White House "Warns" of New 9/11 Attacks

Of particular note in the following article are the new "warnings" coming from the Bush White House about another 9/11 terror attack on the U.S.

This could be read a number of different ways. Their claims that al-Qaeda is recruiting westerners, including perhaps Americans, provides them cover for their efforts to gut civil liberties even further, a goal that they have been pursuing from before 9/11.

There are those who might read these "alerts" also as an effort to boost the GOP's hopes to hold onto the White House. But it would be a mistake to read this too narrowly as a partisan move by Republicans.

This regime stole office twice and has committed and is committing monstrous acts. Bush and Cheney's great unpopularity means not that they are weak and will go out with a whimper but that the danger of their - at a minimum - allowing another attack on us is greatly heightened because it is precisely such a scenario that offers them their best chance to accomplish their goals.

Injecting 'Terror' into Campaign 2008

By Robert Parry Consortium News
February 6, 2008

As Campaign 2008 reaches a critical point, George W. Bush’s top intelligence officials are raising new alarms about a revitalized al-Qaeda recruiting Westerners, possibly including Americans, to carry out terror attacks inside the United States.

At a Feb. 5 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bush’s Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said al-Qaeda was refining “the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S.” by training Western recruits, who could blend in with American society and carry out attacks on U.S. targets.

In a later interview with the New York Times, an unnamed “senior intelligence official” added that these Westerners – “most likely including American citizens” – were undergoing training at al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, though the official added there was no evidence that the operatives had yet reached the United States. [NYT, Feb. 6, 2008]

These warnings of a worsening al-Qaeda threat coincide with key congressional votes on whether to restrict the Bush administration’s claimed authority to conduct warrantless wiretaps of Americans and to subject prisoners to “coercive interrogation techniques,” which have included simulated drowning from “waterboarding.”

One administration goal appears to be to soften up Democrats with the suggestion that they are going “soft on terror” if they try to impose some court oversight of Bush’s wiretapping or if they prohibit interrogation tactics that may cross the line into torture.

Already, some Democrats have joined Republicans in transforming a bill designed to put some constraints on Bush’s wiretapping authority into legislation that gives Bush another major concession, legal immunity for U.S. telecommunications companies that cooperated with Bush’s earlier warrantless wiretapping.

Administration officials also are making clear to Congress that limiting CIA interrogations to standards set for the Army and the FBI could leave the United States more vulnerable in a future crisis.

At the Intelligence Committee hearing, CIA Director Michael Hayden stated publicly for the first time that waterboarding had been used against three senior al-Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003 – and that aggressive techniques were employed against about 30 detainees in total.

Though Hayden did not spell out these additional techniques, they are known to include forced nudity, putting detainees in painful “stress positions,” subjecting detainees to extremes of hot and cold, long-term sensory deprivation and denial of sleep.

Hayden told the senators that if they prohibited the CIA’s harsh tactics, interrogators would not risk violating the congressionally approved standards, whatever the future emergency.

“We will play to the edges of the box that the American political process gives us,” Hayden said. “If the American political system draws the box making it equivalent to the Army Field Manual [prohibiting abusive interrogations], we will play inside the box. …

“One should not expect them [CIA interrogators] to play outside the box because we’ve entered a new period of threat or danger to the nation. There’s no wink and nod here. If you create the box, we will play inside the box, without exception.”

Revived Specter

This revived specter of a worsening U.S. vulnerability to a major terrorist attack will surely hover over the congressional debate on reining in Bush’s assertion of unlimited presidential authority, but it may well spook the presidential campaign, too.

On the Republican side, as frontrunner John McCain begins to position himself for the November general election, the terror fear should help him since he has embraced Bush’s Iraq War even if the U.S. occupation of Iraq lasts 100 years or more. The Arizona senator also has vowed to wage an open-ended war against Islamic militants, calling it the key “ideological struggle” of this era.

So, assuming that Americans still take Bush's terror warnings seriously, McCain could get an advantage. However, the administration’s stoking up fears about another 9/11 represents a more difficult challenge to Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Both Democrats have argued that Bush’s diversion of U.S. forces from the Afghanistan theatre to Iraq contributed to the continued U.S. vulnerability to al-Qaeda’s terrorism and they have advocated direct military retaliation against al-Qaeda. But they have differed significantly in their personal reactions to Bush's “war on terror.”

