A notice to black drug dealers, gangstas, and thugs.

Military/Monetary:

Ousting the Gruesome Twosome is the Key to a Pullout.
The military, the monetary, they get together whenever they think it's necessary, they are turning our brothers and sisters into mercenaries,
they are turning the planet into a cemetery...
The military, the monetary, they use the media as an intermediary...
they tried to make SoDamn Insane into a worthy adversary...
they are determined to keep the citizens secondary, they make so many decisions they are arbitrary...
Peace is not the absence of war, it's the absence of rumors of war, and threats of war and corporations of war.
Gil Scott-Heron/Work For Peace-1994

December 5, 2005

403 to 3, oh well, it was a good idea at the time. A couple weeks back Congressman John Murtha-D (PA) called for an immediate pullout of American soldiers in Iraq. This resulted in what AOL News called "a vote hastily arranged by the GOP that democrats vociferously denounced as politically motivated." The vote took place on the Friday previous to the Thanksgiving break. The Dems lost 403-3. That sounds like some of the election results we have in Buffalo. It doesn't really matter how quickly the vote was arranged, most people know what they want. Most republicans aren't like the rest of us, they dream of sticking it to people, confrontation, and warfare. Currently republicans control the House and Senate, and anytime you got a republican in the Oval Office, tons of people are bound to die, tons of people stand to lose work, and less than a handful of rich people stand to become richer.

The democratic dissenters were Jose Serrano (NY), Robert Waxler (FL), and Cynthia McKinny (GA). Sure, you can call it 403-3, I prefer 159,000-403. Even though the armed services don't cut and run, I don't see any of them turning down a trip home. Actually things weren't as bad as they seemed, they were worse, the democrats were actually 0 for 2 that week, a few days earlier the republican-controlled Senate beat a move to get Bush to set a timetable for troop withdrawal 58-40. As it turns out, hopefully none of these votes even matters, during the whole fracas, no one thought about asking the newly installed Iraqi government how they felt, but not only are Iraqi leaders calling for a pullout, a joint communiqué all-but calls the US-led forces terrorists. It stated that Iraq's opposition has a "legitimate right of resistance," according to the 11/22 Washington Times. This resolution was the result of a recent conference of Shiite's, Kurds, and Sunnis, the Times summed up their overall disposition as "they're not terrorist if they don't target innocent civilians and Iraqi institutions." Can you believe that? Just because they live there, they think they have a voice.

Murtha is cited as one of several democrats who initially backed Bush in his claim that Sadaam Hussien was harboring weapons of mass destruction, along with Bill Clinton, Hillary, Senator Joseph Biden, former Sen. John Edwards, and others (ironically they left W hanging on his Iraq/911 connection). Murtha now takes his place among the Vietnam veterans who are now lawmakers that oppose the war. But focusing on aluminum tubes, African Yellowcake, even bloody gloves (ooops, sorry that was OJ), makes us ignore the two men who have spun a case for war from way back. Few know that unofficially the Bush administration began during the Gerald Ford years. This period marked the emergence of two men who would distinguish themselves as history's most notorious war mongers known today as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. I call them the Gruesome Twosome, do a quick history on them and you'll know why.

According to an 11/24 Salon.com essay by former Clinton aid and biographer Sydney Blumenthal, this administration began during the Nixon Administration, it was during their Nixon tenure that "they learned the application of ruthlessness and the harsh lesson of failure." During Ford they began to essentially run the country. What we are living under right now, is a Watergate that's been caught and exposed, but is still operating, and relentless in it's arrogance. Blumenthal marks the 1975 cabinet purge (AKA the Halloween Massacre) that Cheney and Rumsfeld used to push out undesirables such as then-Ford Veep Nelson Rockefeller, and CIA chief William Colby, and relieve Henry Kissinger of the other half of his dual role as Secretary of State/National Security Advisor. It was then that the CIA post was given to a relative unknown; George H.W. Bush, a future 41st president and of course W's father.

The ironic thing about Colby was he took the job of Director of Central Intelligence based on "the recommendation that he was not one to make waves," according to the Wikipedia. Apparently he didn't rock the boat as a field agent, but he always believed in CIA reform, and felt the agency should come clean on a lot of their misdeeds over the decades. The Gruesome Twosome felt differently, it may have been Colby who was also present when they told Ford that the Soviets were "increasing their defense spending and pursuing secret weapons programs (sound familiar?)," this circumvented the CIA reports of a declining Soviet economy, and Nixon's détente with the USSR, and gave new life to the Cold War. Kissinger reportedly told Ford to fire Colby in late '75, and on 4/27/96 he drowned under mysterious and suspicious circumstances near his home in a boating accident. Wars based on lies and greed is no more patriotic today than it was then. Hopefully the Plame investigation of Bush officials pulls Cheney and Rumsfeld from public service. It may be the only way to get the troops home.