Hot Potato Mash

John McCain Equals More War

AMERICA HAS NO PROBLEMS ACCORDING TO PRESIDENT BUSH

A remarkable interview of President Bush yesterday at the China Olympics by Bob Costas produced the following nuggets...

1. Bush on America: “I don't see America having problems”

2. Bush on religion: “If you are a religious person, you understand that once religion takes hold in a society it can't be stopped.”

3. Bush on the the Russia/Georgia conflict (all said without any hint of irony):

“This violence is unacceptable”

“I expressed my grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia”

“It is interesting to me that here we are trying to promote peace and harmony and we're witnessing a conflict take place”

“I was very firm with Vladimir Putin and he and I have got a good relationship”

“Hopefully this will get resolved peacefully. There needs to be an international mediation there”
--
It is worth noting that YouTube initially would not post my video because of a block the copyright owner (presumably NBC) put on its content (presumably Olympic coverage). Only after I filed a complaint stating that the video met the news exception of Fair Use was the video made accessible. Oddly, a similar video posted on YouTube and then Democratic Underground is no longer available.

Technorati Tags: Bob Costas, George W. Bush, China Olympics, Vladamir Putin

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: VINCENT BUGLIOSI: The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

On Wednesday, famed Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi spoke to a packed and enthusiastic crowd of more than 350 Angelinos about his new book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.” While Bugliosi’s talk will eventually appear on C-SPAN, you can view it first in its entirety below…

Part 1 (19:45)

In my book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” I present evidence that proves beyond all reasonable doubt that George Bush took this nation to war on a lie, under false pretenses, and therefore under the law is guilty of murder for the deaths of over 4,000 young American soldiers who died so far in this war.

Bugliosi began the evening by explaining to the Los Angeles audience that George W. Bush is guilty of murder, according to the law, if he brought the country to war under false pretenses. And Bugliosi emphasized the legal aspect of the case in order to fend off likely attackers:

So although Bush supporters can argue that Bush should not be prosecuted because they don’t think he did anything wrong, they cannot legitimately say that he should not be prosecuted if he has done what I say he did. To say that is to admit that you have no respect for our American system of justice and democracy and that you would prefer that presidents have the same rights as tyrannical dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein.

Bugliosi had a similar answer for those who simply believe it is impossible to prosecute Bush for murder:

There’s this sense out there among many that prosecuting Bush for murder can’t be done. Which is the equivalent of saying what - that he is above the law. That ordinary laws simply don’t apply to him.

Bugliosi also had some special words for the American Right Wing which has expressed its disapproval with his book:

The third group of people responding to my book is the nation’s right wing. And they of course have contempt for me and my book. But whatever contempt they have for me, I can assure them and I can assure you I have much much much more contempt for them. There are no more repugnant, hypocritical and un-American – and that’s the word I want to emphasize – un-American people in our society today than the right wing.

Bugliosi, however, made clear that this book was not political for him and even said he would have written the same book had Bush been a Democrat. So fair is Bugliosi that he even offers up some mitigating evidence for Bush and his co-conspirators:

And there is one thing that I should probably say in partial defense of these people that goes in mitigation, arguably reduces their moral culpability. And what I’m talking about is that many of these people are incredibly stupid. And they make up for their stupidity by being extremely ignorant. And when you combine stupidity with ignorance that’s a toxic combination.

Finally, Part 1 ends with the law:

If a conspirator, or anyone for that matter, deliberately sets in motion a chain of events which he knows will cause – that’s the key word – cause a third party innocent agent to commit an act, the defendant is criminally responsible for that act. Bush, in invading Iraq, caused Iraqis to kill American soldiers in much the same fashion that a person causes a gun to fire a bullet that kills someone by pulling the trigger.

Part 2 (17:54)

Part 2 begins with Bugliosi explaining the only way Bush might be innocent of murder:

Bush can only wash his hands of culpability if he did not take this nation to war under false pretenses. If he did, which the evidence overwhelmingly shows, he is criminally responsible for the deaths of all those American soldiers who have died fighting his war in Iraq.