Sen. Clinton generally has finessed Bush’s bellicosity rather than challenge the premises of his arguments. Her desire to “look tough” often has drawn her into political alliances with congressional neoconservatives like Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut.

In 2007, for instance, Clinton voted for a Lieberman-sponsored resolution calling on Bush to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist” organization. Her vote drew criticism from other Democratic presidential hopefuls as indicating that she had not learned much from her 2002 vote to authorize Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Many Clinton critics suspect that if she secures the Democratic nomination, she would start tacking again toward a neocon-lite position on national security, and that if she wins the White House, she would pursue a foreign policy course not that much different from the belligerent one that Bush has followed. She would never want to look “weak.”

Obama Test

For Sen. Obama, the administration’s ramped-up rhetoric about an impending terrorist threat on U.S. soil represents a different kind of challenge. He has argued for a revolutionary rethinking of how the United States conducts its foreign policy – and might have to defend that position amid a climate of fear.

“I don’t want to just end the war” in Iraq, Obama said at the Jan. 31 debate in Los Angeles. “I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”

Obama’s reference was to his advocacy of unconditional negotiations with enemies, as opposed to Bush’s approach of issuing ultimatums to unfriendly states and demanding major concessions before negotiating with them.

If Obama means what he says, he would be pointing the way toward a very different kind of U.S. foreign policy, one that relies more on American “soft power” influence than on “hard power” military might.

While sounding fairly radical after nearly three decades of escalating military buildups -- and neoconservative dreams of permanent U.S. hegemony around the globe -- Obama’s position actually harkens back to presidential goals from the early 1960s.

Obama is echoing Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the undue influence of the “military-industrial complex” as well as John F. Kennedy’s appeal for a world peace that is “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Where Would Obama Take the Nation?”]

But that could be a tough sell if Americans are fearful again about another 9/11. Already, Hillary Clinton has mocked Obama’s call for direct talks with enemy states as naïve and proof of his inexperience.

Should the new terror warnings gain traction with the American public, Obama’s reaction could be a test of his mettle, whether he can stand up to the extraordinary pressures – sometimes bordering on hysteria – that have dominated the U.S. political process since the late summer of 2001.

Giants Win! Giants Win! Giants Win!

I'm so happy! The cheating coach gets beat. Now if only the other leader who has been taping everything and everyone of us gets what he deserves...

Signing Statements

Since taking office, Bush has issued hundreds of signing statements that negate the laws he is signing - far more than all of the prior presidents combined. In these signing statements he declares that he is not subject to Congress or the judiciary. In his first term alone, he issued twenty-five of these per year. (For more on this, see Barbara Bowley's Chapter Nine ("The Campaign for Unfettered Power: Executive Supremacy, Secrecy and Surveillance") in Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney.) After the 2006 mid-term elections he slowed down for a bit, but as it became clear that Congress would not refuse him anything, he resumed his aggressive assertions of unfettered executive power.

When I speak to audiences about Bush and Cheney's White House, I frequently make the point that as bad as you may think they are, when you look more closely and thoroughly at what they have been doing, you learn that they are much, much worse than you thought. The truth is shocking.

Even those who have been following what's going on continue to be "shocked and awed" by it. Indeed, the monstrousness of it makes it actually harder in some important ways for people in this country to react to because it is so out of keeping with what they are used to thinking about their government.

Even among those who know a great deal of history, and who are therefore not under many illusions about this government, are those who have a hard time understanding how momentous the steps being taken are. Many of them tend to think that this is just more of the same and that the fight to drive Bush and Cheney from office obscures the fundamental character of U.S. imperialism. They are, therefore, standing aside from the impeachment fight.

They fail to see that Bush and Cheney are the cutting edge of a rupture from past norms and that the legalization of torture, the stripping away of due process rights, the ubiquitous spying, the overt assertions that the executive is accountable to no one - not Congress, not the judiciary, not international courts, not the people - are the elements of a fascist state. If you sit by and let what Bush and Cheney are doing happen and you don't fight it and don't do everything you can to drive them from office, then you are allowing these new steps to become the new normal. That would be a fatal mistake.

The people who are now being tortured and indefinitely detained are the most vulnerable - Muslims among them - and the academics who they've fired and threatened include the ones who've taken the most out there stances (such as Ward Churchill). The people who are not yet being rounded up and brutalized are, in all too many numbers, oblivious to the fate of these. Naomi Wolf in her new book The End of America quotes a friend of hers who is otherwise compassionate as saying that "That's not my issue."

