Bush Lied. Thousands Died. We simply cannot allow neocon denial to rewrite history.

Bush Lies

This is well-trodden ground and I honestly thought that Bush's dishonesty was a settled historical fact by now.  But as the years pass between the events of 2002-2003 and the case for war becomes fuzzy in many American's minds, as the horrors of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq settle into a nightmarish mist where moral responsibility floats owner-less, as though the war were an inevitable natural disaster rather than an elective, man-made catastrophe, neocon denial, like Holocaust denial, can become an option for many, especially those most embarrassed by this debacle.
But history matters.  Moral culpability matters.  There are no statutes of limitation on lying or mass murder. If we don't hold our past leaders accountable for what they did, then present leaders know they can act with impunity. This issue transcends party. It even transcends nationality. All countries need to clean house morally, examining motives and deceptions.
Lying is a strong word for some but if a person or administration consistently and repeatedly, despite multiple public and private corrections, presents a case for a war that it knows is not true, with the errors systematically in the direction for war, with a vindictive response to public correction that ruins careers and compromises national security, then we must use the L word.
What follows is a document I created sometime in 2003 when most of these events were fresh in our minds. It is long and I apologize for that, but the voluminous details make an overwhelming case that Bush and other top members of his administration did indeed lie. I had long since left the intelligence community and had access to only open source information, but I knew, in real time, that there were no WMD in Iraq, certainly no nuclear program, as Bush repeatedly stated there was.  The idea that we did not know then what we know now is simply not true, because many of us, including the tens of millions who marched worldwide - the first and most massive protest in human history to a war that had not even started - knew in real time that George W. Bush was lying, systematically and always in the direction of war.

George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. His Iraq lies have loomed largest. In the run-up to the invasion, Bush based his case for war on a variety of unfounded claims that extended far beyond his controversial uranium-from-Niger assertion. He maintained that Saddam Hussein possessed "a massive stockpile" of unconventional weapons and was directly "dealing" with Al Qaeda--two suppositions unsupported then (or now) by the available evidence. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency had produced a report in 1998 noting that Iraq was six months from developing a nuclear weapon; no such report existed (and the IAEA had actually reported then that there was no indication Iraq had the ability to produce weapons-grade material). Bush asserted that Iraq was "harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner"; US intelligence officials told reporters this terrorist was operating ouside of Al Qaeda control. And two days before launching the war, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Yet former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr, who is conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, has said that intelligence was full of qualifiers and caveats, and based on circumstantial and inferential evidence. That is, it was not no-doubt stuff. And after the major fighting was done, Bush declared, "We found the weapons of mass destruction." But he could only point to two tractor-trailers that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded were mobile bioweapons labs. Other experts--including the DIA's own engineering experts--disagreed with this finding.

• David Corn, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception

Lie noun: an untrue statement made with intent to deceive (Merriam-Webster)

To accuse a politician of lying should be a serious charge.

So much deception has been documented by office-holders that the term dishonest politician has become redundant. This is unfair to those who serve with integrity and who are collectively impugned by the well-publicized egregious behavior of a few.

There are several levels of dishonesty, all of which have been displayed by this administration.

The lowest level, and arguably the most forgivable, is lies having to do with personal behavior that does not reflect on the performance of one's duties, and does not affect decisions made by those who hear the falsehood. The sexual life of President Clinton when thrust into a courtroom prompted an emphatic lie from the President "I did not have sex with that woman," although many might argue about whether fellatio constitutes sex, per se. This is at the level of a quibble, a wiggling away from a direct falsehood, but giving information that deliberately creates a false impression.

The most egregious level involves issues of national security, especially when the lies are so designed to inflame passions and lurch the country to war. These involve outright deceptions - the claim that Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain uranium in Africa - or deliberately sloppy language that created a false impression unless parsed very carefully - such as Bush's frequent summoning of the memory of 9/11 in the same sentence in which he mentioned Saddam Hussein. The effect of both lies is lethal. Men, women, and children died in the thousands because decision-makers, influenced by these words (indeed, often citing them) - ceded their war-making authority to the President.

Somewhere between these extremes is an intellectual dishonesty, a sloppiness in thinking that may reflect the operation of a dichotomous mind unschooled in the nuances of history, foreign policy, or cultural and ethnic complexity of a region. This good-old-boy, ah-shucks-I-said-that? approach may have been deliberately misused by President Bush as a screen to hide behind, to make his ludicrous conclusions seem almost forgivable to those who support him. Yes, they say, he may have overstated his case about all those pesky weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda and all that, but everyone makes mistakes. As National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told us, the President is not a fact-checker.

Apparently not.