The main issue would be whether or not George Bush went to war, as he always claimed, in self-defense – the so-called pre-emptive strike. Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, alleged as so, therefore he was an imminent threat to the security of this country so Bush had to strike first in self-defense. If the war was not in self-defense but one that the prosecutor can prove Bush took us to under false pretenses than all of the killings of American soldiers in Iraq become unlawful killings and therefore murder.

While Bugliosi's animus was mostly reserved for Bush and his co-conspirators, he did find time to also criticize Ken Starr, The New York Times and the Supreme Court:

I seem to be getting more angry and acerbic and caustic and that’s because I am always in a state of rage. How can I help but be -- the monstrous, grotesque, obscene Ken Starr almost destroyed the Clinton presidency over absolutely nothing while being totally and completely supported and funded by the federal government. They funded his seven year, seventy million dollar effort, the federal government. And the so-called liberal media, The New York Times savaged Clinton on a day to day basis, supported this monstrous, grotesque, obscene figure – one of the most reprehensible figures in American history – Ken Starr.

The US Supreme Court 2000, stopping the recount in Florida which was specifically authorized by Florida law, taking the election away from the American people and appointing George Bush president, one of the biggest crimes in American history.

The heart of Part 2, however, is reserved for Bugliosi's evidence against George W. Bush. And first on the list was Bush's lies to the country that were contrary to the National Intelligence Estimate:

In George Bush’s first speech to the nation on Hussein and Iraq, October 7, 2002 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Bush told Americans that Saddam Hussein was a great danger to this nation either by his attacking us with the so-called weapons of mass destruction or by giving these weapons to a terrorist group to attack us. And Bush said that this attack could happen, ‘on any given day,’ meaning what, that the threat was imminent.

The only big problem for George Bush is that on October the first, six days earlier, the CIA sent Bush its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate – a classified top secret report that represented the consensus opinion of all 16 US federal intelligence agencies on the issue of whether or not Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country and on page 8 of that 91 page report it clearly and unequivocally says – and by the way what I’m about to tell you to my knowledge has never been said or never been written or never appeared in any major newspaper or magazine in America – page 8 clearly says that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country. That he would only be a threat if he feared we were about to attack him.

So we know then, not think but know, that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October 7th, Cincinnati, Ohio, that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. Now if we had nothing else at all, and there is so much more, that alone shows what, that George Bush took this nation to war on a terrible terrible lie. Therefore all the killings in Iraq became unlawful killings and murder.

But it gets worse! In fact, it gets evil, perverse, sick and criminal:

But it gets worse. It gets worse. October 4th, three days later, Bush and his people had the CIA release an unclassified summary version of the October 1st classified report so that this October 4th unclassified version could be released to the American public and to Congress. This unclassified version came to be known as the White Paper. And in this White Paper that was shown to the American people and to Congress, in which contained the opinion of 16 US intelligence agencies that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country, that conclusion was completely deleted, completely eliminated. Every single one of these all important words, the most important conclusion in that classified document, was completely deleted from the White Paper. And the question I have of you, is how evil, how perverse, how sick, how criminal can George Bush and his people be?

The next piece of ever damning evidence, according to Bugliosi, is the January 31, 2003, Manning Memo written by Tony Blair's chief foreign policy advisor after a top level meeting in the Oval Office less than two months before the invasion.

He says that George Bush was so worried about the failure of the UN inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction that Bush started to talk about three ways to ‘provoke a confrontation’ with Saddam Hussein. One of which he said was to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft over Iraq falsely painted in United Nations colors and he said if Saddam fires on those planes it would be a violation of UN resolutions and therefore justify our going to war. So here is George Bush telling Americans, telling the world, that Hussein is an imminent threat to the security of this country, but behind closed doors this very small human being was talking about how to provoke Hussein into a war.

Part 3 (15:50)

Part 3 begins with another piece of evidence against Bush. Mainly, how Bush responded to the ever positive testimony of chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix on March 7, 2003, by throwing him and his team out of the country and quickly invading Iraq. Blix had told the UN Security Counsel that the inspectors were getting proactive cooperation from Saddam Hussein and that their investigation would be completed in a few months:

Blix and his people became Bush’s biggest adversaries because if Blix and his people confirm that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that would rob Bush of his main argument for war – a war that he wanted to fight at all costs.