The refusal to stand up for those being killed, tortured, brutalized and fired is not only indefensible morally, but short-sighted. If a government can get away with doing terrible things to the most vulnerable, their next steps will be - and are - to progressively go after the less marginal: the people who now think that it's permissible for the executive to trample upon civil liberties and civil rights in the name of "national security."

Note in the following article that Hillary, Obama, and Romney have publicly declared that if elected they too will use signing statements. McCain has said he will not, but then, after the 2005 McCain Amendment that prohibited torturing detainees was passed by Congress and Bush signed it using a signing statement stating that he would not abide by it, McCain said nothing. He said nothing even though Bush had just obliterated the meaning of the McCain Amendment. He said nothing because he wanted to be president himself.

Bush asserts authority to bypass defense act

Calls restrictions unconstitutional

By Charlie Savage, Boston Globe [1]

WASHINGTON - President Bush this week declared that he has the power to bypass four laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq, that Congress passed as part of a new defense bill.

Bush made the assertion in a signing statement that he issued late Monday after signing the National Defense Authorization Act for 2008. In the signing statement, Bush asserted that four sections of the bill unconstitutionally infringe on his powers, and so the executive branch is not bound to obey them.

"Provisions of the act . . . purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the president's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as commander in chief," Bush said. "The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President."

One section Bush targeted created a statute that forbids spending taxpayer money "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq" or "to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq."

The Bush administration is negotiating a long-term agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The agreement is to include the basing of US troops in Iraq after 2008, as well as security guarantees and other economic and political ties between the United States and Iraq.

The negotiations have drawn fire in part because the administration has said it does not intend to designate the compact as a "treaty," and so will not submit it to Congress for approval. Critics are also concerned Bush might lock the United States into a deal that would make it difficult for the next president to withdraw US troops from Iraq.

"Every time a senior administration official is asked about permanent US military bases in Iraq, they contend that it is not their intention to construct such facilities," said Senator Robert P. Casey Jr., Democrat of Pennsylvania, in a Senate speech yesterday. "Yet this signing statement issued by the president yesterday is the clearest signal yet that the administration wants to hold this option in reserve."

Several other congressional Democrats also took issue with the signing statement.

"I reject the notion in his signing statement that he can pick and choose which provisions of this law to execute," said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. "His job, under the Constitution, is to faithfully execute the law - every part of it - and I expect him to do just that."

Bush's signing statement did not explain the specific basis for his objection to the prohibition on establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.

But last year, the White House told Congress that a similar provision in another bill "impermissibly infringes upon the president's constitutional authority to negotiate treaties and conduct the nation's foreign affairs."

Some legal specialists disagreed with the administration's legal theory.

"Congress clearly has the authority to enact this limitation of the expenditure of funds for permanent bases in Iraq," said Dawn Johnsen, an Indiana University law professor who was the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration.

Bush's frequent use of signing statements to advance aggressive theories of executive power has been a hallmark of his presidency. Previous presidents occasionally used the device, but Bush has challenged more sections of bills than all his predecessors combined - among them, a ban on torture.

Bush signing statements prompted widespread controversy when his record came to light in 2006. After Democrats took over Congress in 2007, Bush initially issued fewer and less aggressive signing statements. But his new statement returned to the previous approach, observers said.

The signing statement also targeted a provision in the defense bill that strengthens protections for whistle-blowers working for companies that hold government contracts. The new law expands employees' ability to disclose wrongdoing without being fired, and it gives greater responsibility to federal inspectors general to investigate complaints of retaliation.

In addition, Bush targeted a section that requires intelligence agencies to turn over "any existing intelligence assessment, report, estimate or legal opinion" requested by the leaders of the House and Senate armed services committees within 45 days. If the president wants to assert executive privilege to deny the request, the law says, White House counsel must do so in writing.

Finally, Bush's signing statement raised constitutional questions about a section of the bill that established an independent, bipartisan "Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan" to investigate allegations of waste, mismanagement, and excessive force by contractors.

The law requires the Pentagon to provide information to the panel "expeditiously" upon its request.

The signing statement did not make clear whether Bush is objecting to the creation of the commission because some of its members will be appointed by Congress or whether he is reserving the right to turn down its requests for information - or both.

