[Mb-civic] Bush wired in 1st debate...no Bush mistakes....Bogus elections

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Our Cheating President
By Wilson Ray, Southern Daily News, 10/10/04
The evidence is now overwhelming. The president who likes to make people 
think he is the biggest Christian to ever inhabit the White House is a liar and 
a cheat. His information comes to him in his ear from a radio transmitter 
device he wears on his back under his suit jacket. This is against the rules of 
using props set forth by the debate commission. The irony is, the photos that 
prove it were taken in violation of the rules by a Fox news pool camera 
operator. The rules prohibit photos from being taken from the rear of the 
candidates. The other irony is, we didn't learn this from the New York Times 
or the Washington Post or even CBS News. Independent Web sites, called 
Web logs or blogs for short, have been buzzing about this for days. My 
question is this: Is there a member of the debate commission or the national 
media with the guts to raise this question before the next debate? Would 
somebody in the White House press corps at least ask the damn question? 
And while you are at it, ask who is on the other end of the line? Karl Rove?...

PICTURES OF THE BUMP ON SHRUB'S BACK & MORE AT:
http://www.southerner.net/blog/weeklyblog045.html 

Or, lookat the picturefrom FOX news, directly.  
http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000637.html


***


. . . And Bush's Telling Non-Answer 
By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Monday, October 11, 2004; Page A23 
When this campaign is over, Linda Grabel may become famous.
Grabel was the citizen-questioner at Friday's debate who asked President 
Bush an interesting question that may well set the tone for the rest of this 
campaign.Noting that the president had made "thousands of decisions that 
have affected millions of lives," Grabel sensibly wanted this piece of 
information: "Please give three instances in which you came to realize you 
had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it."
The president's answer was notable in two ways. First, he spent many words 
not answering at all. He spoke vaguely about how historians might second-
guess some of his decisions and that he'd take responsibility for them. He 
also asserted: "I'm human."
Second, when Bush finally did admit something, he said this: "I made some 
mistakes in appointing people, but I'm not going to name them. I don't want 
to hurt their feelings on national TV."
There, in brief, are the core reasons why polls suggest that undecided and 
independent voters are having a problem with this president. His tactic of 
never admitting mistakes is backfiring in light of events. And when asked to 
take responsibility, his first instinct was to direct attention to others by 
speaking of his supposedly mistaken appointments.
You wonder if the president was thinking about people such as former 
Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, one of the first Bush insiders to call the 
president to account for his style of governing. Maybe Bush regrets naming 
Larry Lindsey as his top economic adviser, because Lindsey was honest in 
saying the war in Iraq would be expensive at a time when the administration 
was trying to suggest otherwise.
What a difference two debates can make. The first one created queasiness 
about Bush even in Republican ranks and established John Kerry's 
plausibility as a president. Bush did better in the second debate -- how could 
he not? -- and kept himself in the game. But taken together, the two debates 
have changed the campaign's main subject.
Less than two weeks ago -- it seems so much longer than that -- it appeared 
that the election would revolve almost entirely around Kerry's weaknesses 
and the endless repetition of the words "flip" and "flop." Bush's own record 
receded into the background.
Now, thanks to the debates and the flow of the news, voters are coming to 
terms with the administration's habits of denial and deflection. The 
administration glosses over the fact that its primary argument for war was not 
humanitarian -- that Saddam Hussein should be forced from power because 
he was a wretched dictator. He was that, but the core case was that Hussein 
needed to be confronted because he had weapons of mass destruction -- not 
that he longed for them.
But in Friday's debate, Bush made only the most modest concession to the 
findings of the Iraq Survey Group headed by Charles A. Duelfer that Hussein 
possessed no weapons of mass destruction. "I wasn't happy when we found 
out there wasn't weapons," Bush said, "and we've got an intelligence group 
together to figure out why."
But a president who pushed the country so hard to go to war on the basis of 
supposedly imminent threats owes his fellow citizens more than a desultory 
"oops." That's why Bush's refusal to admit mistakes matters. It suggests his 
belief that voters, even at election time, have no right to a clear and candid 
explanation of what went wrong, and why.
And when in doubt, the president blames somebody else. Almost all of the 
war's supporters believe that the United States put too few troops on the 
ground to keep order after Hussein's fall. What did Bush say about this in the 
debate? He recalled "sitting in the White House looking at those generals, 
saying, 'Do you have what you need in this war?' " and going to the White 
House basement and "asking them, 'Do we have the right plan with the right 
troop level?' And they looked me in the eye and said, 'Yes, sir, Mr. President.' 
"
Convenient, isn't it? If we don't have enough troops in Iraq, it's the fault of the 
generals, not of a commander in chief who doesn't seem to like answers 
other than "yes, sir." But in a democracy, voters don't have to say "yes, sir." 
And many of them, like Linda Grabel, are looking for even a smidgen of the 
humility Bush promised in the debates four years ago but now seems 
incapable of delivering.
***
U.S. Elections in Iraq & Afghanistan: 
Close Enough for Gov'mnt Work 
By Marjorie Cohn 
t r u t h o u t | Perspective 
Monday 11 October 2004 
Officials in the Bush administration are singing in unison that the way to 
neutralize the terrorists is to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. 
They cite the election set for January 30 in Iraq, and yesterday's election in 
Afghanistan, as Exhibits A and B. 
At the second presidential debate in St. Louis on Friday night, George W. 
Bush hailed the Afghan election as a "marvelous thing," claiming his rout of 
the Taliban set the table for the milestone in Afghanistan. 
During the vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney tried to demonstrate his 
superior foreign policy acumen by drawing an analogy between the upcoming 
Afghan elections and those in El Salvador twenty years ago. Cheney claimed 