The bulk of Part 3, however, does not concentrate on evidence of Bush's guilt but rather Bush's state of mind. Bugliosi takes great offense to the fact that Bush has often described his days as perfect and that he proclaims himself to be so happy:

Even if George Bush was only guilty of making an innocent mistake in taking this nation to war in Iraq, not murder as I firmly believe, with all of the death, horror and suffering he has caused, what type of a monstrous individual is it who could be happy with his life? What type of a human monster is George Bush?

If I ever killed one person in my life, even accidentally – a car accident – I’d never have another perfect day as long as I lived. George Bush is responsible for the horrible deaths of thousands of human beings and he is talking about having a perfect day. Bush’s plans to have a perfect day right in the middle of all the death and horror in Iraq goes so far beyond acceptable human conduct that no moral telescope can discern its shape, form and nature.

Bugliosi concludes by telling the audience that he will not rest or be satisfied until George W. Bush is prosecuted for first degree murder:

I don’t like to see anyone get away with murder, even one murder. [O.J.] Simpson got away with two murders and I got so angry that I wrote a book - Outrage, the Five Reasons O.J. Simpson got away with murder. If I can get so angry about someone getting away with one or two murders you can imagine how I feel about George Bush who has gotten away with over 100,000 murders and has been smiling and enjoying himself throughout the whole period. It may sound presumptuous of me but I can tell you that while I may not succeed, I’m not going to be satisfied until I see George Bush in an American courtroom being prosecuted for first degree murder.

The first degree murder of over 4,000 American soldiers:

If justice means anything at all in America, if we are not going to forget about those 4,000 young American soldiers who came back from Bush’s war in a box, I say we have no choice but to bring murder charges against the son of privilege from Crawford, Texas.

"The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder" (Vincent Bugliosi)

George W. Bush, Ken Starr, Manning Memo, Murder, NIE, Right Wing, Saddam Hussein, Supreme Court, video, Vincent Bugliosi

Was Iraq An Intelligence Failure?

Please. Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay explain at McClatchy:

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just theopposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White Housedocuments.

* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a separate intel shopwas set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents,released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.

We could go on, but the rest, as they say, is history.

That's what happened.

Read the entire article

bush, George W. Bush, iraq, Propaganda

A DAY AT THE BEACH WITH HEROES OF PEACE

"A Day at the Beach with Heroes of Peace" was a special live KPFK/Pacifica broadcast that took place at Arlington West in Santa Monica on Sunday. The top video is a short mashup (5:45) I made of some of the event highlights and videos of most of the speakers follow.

John Wayne: White Supremacist, McCarthyite, Draft-Dodging, Republican Icon

The first chapter from Glenn Greenwald's new book, "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics", is all about John Wayne, or as Greenwald calls him, the "Pioneer of the Great American Hypocrite". And while the "Duke" was unquestionably a conservative Republican and a hypocrite, what really stands out is what a deplorable human being he was. A few shocking excerpts:

John Wayne in a 1971 Playboy interview:

"We can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership to irresponsible people."

Wayne was also an anti-communist McCarthyite in the 1950's who regularly accused Hollywood figures of being communist. But even worse, Wayne held his despicable views long after the "Red Scare" ended. In 1969 he told a Time reporter the following:

"I think those blacklisted people should have been sent over to Russia. They'd have been taken care of over there, and if the Commies ever won over here, why hell, those guys would be the first ones they'd take care of -- after me."

And despite being a draft-dodger during WWII when almost everyone served in the military -- including fellow actors James Stewart, Clark Gable and Henry Fonda -- Wayne called teenagers who fled for Canada or Europe during the Vietnam War "cowards," "traitors," and "Communists."

Is there any question that Wayne would be a perfect fit in today's Republican Party?

"Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics" (Glenn Greenwald)

Technorati Tags: Conservative, Glenn Greenwald, Hypocrite, John Wayne, McCarthyism, Racist, Republican, White Supremacy

Americans Overwhelmingly Want Out Of Iraq

Glenn Greenwald explains these numbers and how the pro-war political establishment continuously lies by saying that Americans only want out of Iraq once “victory” is achieved.

