SUN - 13 Nov - Bush on the Run:   It was one of those TV moments where the question itself, regardless of the answer, is so telling.  There sat King Abdullah II, with his British mannerisms and Georgetown University ways, trying to exploit the Amman bombings for whatever p.r. gain he could manage.   He sent his articulate and attractive wife, solo, to the ABC network as he did NBC.  But he was reduced to questionning one of the most respected polling organiations, Pew, when challenged that the great majority of Jordanians disdain the U.S., literally hate President Bush, and by a majority support 'suicide bombings' against the occupying powers -- to mean both the U.S. and Israel.  More telling in a sense there was hardly a word from either Abdullah or his queen on what lay behind what is now happening, of the terrible apartheid realities imposed on the Palestinians, and of the first anniversary of the Fallujah massacre which appears to have brought on the Amman bombings on year later.

SAT - 12 Nov - Bush on the Run:   Bush choose Veterans Day yesterday to lash out more harshly than ever at all those who have been chastising him, especially with regard to the false propaganda that was used to justify the Iraq invasion/occupation.   Bush is on the run.  And this isn't just about normal politics and the mid-term 2006 election, now less than a year ahead.  Bush is playing an increasingly exhausting game of defense; with the political opposition not only continually on the offensive but making considerable inroads in turning the public still further against Bush/Cheney.  Indeed Bush's rasputin-like 'cabal'-leading VP is even more unpopular than he, and he is at the lowest ever for a second-term President since President Nixon, and before him VP Spiro Agnew, who were both forced from office back in 1973.   As previously discussed here the political blood in the water now is already far more than normal and should things continue to deteriorate for Bush/Cheney impeachment is no longer just a chant-word.  THAT is what explains the gloves off speech from the President yesterday -- he knows that if his defense doesn't pick up and the other side keeps on scoring his already failed Presidency could also become an abbreviated one.
    Today, by the way, marks the 10th anniversary of the Rabin Assassination, yesterday the first of the Arafat 'Stealth Assination'.  Bill and Hillary are there for Rabin.  And though Arafat was the most frequent foreign guest to the Clinton White House, they had nothing to say nor paid any attention to the grand 'old man' of the Palestinian struggle nor to the great poisons which have spread so far and wide from the ongoing Israeli-U.S.-Palestinian-Arab confrontation...or should we now refer to it as conflagration.

THU - 10 Nov - New Palestinian 'Ambassador' plays deaf and dumb:   Any real 'Ambassador' that represented any real and self-respecting government (which sadly the 'Palestinian Authority' is certainly not) would find himself recalled if not dismised for gross incompetence.  But after Hassan Rahman people in Washington are so use to deaf and dumb 'official' Palestinian representatives, on top of such a complacent, compliant, and mediocre Arab media, that Afif Safiya is praised by his little incestuous group rather than condemned.  Safiya follows in the dastardly 20-year footsteps of Rahman who so terribly misrepresented the Palestinians in Washington for so long.  
     So there he sat silently in the audience yesterday afternoon, Safiya that is, as the last panel of the Middle East Institute debated the future of his people and the 'peace process' Safiya has so often fronted for and personally benefited from.   Well, 'debated' isn't quite the right term.   All four of the people on the panel in the auditorium of the National Press Club, including the moderator, a former Congressman, who came from Brooklyn to preside, were Jews.  In fact all four were distinctly  Jewish Zionists differing primarily with what kind of emphasis they used to blame the Palestinian victims for their oh-so-tragic predicament. 
     No use protesting about any of this to the Middle East Institute.  MEI has been afraid of its own shadow for so long now, trying so hard to stay on the right side of the Israeli-Jewish lobby that a few years back they actually gave the keynote floor to the notorious Bernard Lewis -- this year it was the former head of the Saudi CIA now in Washington as Saudi Ambassador (see yesterday).   It's the miserably inept and incompetent Palestinian representation in Washington that allows such things to happen; and this latest disaster was in a sense Safiya's coming out party here. 
     Just as this final panel was about to begin came word of the worst anti-American anti-Israeli anti-Hashemite attacks ever in Amman, Jordan.