What follows is a collection of some of the President's most egregious lies. There are unfortunately many others. I have attempted to exclude statements that arguably could have been simple errors of fact or judgment, which any leader under pressure will inevitably make. If the mistake is made in good faith and the consequences are not disastrous, then the leader should be forgiven. But if the weight of evidence was that the inaccuracy was inexcusable (because contemporary information disproved the statement) or seemed intended to deceive, then the inaccuracy is included as a lie.

What Bush said:	The truth:
Saddam Hussein had a "massive stockpile" of unconventional weapons.	The overwhelming weight of evidence from inspectors was that if he had any weapons they were scant. (Subsequent failure to unearth a single unconventional weapon demonstrates the inspectors' assessment was correct.)
Saddam Hussein was directly "dealing" with al Qaeda .	No such evidence existed or exists. "Combining the techniques of Madison Avenue and of totalitarianism, President George Bush has … endlessly reiterated the names of Saddam and 9/11 together. With a wondrous piece of suggestio falsi, he spoke of Saddam's links with 'al-Qaida-type organisations' (or 'al-Qaida types', or 'a terrorist network like al-Qaida'), and in one speech about Iraq, he mentioned September 11 more than 10 times. As a result of this subliminal persuasion, a majority of Americans now say they believe that Saddam was linked to the attack on New York, a falsehood which even the White House has never dared assert in plain terms." Guardian, 4/21/03
The International Atomic Energy Agency had produced a report in 1998 noting that Iraq was six months from developing a nuclear weapon.	No such report existed. The IAEA had actually reported then that there was no indication Iraq had the ability to produce weapons-grade material. Note that President Bush made this statement on television; by the time it was retracted several days later, the public impression of this inaccurate statement had already had its effect.
Saddam Hussein was importing aluminum tubes to reconstitute his nuclear program.	The IAEA stated multiple times that these tubes had been thoroughly examined and exactly matched the dimensions needed for conventional artillery munitions (allowed by the cease fire accords). President Bush repeated his incorrect statement in a later televised addressed AFTER the IAEA corrected his earlier inaccuracy.
Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain uranium in Niger.	He initially cited what was dismissed by the intelligence community as a fraudulent letter. He later cited British intelligence. That British intelligence has never been shared with the Americans or the British. "In October, [2003], acting on Tenet's suggestion, Bush excised a sentence about Iraq seeking a specific quantity of uranium from Niger, Fleischer said. Yet, several months later, Bush went ahead and raised the claim about seeking uranium in Africa." - CNN, 7/15/03
Iraq was "harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner"
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."	No one who heard this speech doubted the President was referring to nuclear weapons, by far "the most lethal weapons ever devised." Note this is more than a desire, more than an inchoate program; President Bush said Saddam Hussein "possess[es]" the weapons and was hiding them.
Saddam Hussein "wouldn't let" U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq. (State of the Union Speech).	In fact, the inspectors were in the country in the months before the war. - CNN, 07/15/2003
"We found the weapons of mass destruction."	Perhaps one of his most famous mis-statements, made on Polish television after the war. Arguably the most forgivable (every report of chemical weapons "finds" were later shown to be false), it is still curious why the President would issue a statement on such an important issue at such a critical time (attempting to enlist more Polish support for the occupation) without allowing his "fact-checkers" to vet the story.
"The vast majority of my [proposed] tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum."	Actually 42.6% of the initial $1.6 trillion package would go to the top 1% of earners; only 12.6% would go to the entire bottome 60%.
A single mother of 2 children supporting 2 children would experience a 100% pay cut.	Actually, such a woman would have not tax liability prior to the tax cut.
"The greatest percentage of tax relief goes to the people at the bottom end of the ladder."	The greatest proportion of the tax cut (42.6%) goes to the top 1%; here, Bush is using the "percentage" to refer to the percentage one's taxes are lowered. So a person paying $200 in income taxes who no longer has to pay federal income tax does enjoy a 100% reduction in income taxes, but is this arguably more significant than a millionaire whose $100,000 tax bill is cut by "only" 10%, or $10,000?
The estate tax would "keep family farms in the family."	The New York Times could not find a single family lost because of the estate tax.
"Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money."	This is meaningless average since the distribution was so skewed toward high-earners. Almost half of all taxpayers would received less than a $100 tax reduction. Those in the middle of the range would receive $265. 80% of taxpayers would received less than $1,083.
About arsenic: "At the very last minute my predecessor made a decision, and we pulled back his decision so that we can make a decision based upon sound science and what's realistic."	2 lies: the decision to lower arsenic levels to 10 parts per billion was made after a decade of study, not "at the very last minute"; "sound science" as represented by a 1999 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study indicated the existing standard could create a 1-in-100 cancer risk and recommended lowering levels promptly.
Kyoto had to be abandoned because of "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge" about global warming.	More a quibble than a lie, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted global temperature increases, citing unspecified human contribution of human emissions.
"America was targeted for attack [on 9/11/01] because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."	Since at least 1998, al Qaeda's motivation for attacking America was clearly its foreign policy not its domestic values. The 3 major criticisms were US support of Israel, sanctions against Iraq, and stationing of Western troops in Saudi Arabia. The attacks were vicious but far from random.