Phillip Cooper, a political science professor at Portland State University, noted that Bush's statement does not clearly spell out the basis for any of his challenges. Cooper, who has been a pioneer in studying signing statements, said the vague language itself is a problem.

"It is very hard for Congress or the American people to figure out what is supposed to happen and what the implications of this are," Cooper said.

The White House did not respond to a Globe request to explain the objections in greater detail. But the Bush administration has repeatedly insisted that its use of signing statements has been both lawful and appropriate.

Still, the signing statement makes one thing clear, according to David Barron, a Harvard law professor. The White House, he said, is pressing forward with its effort to establish that the commander in chief can defy laws limiting his options in national security matters. The administration made similar assertions in recent disputes over warrantless wiretapping and interrogation methods, he said.

"What this shows is that they're continuing to assert the same extremely aggressive conception of the president's unilateral power to determine how and when US force will be used abroad, and that's a dramatic departure from the American constitutional tradition," said Barron, who was a Justice Department official in the 1990s.

In 2006, the American Bar Association condemned signing statements as "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers."

Among the presidential candidates, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have said they would issue signing statements if elected. John McCain said he would not.

Yale Daily News: Law Students Protest Bybee

Law students protest Bybee’s torture memo

Audience members place trash bags on heads during talk by former chief of Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel

Isaac Arnsdorf
Staff Reporter

Friday, February 1, 2008

The speaker had hardly finished his first sentence when about 25 Yale Law School students in the audience stood up and sheathed their heads in black trash bags, in imitation of hooded military prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The students were protesting an appearance at the Law School on Thursday evening by Jay Bybee, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit who, when he was head of the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, signed off on a controversial policy for interrogation and detention of “military combatants” — what critics have labeled the “torture memo.”

Bybee’s speech was billed as a debate with Yale Law professor Steven Duke about federalism and criminal law, but for at least two dozen audience members, the address was primarily an opportunity to confront Bybee. The event — hosted by the Yale chapter of the Federalist Society, an organization of conservative and libertarian law students — was reserved exclusively for law students and closed to the press, but the proceedings were visible from the hallway.

“Jay Bybee helped formulate policies that violated hundreds of people’s human rights,” protest organizer Darryl Li LAW ’09 said in an interview after the demonstration. “He was never held accountable for what he did but rather was promoted to a very powerful position in the federal judiciary.”

Christopher Angevine LAW ’08, president of the Federalist Society, declined to comment on the event Thursday night.

Several members of the Law School faculty have been vocal opponents of Bush administration policies on the war on terror. Dean Harold Hongju Koh testified before Congress in 2006 against the warrantless domestic wiretapping program. And last month, Law School visiting lecturer Jonathan Freiman LAW ’98 and Yale’s Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic filed suit against John Yoo LAW ’92 on behalf of Jose Padilla — who was convicted of conspiracy to murder and kidnap people overseas — for Yoo’s role in drafting Bybee’s memo.

Before the event, the protestors convened in the Law School auditorium, where Li distributed trash bags and briefed them on the plan. The participants were an informal group of students, Li said.

“This is an issue that’s important to the world and to the nation, but especially to us as law students, because Bybee is a shameful example of how placing power above principle violates the rule of law and dishonors the legal profession,” Li said.

At the door of the lecture hall, which was guarded by a police officer, two students handed out fliers titled “STAND UP TO TORTURE.” One of them said she offered a flier to Bybee when he entered, but he turned it down.

The program began at 6:10 p.m. with an introduction by the Federalist Society’s vice president for events, Adam Gustafson LAW ’09. Those in the half-full lecture hall applauded as Bybee ascended to the lectern.

But as he began to speak, the protesters, clustered in the center seats, stood and pulled the bags over their heads. A few other audience members clapped, several of the protesters said afterward. Bybee, visibly annoyed, stopped speaking.

“If you’re blocking other people from seeing, you have to leave,” Li said Gustafson told the protesters. Gustafson paused, then said, “You are blocking people. You have to leave.”

The protestors removed the bags and laid them at the foot of the lectern as they walked out. Bybee then went on the speak for about 30 minutes.

Li said he was involved in a similar protest when Bybee spoke at Harvard Law School in 2006.

U.S. Chief Legal Officer Can't Say Whether Waterboarding is Torture. Also Won't Say If the Sun is Hot.