WED - 9 Nov - Saudis Bow:    Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan is gone after more than 20 years.  There was not even a single mention of him by anyone as the new Saudi Ambassador, the old head of the Saudi CIA Turki Al-Faisal, gave his inaugural Washington address.  It was the  keynote address at the Middle East Institute yesterday morning at the National Press Club a few blocks from the White House.   In substance and style it was an amazing bow to the powers that be -- a speech that could have been written by White House speech writers, in fact, in most aspects, by Israeli speech writers.  But then the long-corrupted and co-opted Al-Saud regime is on the run and knows very well that it has to count on the American CIA and ultimately the American military to keep it in power.  And that requires not only knuckling under to Washington, it also means staying on the right side of the powerful Israeli/Jewish lobby that still dominates U.S. foreign policy-making when it comes to the Middle East.
   Meanwhile, the elephant in the legal closet, Presidential 'Pardon' power, that I've focused on before -- the issue that is key to what is likely to happen in the end with regard to 'Scooter' Libby and by extension VP Cheney -- has now been brought forward in a bigger way than ever by the Democrats, just as they showed their muscle by taking the Governor races in both Virginia and New Jersey yesterday.

TUE - 8 Nov - Brzezinski's 4-part formula to shore up the Empire:    America's imperialist class gathered last evening - it was the 59th annual banquet of the Middle East Institute, a kind of retirement home for fading State Department and oil company hacks, with a sprinkling of Arab 'client regime' Ambassadors, p.r. agents, and Council on Foreign Relations types.   The tables bore the names of the military-industrial complex from Raytheon to Exxon-Mobil with the on-the-take Arab 'client regimes' out for the evening of mingling -- you know the ones, the Royal Saudis and the Kuwaitis in the lead.  The new Palestinian 'Ambassador' Afif Safiya was there along with 'the other Judith', long-time multi-agent Judith Kipper now doing her hustling under CFR's banner.  The Israelis have never been directly involved with the MEI crowd -- these guys after all are the 'Arabists' -- but they've had MEI under control and far out-flanked for a long time now and don't have to bother much with this bunch.   You can tell these days in Washington who's powerful and important, and even though this group does have some fading luminaries and even a very few of today's powerful -- the Saudi Ambassador for instance who gives the keynote address today -- there were no 'security' checks and the enthusiasm level was more akin to that of a evening in a home for the aged.   Not even any real unscripted questions form the audience for Dr. Brzezinski, the cerebral mello-toned former National Security Adviser (Carter years) dinner speaker -- just note cards passed up to the MEI President (always a retired State Department Ambassador by the way) for filtering. God forbid anyone might even try to lull this bunch out of their stupor.
 

MON - 7 Nov - Cheney Sinking:   Many will dismiss such talk as just gossipy and/or way out there.  But here in Washington there is a certain subterranian quality to reality, especially at critical times.  The notion that VP Cheney might have to go -- for a combination of political, legal, and p.r. reasons -- and that Bush might bring on partial nemesis John McCain to try to 'save' his Presidency is actually a real possibility now.   Cheney, far some time more unpopular than Bush who himself is now way down there, has taken on a kind of drip drip quality.
Day after day, scandal after scandal, so many negative things have Dick Cheney attacked to them.   The key Washington scandals -- from his Chief of Staff 'Scooter' now under indictment,  to IRAQGate with all the lies and sub-plots, to the torture fiascos of Abu Ghraib et. al, to the Neocon 'cabal' -- all are tracing back to the VP.  Just today, as the President in Panama insists against credulity "We do not torture" the Washington Post has a top front-page Cheney-focused story about the VP's personal crusade to continue to allow the CIA to pursue 'black ops' and what everyone else in the world knows to be torture, whatever rhetoric twists are used to smokescreen these realities.  As for Bush, his attempts to deny torture are reminiscent of Reagan's attempts to deny Iran-Contra, the scandal which eventually forced the Gipper to shake up his second-term big time.
    Meanwhile John McCain has positioned himself right where he wants to be.  He orchestrated the Senate's 90-9 vote to totally outlaw torture, with VP Cheney fighting him every step of the way and even getting Bush to issue a rare veto-threat that further exposed the President on this lose-lose issue.  The man who was opposition party John Kerry's first choice for VP, the man who has been manuevering to be top dog for years already, now has another road that may open for him.  For should McCain ome in and help 'save' the Bush Presidency the nomination that would otherwise be denied him by the Republican extremist wing, would be his in 2008.  McCain will of course keep denying and denying that he's interested in being VP.  But in 2008 he will be 72, and this is in all likelihood his last shot at the White House.  So if and when the offer finally comes from the Oval Office itself McCain will step up to the plate with that boyish falsely immodest grin and declare it his patriotic duty to accept.  Meanwhile he's doing all he can to manuever such a situation into being, though of course Washington political protocol demands he never admit it.