"No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft--fly US aircraft--into buildings full of innocent people."	Actually, he and his senior staff had been briefed several times on just such a scenario.
"We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th."	Actually, he resisted creating a special committee to explore what happened, complicated the committee's future at one point by appointing an alleged war criminal (Kissinger), then filed to cooperate fully with the committee until publicly shamed into doing so.
"We're not going to deploy a [missile defense] system that doesn't work."	He did; the system has never tested successfully. Initial tests were such abysmal failures that subsequent tests were classified.
His 8/01 decision to permit federal funding of stem-cell research only for projects that used existing stem-cell lines was softened by his claim that there were sixty existing lines which "allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem-cell research."	In reality there were only about 10 lines, insufficient for a promising research effort, and seriously hampering American innovation in critical areas of medical research.
Ariel Sharon is a "partner for peace."	This is a strange statement to make about a man found responsible by his own government for the 1980 Sabra-Shatilla massacres that killed up to 1,800 Palestinians, and a man who has refused to make a single concession on settlements, the security wall, or the right of return of Palestinian refugees in the interest of peace.
Yasser Arafat is "irrelevant."	Yasser Arafat, like Sharon a man with a long history of politically motivated violence, may be many things, but he quite clearly remains (through 9/03) relevant to Palestinian policy. He was elected in 1996 to lead his people, which is of course more than can be said for President Bush.
Bush supports free trade.	In March, 2002, in a move later shot down by the World Trade Organization as a violation of existing free-trade agreements, Bush hiked tariffs on steel imports. He later rescinded many of those hikes, perhaps realizing this drove up the price of everything made with steel by about a third.
"We have assembled a coalition of the willing."	The vast majority of the troops and assets for the Iraq invasion were Anglo-Saxon with token support by a number of other countries, many of whom were granted large cash infusions for signing on. "The Bush team keeps arguing that this silly alliance it cobbled together to fight the war in Iraq is multilateral and therefore the moral equivalent of the U.N. Almost every government in it is operating without the support of its people. Fighting this war without international legitimacy is hard enough, but trying to do nation-building without it could be even harder." Thomas Friedman, NYT, 3/30/03
"I pray for peace."	Said on the eve of war, this strange statement makes it seem as if he had no choice but to attack, as if war was thrust upon him. Was it outright sacrilege? Perhaps. The Pope denounced the war as a "defeat for humanity." Bishop Tutu urged President Bush to "listen to the voice of the people, for many times the voice of the people is the voice of God" to "give peace a chance."
Security Council Resolution 1441 authorized the United States to take force against Iraq.	Incorrect. 1441 set up a timetable under which inspectors would be readmitted (they were), Iraq would report the possession of any weapons of mass destruction (they did, accurately as it turned out), then Blix would return to the UNSC who in turn could authorize force in the name of the United Nations if Iraq was deemed in material breach. No individual member state was given authority to attack unilaterally, and Blix indicated on multiple occasions that the Iraqis were surprisingly cooperative.
In response to world-wide protests against his proposed Iraq invasion: "Size of protest it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group… The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case, the security of the people."	A focus group consists of a small number of representative people. When over ten million people take to the streets worldwide, that pretty much IS the people. The highest support for the war outside of the United States was 14% prior to the invasion. Since the weight of evidence before and after the conflict illustrated that Saddam Hussein never posed a threat to the "security of the people", his equating invading Iraq in the teeth of international outrage was with protecting that security was bogus.
Mr Bush "understands there are going to be people who are more comfortable doing nothing about a growing menace that could turn into a holocaust".	This implies that the most rigorous arms inspection and disarmament regimen in history (that now seemed to have been even more successful than its most ardent supporters believed) is "doing nothing" and that between here and "a holocaust" no opportunity for intervention will present itself.
"Mission Accomplished" (slogan as backdrop to President Bush's 5/1/03 speech on the Abraham Lincoln announcing the triumphant end of major hostilities).	More Americans died since the speech than before it. Saddam Hussein remains at large. The country remains short of security, water, electricity. Many international aid agencies have withdrawn.
"There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong." (Implying that Iraq could also sustain "democratic values."	From the Guardian: " In fact, it is Mr Bush who is wrong. Japanese men got the vote in 1925, not in 1945, as the president implied. And German men won the vote as far back as 1849, albeit subject to a property qualification, at a time when Mr Bush's country practised legalised slavery. Bearing in mind that America only became a full democracy in 1965, and Germany in 1946, there is a case for saying that Germans have at least as strong a democratic tradition as Americans. What's more, there is no dispute about who actually won the last German election, which is more than can be said about the means by which Mr Bush came to office. A little historical humility would do the president no harm."
"a new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region"	Conceivably an error in judgement rather than a true lie, this certainly has not (as of 9/03) been true.

