Cheney

^{… we as an industry have had to deal with the pesky problem that once you find oil and pump it out of the ground you’ve got to turn around and find more or go out of business. Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you’ve got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is true for companies as well in the broader economic sense as it is for the world. A new merged company like Exxon-Mobil will have to secure over a billion and a half barrels of new oil equivalent reserves every year just to replace existing production. It’s like making one hundred per cent interest discovery in another major field of some five hundred million barrels equivalent every four months or finding two Hibernias a year.}

^{For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?}

^{Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990’s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world’s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn’t turn out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to be deep water successes that yielded the bonanza of the 1990’s…}

^{Left: Cheney’s Energy Task Force Map
Right: The Middle Eastern Oil Corridor}

I think the evidence is strong enough to say that Dick Cheney set out to get our government involved in  setting the stage for oil exploration in the Middle East by American Oil Companies – Iraq for sure and probably Iran later. Likewise, I think there’s enough evidence to say that our first Gulf War with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had something to do with Kuwait’s oil production. It’s time to move those charges from the area of suspicions to the category of facts. I don’t think we could say that the pugilism towards the United States from Iraq and Iran is completely due to our aggression and oil-lust, but I do think it must be a factor.

^{I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we have to choose between "commercial" interests and other interests that the United States might have in a particular country or region around the world. Oftentimes the absolute best way to advance human rights and the cause of freedom or the development of democratic institutions is through the active involvement of American businesses. Investment and trade can oftentimes do more to open up a society and to create opportunity for a society’s citizens than reams of diplomatic cables from our State Department.}

^{I think it’s important for us to look on U.S. businesses as a valuable national asset, not just as an activity we tolerate, or a practice that we do not want to get too close to because it involves money. Far better for us to understand that the drive of American firms to be involved in and shape and direct the global economy is a strategic asset that serves the national interest of the United States.}

^{Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.}

1. Because it’s true. They know it. We know it [Cheney already said it in those early speeches]. We cannot negotiate honestly with either the Iraqis or the Iranians without some kind of acknowledgment of our true motives. There’s nothing wrong with our wanting oil, but there’s plenty wrong with trumping up bogus excuses to get it.
2. We are going to have to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions [if the Iranian people don’t do that for us]. We have to make it crystal clear that endeavor is not connected to a hidden agenda – going after their oil. Cheney and friends tried to hide it in Iraq, and nobody bought it.
3. Our national pride is in the tank. I can’t see any way to deal with it that avoids coming clean about our recent past. The collective "we" blew it. Blaming Bu$hCo isn’t enough. We have to face what "we" did.