Mukasey Won't Comment on Waterboarding
The Associated Press

Wednesday 30 January 2008

Washington - Attorney General Michael Mukasey still won't say whether waterboarding is torture, a stance that is upsetting Senate Democrats who had threatened to derail his confirmation over the issue.

Mukasey's refusal to define waterboarding as illegal could provoke hostile questioning during a scheduled appearance Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was to be his first appearance there since being sworn in Nov. 9 and comes on the heels of a letter sent to the panel's chairman signaling he will not ever publicly conclude that waterboarding is illegal.

"I understand that you and some other members of the (Judiciary) Committee may feel that I should go further in my review, and answer questions concerning the legality of waterboarding under current law," Mukasey wrote in a three-page letter Tuesday to the panel's chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "I understand the strong interest in this question, but I do not think it would be responsible for me, as attorney general, to provide an answer."

The letter came as a response to senators' demands for Mukasey to clarify whether the interrogation tactic known as waterboarding should be banned by the United States. The tactic that involves strapping down a person and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning.

At his confirmation hearings in October, Mukasey refused to define waterboarding as torture because he was unfamiliar with the classified Justice Department memos describing the process and legal arguments surrounding it. His non-answer reply Tuesday infuriated Democrats who accused the attorney general of being incapable of what they called making a simple legal decision.

Mukasey "seems constitutionally incapable of rendering judgment on a simple and straightforward legal question," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who sits on the committee, said in a statement late Tuesday. "During his confirmation hearings, Mr. Mukasey promised repeatedly to end the stonewalling.... Let's hope he is more forthcoming in his testimony than he was in his letter."

In his letter, Mukasey concluded that current methods used by the CIA to interrogate terror suspects are lawful and that the spy agency is not using waterboarding on its prisoners. Beyond that, Mukasey said, it would be irresponsible for him to decide whether waterboarding is illegal since doing so could reveal details about the classified program.

Waterboarding was banned by the CIA and the Pentagon in 2006. Critics want the Justice Department to join other nations and outlaw waterboarding as illegal. But U.S. intelligence officials fear that doing so could make government interrogators - including those from the CIA - vulnerable to retroactive criminal charges or civil lawsuits.

Waterboarding is at the heart of a Justice Department criminal investigation over whether the CIA illegally or otherwise improperly destroyed videotapes in 2005 of two terror suspects being interrogated. The tapes showed harsh interrogations, including possible waterboarding, of suspected terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2002, when both suspects were held in secret CIA prisons overseas. They were destroyed as intelligence officials debated whether waterboarding should be declared illegal.

January 31st actions

There are actions being planned in your area - or if there aren't, get your friends together to do something that day - to show that we are not all "good Germans" and that we refuse to allow torture to go on in our names!

In Los Angeles, from 5-7 pm people are meeting at the Kodak Theatre, the Hollywood and Highland Red line stop, to demonstrate. When I checked a few minutes ago, the World Can't Wait website was again being maliciously hacked, at least the second time in the last few days. The top image is a banner that you can get that we are trying to get churches, office buildings, homes and apartment dwellers to hang for all to see. Contact info@worldcantwait.org for more information.

Obama: Reagan regained our greatness

I'd add to the following essay this: as bad as you think that Bush and Cheney are, and as alarmed as you should be about the fascist character to their actions and trajectory of their program - as David Addington has said "we're going to push and push and push until some larger force stops us" - Bush and Cheney are a logical extension of the path and program that Reagan/Bush Sr. initiated. If Reagan were alive today and were the president, he would be doing precisely the same thing that Bush/Cheney have been doing.

When he first attempted to get the GOP nomination for president, Reagan was derided by the mainstream media as a right-wing kook - which he was! Subsequently, when he successfully ran for the nomination and for the presidency, the manner in which he was treated by the mainstream media changed radically, but not because Reagan had changed. Reagan was the jocular old smiling face that made Americans feel good about being "great" - that is, "We're Number One!" as yelled out by the same kind of frat boy types who you see today declaring how much they love torture.

The "we're number one" yahoo chant is the heart of the problem because it's a concentration of the imperialist, Godfather attitude - "everybody in the world get back, 'cause here comes the U.S.A. with our bombs and our waterboarding, with God on our side!"

