Man he nails it home here ........ Ditto heads will hate to hear this , but it is tru

[Spider]

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Fr..._for_0513.html
Times' Frank Rich: Any 'witch hunt' for traitors should begin in the White House

RAW STORY
Published: Saturday May 13, 2006

Print This | Email This

Defending journalists who have been castigated as traitors for exposing government blunders, New York Times columnist Frank Rich writes that any "witch hunt" for traitors should begin in the White House, RAW STORY has found.

"What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude," Rich writes.

"It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press' exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security," Rich continues. "That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin."

Ex-CIA Director Porter Goss should not be allowed to "escape into retirement unexamined," Rich argues, calling him "so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaida double agent."

"His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate CIA intelligence on Iraq before the war," Rich writes.

Rich ends his column by suggesting that if Air Force General Michael Hayden is confirmed by the Senate to replace Goss then "someone should charge those senators with treason, too."

Excerpts from Rich's "Will The Real Traitors Please Stand Up?" set for Sunday's edition of the New York Times:
#

When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary New York Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the CIA's secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Add Frank Rich to the growing list of journalists who seem to be finding their cojones.

[Rock Chalk]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

Add Frank Rich to the growing list of journalists who seem to be finding their cojones.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by §Pide®

Ditto heads will hate to hear this

Surprise - you were right.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Starting over when Bush is gone

By Mike Whitney

Big Brother Bush has finally descended into the hell of public scorn and degradation. The once-mighty George 2, the "War President", who towered over the global landscape after 9-11, has slumped into disrepute with the popularity-meter resting on empty.

Oh dear.

There's no place to hide now. 6 years of demagoguery and deception have smashed the Orwellian facade and fueled the public rage. The country is on tender-hooks; one paltry incident away from a citizen revolt and massive political upheaval.

Don't believe it? The fury of the masses is silently brewing just below the surface. The specter of violence is quite real.

Bush's popularity is now somewhere below Nixon's and just above venereal disease; the perfect spot for a draft-dodging poseur whose bravado cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

Bush managed to surpass Nixon by claiming a 71% disapproval rating; a triumph that Hitler would have admired. Still, given the 3 years left on his tenure as president, there's room for improvement in that category as well.

As if things couldn't get any worse for "the Decider", Karl Rove has just been indicted on charges of perjury.

How will the bad news affect Bush's fragile psyche?

Will he finally crack and bolt himself inside the Capital bell-tower; grimacing and spitting at the passers by? Or will he simply wear a path in the Oval Office rug pacing back and forth like a caged hyena?

Rove is the one indispensable star in the Bush firmament. It's Rove who stitched together the Bush persona; carefully blending religious zeal with Reagan's rustic chumminess. Rove is the force behind our Betsy-McCall president. He's the guy who dresses him up to lark about in military jumpsuit or to play a working class hero in flannel shirt and chainsaw. It's Rove who perfected the pallid-faced hologram that appears whenever one turns on the TV. He chiseled Bush out of wormwood producing a character that looks to have the full range of human emotions with the exception of compassion. Without Rove, junior would still be snoozing peacefully on a barstool in Abilene rather than raining down hellfire on peaceful Muslim countries.

Now, the "shadow-president" is going down; clapped in leg-irons and frog-marched to the Washington hoosegow. Don't expect Karen Hughes to fill the big shoes Karl Rove leaves behind.

The Bush Reich is steadily slipping towards disaster. Defeat is circling overhead like great birds of prey. As Bush's popularity craters and key players are carted off to prison the empire of corruption, bowed-over by the accumulated weight of its war crimes, draws ever-closer to doomsday. Bush's breathing has grown heavier and more raspy, his delivery more labored and hesitant, his demeanor more tentative and agitated. The ground has been cut out from under Bush and his cadres. In a few months they'll be looking over their shoulders with each step as they pass silently into their bunkers.

The inescapable force of public contempt has fallen on the White House like a darkening storm-cloud. The neocon master-plan is unraveling like a spool of yarn skittering across the kitchen floor.

Bush has insinuated corruption into every molecule of the body politic. The torture and violence have removed any claim of legitimacy or moral authority. The social contract has been hacked into small bits and left to feed the crows. The government is now entirely powered by hubris and brute force, the sustenance of tyranny.

The American dream has ripened into a menacing delirium, teeming with torture, violence, and murder. We have become everything we profess to hate.

Maybe, it's time to pull up the foundation blocks and give the scaffolding a good shove. Bring down the whole fetid contraption; political, media, congressional and corporate. Rattle the cages and send the denizens of the think-tanks and the right-wing foundations scampering into the streets for cover.

Let the whole rotten contrivance crash to earth in a heap; there's not one part of it that's worth saving.

We'll start fresh when Bush is gone.

Viva la revolution.

[defenseman]

The press prints too much stuff without getting ALL the facts, and writing with a "left" twist when presenting the material in most cases. That's not COJONES, that's "creative spin". Don't buy into it, don't condone it. We'll see how it all plays out, interesting development though, I'll admit...dman

[Garcia Bronco]

Originally Posted by defenseman

The press prints too much stuff without getting ALL the facts, and writing with a "left" twist when presenting the material in most cases. That's not COJONES, that's "creative spin". Don't buy into it, don't condone it. We'll see how it all plays out, interesting development though, I'll admit...dman

agreed. While the press has it's place...the advent of 24 hours news stations and the internet(which have sponsors that pay their salary) have destroyed much of any credibility journalists have. Frankly, I find it hard to believe anything they say of do.

[Smiling Assassin27]

when i see the words 'noble goals' and 'Ted Kennedy' in the same sentence, i think incompetence, not media bias.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by defenseman

The press prints too much stuff without getting ALL the facts, and writing with a "left" twist when presenting the material in most cases. That's not COJONES, that's "creative spin". Don't buy into it, don't condone it. We'll see how it all plays out, interesting development though, I'll admit...dman

There you go again doing what you always do, i.e., dismissing an article's assertions as "creative spin" without actually showing any specific argument to be invalid and without actually disproving specific facts presented.

You seem to believe that simply labelling an opponent's argument as "left twist" is the same thing as refuting it.