SUN - 6 Nov - Targets Cheney and Bush - Impeachment Fever:   Those who hold official power positions in Washington can't and won't say so for attribution, but what is happening is Washington now is the targeting of the two top men empowered in December 2000 by the 5-4 Supreme Court vote -- Richard Cheney and George Bush.  It's an under the table game at this point, but it's very real and all the key players know what the real stakes have become.   Cheney himself, not Libby, is the target for indictment in CIAGate/IRAQGate -- it is he who is really at the top of Patrick Fitzgerald's legal investigation, though he will never say so.  But Watergate-era White House counsel John Dean can, and just has.   And Bush himself is now the potential impeachment target of the activist wing of the Democratic party though no one speaking for the party will ever say so at this point.    The scenario goes something like this:  Rove and Cheney could be forced under or out by the ongoing Fitzgerald investigation and.or the trial of 'Scooter' Libby.   They were both key players in the Iraq Group whose  purpose was to manipulate and misrepresent in order to make politically doable the Iraq invasion/occupation.   Meanwhile, as evidence of what was done in 2001 and 2002 seeps into public view, as the credibility of the Bush/Cheney regime continues to deteriorate, as Democrats rebound in the 2006 election (which is why the poll numbers above are so significant), the political stage will then be set for charging the Neocon/Evangelical Adminstration with historic deceit justifying the bringing of a bill of impeachment in the new House that first convenes 14 months from now.  And if one thinks back to what brought about the impeachment of Bill Clinton it is rather hard to deny that what Bush and his have done is far more serious and culpable than what Clinton did.

SAT - 5 Nov - Bush/Cheney under seige at home and abroad:    The Americans love to call it 'Free Trade', but it's really all about American coporate domination.  They love to call call it the 'MiddleEast Peace Process' but that too is really all about domination and plunder.   The sloganeerists like Karl Rove and the Propaganda Departments stretching from the State Department to the false-flag think-tanks like the 'U.S. Institute of Peace' work ever-so-hard to mask reality with such deceptive rhetorical flourishes.   Even so the backlash against 'Free Trade' has been growing and was evident again in the past few days on the streets of the fourth Summit of the Americas in Argentina.  The backlash against the 'Middle East Peace Process' is much more convoluted but was most strikingly exhibited in the past in Tehran in 1979, in Beirut in 1983, and of course on the day known as 9-11 and what is taking place today in Iraq.   Here at home as well Americans are finally coming to understand the duplicity of all the double-talk, deceptions, and outright lies, a growing majority in fact now saying in public their President nad government lack honesty and truthworthiness  -- but this is primarily with regard to domestic issues and things that affect affect most Americans directly in their pocketbook.

“This Administration manufactured and manipulated Intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq.”
                                                       - Senator Reid

Fully half of Americans now believe Bush purposefully lied to bring about the Iraq invasion/occupation.