This is why the "America is great" argument that Obama's making is such a cesspool. Many Americans are understandably proud of being Americans, it's customary for people of any country to love their country. But where this all goes terribly wrong is when people in this country forget or overlook the fact that we are the sole imperialist superpower. The American way of life is purchased at the price of the domination and plunder of huge sections of the globe, a relationship that would not exist as it does now without the generous use of violence, including, most dramatically, torture on a daily basis.

What makes Americans better and more important than any other people on this planet? What gives our Navy the right to use the oceans for underwater communications that endanger the lives of the whales? What makes American lives more precious than those that are being killed by this government's policies? These are the hard questions that Americans who have a conscience need to ask themselves. If you think we're more important than other people, you're fair game for our government's ongoing and escalating deceit to justify committing crimes against humanity.

“American Greatness”—And Why Obama and Reagan Really DO Belong Together

by Toby O’Ryan

“But I think, when I think about great presidents, I think about those who transform how we think about ourselves as a country in fundamental ways… And, you know, there are circumstances in which, I would argue, Ronald Reagan was a very successful president, even though I did not agree with him on many issues, partly because at the end of his presidency, people, I think, said, ‘You know what? We can regain our greatness. Individual responsibility and personal responsibility are important.’ And they transformed the culture and not simply promoted one or two particular issues.”

—Barack Obama

“Regain our greatness”? How about we just bring a little bit of the fucking real into the discussion, okay?

Reagan promoted outright racism and “USA Number One” chauvinism. He began his 1980 election campaign with an appearance in Philadelphia, Mississippi where he praised “states’ rights.” And Philadelphia, Mississippi, you see, was where a mob of KKK murdered three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—in 1964. “States’ rights” was the code word used by Klansmen and their more polite supporters to justify the lynchings, the murders, and all the rest of the terror they used against people fighting against segregation. And Reagan matched this with the so-called war on drugs that resulted in massive imprisonment of Black and Latino youth…all while he at minimum turned a blind eye to the dope that was pumped into the ghetto during the 1980s, some by CIA operatives and “assets.”

Reagan was also famous for threatening nuclear war—including with his infamous joke: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” In actual policy, he not only rattled horrific nuclear weapons. He armed brutes and thugs to carry out terror from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, from El Salvador and Guatemala to Angola and Mozambique, and scores of places beyond. And in most of those places, the death toll ran not into the thousands, not into the tens of thousands, but into the hundreds of thousands of human beings that somehow got in the way of American empire…oops, I mean American greatness. He fostered the war between Iraq and Iran that took the lives of a million people. And, oh yeah, he also backed to the hilt the apartheid government of South Africa and the racist state of Israel—when both were dealing with serious internal rebellions of their oppressed by the most brutal means imaginable.

And these are just a few of his crimes. You could fill a hundred books with what he did to women, to workers, to gay people (including his vicious policies on AIDS)…with the way he brought Christian fascists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson into prominence…well, the list goes on. And yes, he did promote the idea that not only is there nothing wrong with the merciless dog-eat-dog ethos of America, it’s actually the only way to go—that’s what Obama means by the code words of “individual and social responsibility.”

“How We Think About Ourselves as a Country”

But here’s where Obama lets out a little bit of truth: that Reagan “transformed how we think about ourselves as a country.” You see, up to then you had people a little bit beginning to come to grips with the reality of America and, for once, not the storybook bullshit. So, yeah, Reagan’s great “talent,” as Obama lets on, was that he got people to think about all these crimes in different ways, especially after the ’60s generation had begun to bring out the undeniable truth about so-called “American greatness.” Reagan came out there with this shit-eating grin and salesman’s chuckle, and all the while he mobilized a fascist social base ready to bully anybody, and he narcotized those in the middle, and he effectively silenced and marginalized those who stood for anything decent.

Barack Obama is telling you what he thinks is great. Barack Obama is telling you how he plans to operate—to do a job of convincing people that the ugly shit that America does, all the torture and murder and arrogance that it carries out and that stinks in the nostrils of people all over the world, really smells like roses. Even as people in this country barely begin to come to grips with Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah, and all the rest, he wants to “transform how we think about ourselves as a country in fundamental ways.” And he wants to do it like Reagan did.

Now it’s up to you—do you want to convince yourself that he doesn’t mean it? Do you want to go along with the idea that thinking about something differently changes its character?

Or will you stare the truth in its face, repudiate any desire for any more so-called “American greatness,” and transform how you think and act on that basis?