a "guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people 
dead, and we held free elections." 
It is noteworthy that Cheney said "we" held those elections, not the 
Salvadorans. The Salvadoran elections were as phony as a Yankee three-
dollar bill. In fact, the United States - and Cheney as a Congressional election 
observer - was not supporting freedom in El Salvador at that time. Most of 
those killed were civilians murdered by the U.S.-backed junta and 
paramilitary "death squads." The Salvadoran elections were not free 
elections. Only conservatives and right-wing parties fielded candidates; the 
leftist politicians had been assassinated or driven underground. 
The Afghan elections are looking as bogus as the Salvadoran elections 
that Cheney touted. The day after the second presidential debate, all 15 
presidential candidates running against U.S.-backed interim president Hami 
Karzai boycotted the race, alleging fraud. The Associated Press now reports 
that two of those candidates have withdrawn from the boycott. They want a 
commission to determine whether the voting was fair and will accept its 
decision. Their demands appear to have been met. 
The only woman running refused to cast a ballot in protest. "In the morning 
I was prepared to vote," she said, "but within the past three hours I've 
received calls from voters that this is not a free and fair election. The ink that 
is being used can be rubbed off in a minute. Voters can vote 10 times!" The 
day after the election, the Los Angeles Times reported that Major General 
Eric Olson, the operations commander for U.S. and coalition forces in 
Afghanistan, calls this problem, "Afghanistan's hanging chad." 
"Today's election is not a legitimate election," said another candidate. "It 
should be stopped and we don't recognize the results," he added. An Islamic 
poet, also a candidate, complained, "Today was a very black day. Today was 
the occupation of Afghanistan by America through elections." 
His sentiment was echoed by Sonali Kolhatkar, President of the Afghan 
Women's Mission. She told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, "This whole 
election has been organized by the United States. The Afghan people have 
not had any hand in organizing their own election, the timeline of the 
election." 
Voter registration numbers were inaccurate or fabricated, according to 
Christian Parenti, journalist from The Nation. He was able to secure two valid 
voter registration cards and he's not Afghan. Human rights organizations said 
some people received four or five cards; they thought they could use them to 
receive humanitarian aid. 
Weeks before the election, several candidates charged that U.S. 
Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad, known to many as "the Viceroy" or a "puppet-
master," pressured them not to run against Bush's sweetheart Karzai. The 
New York Times reported Friday that Karzai's close relationship with his 
"American overseers" has proved tricky. The interim prez controls nothing 
outside of Kabul, and only leaves his home under heavy American guard, 
due to attempts on his life. 
Both Khalizad and Karzai happen to be former consultants to oil giant 
Unocal, which, backed by the Bush administration, negotiated with the 
Taliban for an oil pipeline to run through Afghanistan. It was when those talks 
broke down, long before September 11, that Bush set his sights on regime 
change in Afghanistan. 
Sound familiar? That brings us to Iraq. There, also, the tactic of invasion 
followed by election is critical to Bush's campaign for a second term in the 
White House. Bush paints a rosy picture for an American electorate nervous 
about the steady carnage in Iraq. The Bushies ceremoniously "transferred full 
sovereignty" to the Iraqis just before the end of June. They hand-picked Iyad 
Allawi, with close ties to the CIA, as interim prime minister. The Bush 
administration solemnly promises to hold elections in Iraq on January 30. 
Allawi, recently on the campaign trail with Bush in New York, said that 
holding the elections on time was "the most important task entrusted to us." 
Most likely, those elections will install Allawi as chief U.S. puppet in Iraq. 
Given the situation on the ground there, it is counter-intuitive to believe free 
and fair elections could take place on January 30. Fighting is fierce 
throughout Iraq. Jordan's King Abdullah II said last week it would be 
"impossible to organize indisputable elections" in the midst of the current 
chaos in Iraq. 
The Associated Press reports that when Donald Rumsfeld had a brief 
exchange with journalists in Baghdad yesterday, he grew agitated by 
questions about the possibility of needing extra U.S. troops before the Iraqi 
elections. "There's a fixation on that subject!" he said, exasperated. "It's 
fascinating how everyone is locked in on that." 
Why do reporters in Baghdad have that fixation? "Half of the country 
remains a 'no go zone' - out of the hands of the government and the 
Americans and out of reach of journalists," Wall Street Journal reporter 
Farnaz Fassihi wrote in a email to friends last week from Baghdad. "In the 
other half," she said, "the disenchanted population is too terrified to show up 
at polling stations. The Sunnis have already said they'd boycott elections, 
leaving the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will 
not be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war." 
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan cautions there can be no "credible 
elections if the security conditions continue as they are now." Indeed, last 
week, two organizations representing more than 60,000 United Nations 
staffers urged Annan to pull all U.N. staff out of Iraq because of the 
"unprecedented" risk to their safety and security. 
The Chicago Tribune reports that diplomats and military officials admit 
conducting elections in communities in at least six provinces would be 
extremely risky if not impossible. But Allawi advocates holding the election 
even if 300,000 people out of Iraq's 27 million weren't able to vote. 
Donald Rumsfeld has suggested that communities like Fallujah can simply 
be skipped, so the election can proceed apace: "And let's say you tried to 
have an election, and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the 
country, but some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," 
Rumsfeld said recently. "Well, that's - so be it. Nothing's perfect in life. So 
you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an 
election? You bet," he affirmed. Kinda like Florida in 2000 - close enough for 
government work. 

Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to t r u t h o u t, is a professor at 
Thomas Jefferson School of Law, executive vice president of the National 
Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the 
American Association of Jurists. 



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