2006 archive

But here was Bush on March 13, 2002: “I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority….I truly am not that concerned about him….We shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore.”

Following through on the Bush plan, which calls for military tribunals allowing evidence obtained through coercion, would cast the nation as a hypocrite in the eyes of the world, the scholars said.

“We can’t do things that violate our basic notions of law and fair play, no matter how despicable the person is,” said Mark J. Miller, a political science and international relations professor at the University of Delaware. “He or she deserves a process that is consistent with our standards.”

But I saw our president taking unseemly advantage of the terror threat. I saw him take short cuts in the law. I saw him repeatedly mischaracterize the facts. I saw him hang pre-existing projects on this new peg. I saw him try to make Americans– always before a proud, free people–live in fear, so as to aggrandize his own power and prevent criticism of his policies. Now members of his cabinet have been so emboldened by their megalomania that they are likening critics of the Iraq War to Hitler-lovers.

Bush did it again on Wednesday. He continues to peddle the Abu Zubayda myth:

(snip)

Today, in the same subtle terms in which Mr. Bush and his colleagues muddied the clear line separating Iraq and 9/11 — without ever actually saying so—the President quoted a purported Osama Bin Laden letter that spoke of launching, “a media campaign to create a wedge between the American people and their government.”

Make no mistake here—the intent of that is to get us to confuse the psychotic scheming of an international terrorist, with that familiar bogeyman of the right, the “media.”

The President and the Vice President and others have often attacked freedom of speech, and freedom of dissent, and freedom of the press.

Now, Mr. Bush has signaled that his unparalleled and unprincipled attack on reporting has a new and venomous side angle:

The attempt to link, by the simple expediency of one word—“media”—the honest, patriotic, and indeed vital questions and questioning from American reporters, with the evil of Al-Qaeda propaganda.

That linkage is more than just indefensible. It is un-American.

Mr. Bush and his colleagues have led us before to such waters.

We will not drink again.

And the President’s re-writing and sanitizing of history, so it fits the expediencies of domestic politics, is just as false, and just as scurrilous.

“In the 1920’s a failed Austrian painter published a book in which he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany and take revenge on Europe and eradicate the Jews,” President Bush said today, “the world ignored Hitler’s words, and paid a terrible price.”

Whatever the true nature of al Qaeda and other international terrorist threats, to ceaselessly compare them to the Nazi State of Germany serves only to embolden them.

More over, Mr. Bush, you are accomplishing in part what Osama Bin Laden and others seek—a fearful American populace, easily manipulated, and willing to throw away any measure of restraint, any loyalty to our own ideals and freedoms, for the comforting illusion of safety.

It thus becomes necessary to remind the President that his administration’s recent Nazi “kick” is an awful and cynical thing.

And it becomes necessary to reach back into our history, for yet another quote, from yet another time and to ask it of Mr. Bush:

The train had reached Chicago when Daniel Stepanovich’s daughter told officials that he had died in a sleeper car on Sunday evening, about the time the train was pulling into Glenwood Springs, Colo., said Chicago Police spokeswoman Jo Ann Taylor.

It would be altogether understandable for Congress and state legislatures to counter this constitutional excess with constitutional responses of their own. Yet it would be the wrong thing to do.

The Framers meant our Constitution to establish a structure of government and to provide individuals certain inalienable rights against the state. They certainly did not envision our Constitution as a place to restrict rights or enact public policies, as the Federal Marriage Amendment does.

Ordinary legislation — not constitutional amendments — should express the community’s view that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” To use the Constitution for prescriptions of policy is to shackle future generations that should have the same right as ours to enact policies of their own. To use the Constitution as a forum for even our most favored views strikes a blow of uncommon harshness upon disfavored groups, in this case gay citizens who would never see this country’s founding charter as their own.

The fish, smallmouth and largemouth bass, are naturally males but for some reason are developing immature eggs inside their sex organs. Their discovery at such widely spread sites, including one just upstream from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, seems to show that the Potomac’s problem with “intersex” fish extends far beyond the West Virginia stream where they were first found in 2003.

The cause of the abnormalities is unknown, but scientists suspect a class of waterborne contaminants that can confuse animals’ growth and reproductive systems. These pollutants are poorly understood, however, leaving many observers with questions about what the problems in fish mean for the Potomac and the millions of people who take their tap water from it.

(snip)

The dispute began about 12:30 p.m. as both women tried to pull into the same parking spot in Powder Mill Square, a center of small shops, eateries and offices off Del. 52.

(snip)

Steptoe started arguing over the parking spot with the second driver, Megan Gioffre, 31, of the 2400 block of Pennsylvania Ave. in Wilmington, he said.

The young may be understandably incredulous, but the Great Compression, as economists call it, was the single most important social fact in our country in the decades after World War II. From 1947 through 1973, American productivity rose by a whopping 104 percent, and median family income rose by the very same 104 percent. . . .