Stealing, Liberally

I wanted to get a little blogging done today, but I’m pretty swamped (and sweet potatoes are currently in the steamer, so I have to be quick). But when in doubt, steal. Here are some thought on the current campaign, and the Bush Administrations performance, that you may not have read. Presented in easy-to-read list form!

But please, click on the links to read the whole stories.

First up, William Rivers Pitt offers this list of things that are going unnoticed in the rush to say who was (and wasn’t) doing what 30 years ago:

Issues we are not hearing about because we have spent so much time talking about television advertisements:

· Millions of jobs lost in the last four years;

· Unbearably expensive health care;

· A total loss of confidence within the international community in our moral leadership;

· The underfunded farce that is the Department of Homeland Security;

· The underfunded farce that is the No Child Left Behind bill;

· The fact that military assault weapons will soon be making a perfectly legal return to a neighborhood near you;

· The deeply illegal outing of a deep-cover CIA agent by Bush administration officials, who did it because they wanted to silence a critic;

· The rape and torture of men, women and children in the Abu Ghraib prison, horrors that were sanctioned in writing by Bush's own lawyer and the Secretary of Defense;

· The allegation by Senator Bob Graham of Florida that Bush torpedoed any aspect of the 9/11 investigation that came within spitting distance of his friends in the Saudi royal family;

· The allegations by several generals that Bush's people started stripping necessary troops and resources from Afghanistan to bolster their ill-conceived charge into Iraq;

· The myriad accusations by a dozen insiders that Bush and his people ignored the terror threat until the Towers fell, and then used the attacks to scare the American people into an unnecessary war in Iraq and a mammoth payday for their friends in the weapons and oil business;

· The fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq;

· The fact that no connections between Hussein, bin Laden and 9/11 have been established beyond the bloviating hyperbole of a few senior Bush officials who haven't yet gotten the memo;

· Does anyone even remember Enron?

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of September 11th. We deserve better than this.

Then, Eric Alterman provides these insights, as he remembers Sept. 11th.

Even so vociferous a critic of the unelected Bush, Cheney, the Neocons, and the religious right as myself could not bring himself to imagine in that horrific week with the smell of the smoking ruins literally polluting the sky above my house, that America’s president, its vice-president and their advisers would be capable of the following:

· Bush and company specifically ignored multiple warnings of just such an attack.

· Bush and company lied to the heroes of 9/11 about the health and safety implications of breathing the air down at Ground Zero—my own family included.

· Bush and company immediately sought to manipulate the grief and anger of the attacks to launch an unnecessary and counterproductive war against Iraq which has resulted in over a thousand needless American military deaths and U.S. soldiers turning into occupiers and in some case torturers.

· Bush and company lied to the nation about the responsibility for the attack, trying to pin it on Saddam Hussein who had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

· Bush and company allowed its friends in the Saudi royal family to hide its relationship to the killers. Bush and company made only a lackluster effort to capture the killers, allowing many to escape at
Tora Bora and pulling agents and resources out of Afghanistan to feed its obsession with Iraq.

· Bush and company did everything they could to prevent and later, undermine an investigation of why 9/11 was allowed to happen.

· Bush and company continue to ignore their responsibility to protect the nation from another attack, failing to protect its ports, nuclear and chemical plants, and its most vulnerable urban targets and instead, have actually gone out of their way to inspire more such attacks, despite intelligence warnings on this very topic.

· Bush and company have destroyed the sympathy our nation enjoyed (and deserved) in the immediate aftermath of the attack and have instead turned that sympathy into global hatred and disgust, further endangering our citizens.

· Bush and company have repeatedly manipulated the powerful imagery of the attacks for their own partisan political purposes.

Bush and company have repeatedly cowed the media into ignoring, and when that’s impossible, apologizing for, much of the above. For all of the above, the men and women who people this administration deserved not merely to be repudiated politically but held accountable both morally and legally. Instead it is they who attack and impugn patriots like lifetime public servants Richard Clarke and Anthony Zinni, whose only crimes were to call them honestly to account for their catastrophic dishonesty, incompetence, and ideological fanaticism. Since September 11, President Bush and company have accomplished what the terrorists could not; they have divided us against ourselves.

They've said it more eloquently than I could. Besides, lists can keep you focused.

Rob