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And today, President Obama should end his and his country's shameful silence over the inhumane blockade of Gaza that is denying 1.5 million beleaguered people the basic necessities of a decent life. Time to start acting like America again. That bloody debacle in the Eastern Mediterranean last Sunday was an inevitable result of Israel doing what it always seems to do: going beyond what is essential to her security, to impose collective punishment upon any and all it regards as hostile to Israel. Israel claims, and film confirms, that its commandos rappelling down onto the Turkish ship were attacked with...

This e-wire / report ultimately makes two points: 1. The voting process at the Iowa Straw Poll was a fraud, wrapped in lies. (Whenever those running any kind of an election use police power to hide all the ballots from the people, and then announce results (?) when supposedly (?) only they have seen the ballots – those people are frauds, are acting like Stalin-esque tyrants, and their organization is a fraud. That award goes in our current drama to the Iowa GOP leadership, namely Ted Sporer, Chuck Laudner, Mary Tiffany, Craig Robinson, and Chairman Ray Hoffman. What they did...

If George W. Bush launches a pre-emptive war on Iran, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will bear full moral responsibility for that war. For it was Pelosi who quietly agreed to strip out of the $100 billion funding bill for Iraq a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before launching any new war on Iran. Pelosi's capitulation came in the Appropriations Committee. What went down, and why? "Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy," wrote The Associated Press' David Espo and Matthew Lead....

When Congress finally decides on just the right language for its "non-binding resolution" deploring President Bush's leadership in this war, it might consider a resolution to keep us out of the next one. For America is on a collision course with an Iran of 70 million, and the folks who stampeded us into Iraq are firing pistols in the air again. At the annual Herzliya Conference, U.S. presidential aspirants, neoconservatives and Israeli hawks were all invoking the Holocaust and warning of the annihilation of the Jews. Israel's "Bibi" Netanyahu, who compares Iran's Ahmadinejad with Hitler, said: "The world that didn't...

As George Bush reflects on his legacy, an urgent question must be pressing in upon him each day. Will I leave here as the man who launched failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost thousands of U.S. dead, to no avail? Or can I yet enter history as the Churchillian statesman who used U.S. power to save America and Israel from the mortal threat of atomic weapons in the hands of the Iranian mullahs? Which legacy would Bush prefer? Or Cheney? As Americans await Bush's address announcing a "surge" of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq, we may...

"Joe, why are you doing this?" That is a question Joe Lieberman will hear again and again from old friends, as he mounts his "independent" campaign for the Senate seat his own party voted on Tuesday to take away from him. And there is no compelling answer Joe can give. Joe insists he's a progressive Democrat in the mainstream of the party and has a voting record to prove it. But Ned Lamont is a progressive (i.e., liberal) Democrat, and the Connecticut party chose him as its Senate nominee, not Joe. Joe could say Iraq is the dividing line and...

August 08, 2006 Condi's 'New Middle East' By Patrick Buchanan "Things are as they are, and their consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we seek to be deceived?" -snip- Think back. Had Reagan done to Lebanon, when half a dozen Americans were seized as hostages, what Israel has done, when two soldiers were taken hostage, Democrats would have denounced Reagan as a war criminal. Conservatives would have begged him to ease up. Yet, almost to a man and woman, our politicians are falling all over one another to express their 100 percent support of what...

"Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hezbollah," roared Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon on July 27. "Every village from which a Katyusha is fired must be destroyed," bellowed an Israeli general in a quote bannered by the nation's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. The Israeli paper then summarized what the justice minister and general were saying: "In other words, a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." That was Thursday. Sunday, in Qana, 57 of Haim Ramon's "terrorists," 37 of them children, were massacred with precision-guided bombs. Apparently, Katyushas...

Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah's attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon – i.e, the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control. It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing and ravaging an African-American community because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops. If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead...

Gentle reader, do you know that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon? Israel has ordered all the villagers to clear out. Israel then destroys their homes and murders the fleeing villagers. That way there is no one to come back and nothing to which to return, making it easier for Israel to grab the territory, just as Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians. Do you know that one-third of the Lebanese civilians murdered by Israel’s attacks on civilian residential districts are children? That is the report from Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator for the...

"War wins nothing, cures nothing, ends nothing . . . in war there are no winners, but all are losers." So said Neville Chamberlain on the eve of the war he had sought desperately to avoid, but which his own blunders would bring about. Chamberlain was mistaken. War ended Nazi Germany, though the cost was high: the Holocaust, the collapse of the British Empire, the Stalinization of 11 nations of Eastern Europe, 50 million dead and half a century of Cold War. As this is written, Condi Rice has arrived in the Middle East, and the two-week Israeli-Hezbollah war, an...

My country has been "torn to shreds," said Fouad Siniora, the prime minister of Lebanon, as the death toll among his people passed 300 civilian dead, 1,000 wounded, with half a million homeless. Israel must pay for the "barbaric destruction," said Siniora. To the contrary, says columnist Lawrence Kudlow, "Israel is doing the Lord's work." On American TV, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says the ruination of Lebanon is Hezbollah's doing. But is it Hezbollah that is using U.S.-built F-16s, with precision-guided bombs and 155-mm artillery pieces to wreak death and devastation on Lebanon? No, Israel is doing this,...

In keeping with its established role as purveyor of disinformation, Fox "News" talking head Brit Hume misreported Fox's own poll. On the Jan. 26 "Special Report," Hume said that 51 percent of Americans "would now support" air strikes on Iran. What the poll found is that if diplomacy fails, 51 percent would support air strikes. Can we be optimistic and assume that the American public would not regard an orchestrated failure by the Bush administration as a true diplomatic failure? Alas, we cannot expect too much from a population in thrall to disinformation. The "evidence" that Iran is pursuing nuclear...

Buchanan defends foreign aid – for Hamas-------------------------------------------------------- Posted: February 1, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc. Ever since President Bush, sometime after 9-11, converted to neoconservatism, his Middle East policy has suffered from the triple defects of that subspecies of the Right: hubris, ideology and immaturity. Neoconservatives see the world as they wish it to be, not as it is. Like teenagers, they act on impulse and rail against the counsel of experience. "Often clever, never wise," Russell Kirk said of the breed. Repeatedly, Bush was warned by traditional conservatives that to send a U.S. army to...

Karen Hughes, President Bush’s newest undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and the caretaker of America’s image abroad, has her work cut out for her. A Zogby survey of 3,900 Arabs in Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates has uncovered massive distrust of U.S. motives in the Middle East. Unkindest cut of all, Arabs would prefer that President Chirac and France lead the world rather than us, and, rather than have us as the world’s lone superpower, they would prefer the Chinese. While Arabs are not as rabidly anti-American as in the aftermath of the...

Americans who value the Constitution should stand with Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and oppose George Bush's attempted power grab in conjunction with establishing a Department of Homeland Security. The Bushies are trying to frame the debate as either protecting bureaucracy or providing security for Americans. In fact, the debate is about preventing an authoritarian president from sacrificing the Constitution in the name of providing security. Let me remind you that those who prefer security to freedom will lose both. Bush wants to be able to disregard labor contracts and civil-service rules, as well as move money within the department as...