Technorati Tags: iraq, public opinion, puppy, war

'BUSH ORDERED WAR CRIMES'

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley: “It really is amazing because Congress, including the Democrats, have avoided any type of investigation into torture because they do not want to deal with the fact that the President ordered war crimes. But evidence keeps on coming out - the only thing we don’t have is a group picture with a detainee attached to electrical wires. I mean every time we see more evidence we have more and more high ranking people at the scene of this crime. And what you get from this is that this was a premeditated and carefully orchestrated torture program. Not torture, but a torture program.”

“Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law” (Marjorie Cohn)

Technorati Tags: olbermann, Jonathan Turley, torture

The Great Moral Issue Of Our Era Is The Illegal War In Iraq

Bob Fritakis writes at The Free Press:

“The great moral issue of our era is the illegal war in Iraq. Like the issues of slavery, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War in past epochs, silence on this issue equals complicity...”

“The slaves couldn't speak for themselves, nor can the more than one million Iraqis who have died as a direct result of Bush's war. The voices of 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been silenced as well...”

“The cost of the war continues to rise daily. The monthly cost exceeds the monthly cost of the Vietnam War (adjusted for inflation) by half a billion dollars.”

“And what has the war accomplished? The war has turned Iraq, an anti-Al Qaeda state with no ties to the terrorist organization, into a symbol for ”accelerated recruitment“ for Al Qaeda, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The country is now ”a training and recruitment ground (for terrorists) and an opportunity for terrorists to enhance their technology skills,“ according to the U.S. National Intelligence Council...”

“This military madness once again afflicts our nation, and our elected officials lack the courage to take a stand for peace.”

KARL ROVE PRESENTED WITH ANOTHER PROTEST BANNER!

Some good folks at George Washington University interrupted a Karl Rove speech with a “War Criminal” banner (video below). HUGE props to the student protesters even if their banner wasn't quite as professional as the “Free Don Siegelman” banner I presented Rove with last month.
 
You will note at the end of the video that Rove explains that all the animosity displayed towards him around the country is because he is a “myth”. Rove used the same myth reasoning to explain away all the scandals associated with him when I heard him speak last month as heard in the video below.

Transcript:

Question: It’s basically a widespread belief that when it comes to politics you play it rough. They have accused you of outing CIA agent Valerie Plame, planning the dismissals of US attorneys on political grounds, collusion with Jack Abramoff and most recently plotting the downfall of Don Siegelman. Do you play rough?

Rove: Ah, you know, in each one of those instances things have proven to be or turned out to be either non-existent or not true. But if there is no evidence for it, Rove is responsible. It’s like the 60 Minutes thing on Don Siegelman…

Question: Did you see it?

Rove: Yeah I did, you know, this woman says that she was a longtime Alabama operative and I asked her to get pictures of Governor Siegelman with - naked pictures of him with his aides - and, ah, that this is a number of requests I’ve made to her.

The fact of the matter is that I never met with this woman. I never made this request of her or anybody else. If she was a political operative she wasn’t involved in any of the campaigns that I was involved in in Alabama. I’ve never met the woman.

And I frankly thought it was really unusual, you know, there was CBS – this woman says she met with me in 2001 – I’m at the White House, where did we meet? You know, she was an opposition researcher, ah, who paid her? When did I start making these requests? I mean, I, I, the woman lied. I don’t think I’ve ever met the woman. I know I’ve never taken a meeting with her.

And yet the CBS – look, I’m a myth I’m not a human being. I may appear to be flesh and blood but I’m a myth.

Hopefully someone will have another appropriate banner waiting for Rove at the next stop of his hugely lucrative speaking tour.

Technorati Tags: Don Siegelman, Karl Rove

Supporters Of The Iraq Occupation Must Answer This Question

The NY Times' Nicholas D. Kristof believes that “staying in Iraq indefinitely undermines our national security by empowering jihadis”. He adds, that if you disagree with this assessment and “believe that staying in Iraq does more good than harm, you must answer the next question: Is that presence so valuable that it is worth undermining our economy?” All supporters of the continuing occupation of Iraq should be forced to answer that question in light of the following:

Granted, the cost estimates are squishy and controversial, partly because the $12.5 billion a month that we’re now paying for Iraq is only a down payment. We’ll still be making disability payments to Iraq war veterans 50 years from now.

Professor Stiglitz calculates in a new book, written with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, that the total costs, including the long-term bills we’re incurring, amount to about $25 billion a month. That’s $330 a month for a family of four.

A Congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee found that the sums spent on the Iraq war each day could enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start or give Pell Grants to 153,000 students to attend college. Or if we’re sure we want to invest in security, then a day’s Iraq spending would finance another 11,000 border patrol agents or 9,000 police officers.

Imagine the possibilities. We could hire more police and border patrol agents, expand Head Start and rehabilitate America’s image in the world by underwriting a global drive to slash maternal mortality, eradicate malaria and deworm every child in Africa.

All that would consume less than one month’s spending on the Iraq war.

Moreover, the Bush administration has financed this war in a way that undermines our national security — by borrowing. Forty percent of the increased debt will be held by China and other foreign countries.

“This is the first major war in American history where all the additional cost was paid for by borrowing,” Mr. Hormats notes. If the war backers believe that the Iraq war is so essential, then they should be willing to pay for it partly with taxes rather than charging it. (emphasis added)

One way or another, now or later, we’ll have to pay the bill. Professor Stiglitz calculates that the eventual total cost of the war will be about $3 trillion. For a family of five like mine, that amounts to a bill of almost $50,000.

Read the entire Kristof Op-Ed.

“The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Linda J. Bilmes)

Technorati Tags: Nicholas Kristof

Anyone Know If We Are Still At War?

It appears that Hot Potato Mash has more Iraq war coverage than the mainstream media. From today's New York Times:

The three broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. And by the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year.

Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year. (emphasis is mine)

The policy debate in Washington that dominated last year’s Iraq coverage has almost disappeared from the news. And reporting on events in Iraq has fallen by more than two-thirds from a year ago.

Clearly the MSM just doesn't care about our soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq. Soldiers like Tomas Young seen in the two videos below and the soon to be released documentary “Body of War”. For more on Young see my post at Brad Blog.

Part 1 (9:03)

Part 2 (5:30)


(h/t Dredd)

Technorati Tags: iraq, msm, Tomas Young

John 'Warmongering' McCain

Matt Taibbi has a must read about John McCain at Rolling Stone:

I want to choke the life out of both of them. But how do you communicate to someone the sheer insanity of voting to bomb the fuck out of some distant country while you sit safe and cozy in the Virginia suburbs, evaluating sweetbreads — just so the world can keep on feeling like the heroic war movies you rock yourself to sleep with on Sunday afternoons?

The answer is you can't. And that is one big reason why John McCain, defying the expectations of almost everyone who watched him last summer — myself included — has risen from the political dead to wrap up the GOP nomination. He's survived because Onward to Victory is the last great illusion the Republican Party has left to sell in this country, even to its own followers. They can't sell fiscal responsibility, they can't sell “values,” they can't sell competence, they can't sell small government, they can't even sell the economy. All they have left to offer is this sad, dwindling, knee-jerk patriotism, a promise to keep selling world politics as a McHale's Navy rerun to a Middle America that wants nothing to do with realizing the world has changed since 1946.

The lesson of the McCain campaign is that one should never underestimate America's capacity for self-delusion. Balls-deep in one of the biggest foreign-policy catastrophes of all time, an arrogant military misadventure destined to make us infamous for a generation across a dozen cultures, minivan-driving suburban America is still waiting for Bill Holden to make it right by blowing up the Bridge on the River Kwai — and returning, tanned and handsome, to get the girl with a mouth full of cool one-liners.

“Free Ride: John McCain and the Media” (David Brock, Paul Waldman)

Technorati Tags: John McCain

VIDEO MASHUP: Thought Control - The MSM's Role In Silencing Anti-War Voices

Cross-posted at Brad Blog

'There Comes A Time When Silence Is Betrayal' - Martin Luther King, Jr.