41 : Bush on Bush

                             words....

 

Bushisms

"The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book [Slaughterhouse Five], which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is.  One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in."
  - Kurt Vonnegut

In the spirit of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, can we not apply this logic to the Bush administration?  Can we not calculate how many people died for every gift of unintended humor President Bush gave us? 
It's a fair calculation:  several hundred thousand dead Iraqis, several thousand dead soldiers and contractors, and almost 3,000 dead Americans on 9-11.  That is the cost of his administration in human lives. 
There was a benefit, however, a gift that keeps on a giving, a consolation prize of sorts.  All these bizarre word manglings that would make us almost pity the man were he some bumbling, mid-level manager rather than a War President, the Decider, who oversaw the killing of all those people on his watch. 
Let's settle on a round million dead.  Let's also assume there are 100 really juicy Bushisms out there floating around for our eternal amusement.   Let's further assume that the average Bush statement is 30 words.  Then Bush's enjoyment to death ratio works out to 3 words for every thousand corpses, or 333 dead, mostly dead Iraqis and Pakistanis and Afghans, for every funny Bush word. 
Some business we are all in.  Mission Accomplished.  Since so many paid so much for those malapropisms let's at least enjoy them:

"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

You teach your child to read and he or her will pass a literacy test.
  George W. Bush

We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job.
   George W. Bush 9/21/05

Laura and I really don't realize how bright our children is sometimes until we did an objective analysis.
  George W. Bush Meet the Press, NBC, 4/15/2000

My education message will resignate among all parents.
  George W. Bush   New York Post, 1/19/2000

I do not believe we've put a guilty - I mean, innocent person to death in the state of Texas.
  George W. Bush  All Things Considered, NPR, June 16, 2000 [Miller, 243] Note that Bush was never known to have spent more than half an hour on any matter, death penalty appeals included.

Well, it seems like to me "Thou shalt not kill" is pretty universal.
  George W. Bush GOP Debate, Johnston, Iowa, 1/15/00; Really?

Please… don't kill me!
  George W. Bush mocking what Karla Faye Tucker said, when asked, just before her execution, "What would you say to Governor Bush?", Talk, 9/99

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
 - George W. Bush 8/6/04

Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
- George W. Bush to FEMA Director Michael Brown

Military and Terrorism Deaths Under Republican and Democratic Presidents

5 February 2012

In 2006, I calculated that you are 19.7 times as likely to die in combat if you serve a Republican Commander-in-Chief versus and Democratic one, using data from 1980 to the present and adjusting military death rates (including terrorism and combat) for the fluctuating size of the military (which actually diluted the deaths under Reagan but increased them marginally under Bush).   Comparing this violent death rate per 100,000 military per year by presidential party of President made it clear that Republican presidents, despite all their cowboy bluster (or perhaps because of it) are far more likely to get you killed.  Some of my friends in uniform argued that that in itself is not sign of a failure, that the objective is to win wars, not only preserve lives, and there is a necessary utilitarian trade-off, but this puts Republicans on even weaker ground since it is hard to call the catastrophe that unfolded in Afghanistan and Iraq as victories for anyone, certainly not us since no critical national security issues required that level of carnage, and the Iraq war in particular was an elective, aggressive war started on false pretenses that failed to accomplish its stated objective (you cannot disarm someone of WMD he does not have). 
Tonight I decided to update those numbers, but to use a simpler methodology.   Using publicly available data reported by the Pentagon and compiled by the Congressional Research Office and icasualties.org I did a year-by-year tally of all military and terrorism deaths and created running totals and averages for the party of the president that year. 
Since 1980, 8,353 Americans have died in combat or from international terrorism under Republicans.
1,601 Americans died under Democratic presidents, most in the past few years in the two wars started by a Republican, but in fairness I tallied these deaths in the Democratic column, since arguably President Obama could have more aggressively ended the disaster in Iraq and not escalated Afghanistan.

Since there have been more years of Republican administrations during this time period, I divided the total deaths by party by the number of years in office and a remarkable difference remained:

This final chart is a bit difficult to follow, but simply takes all of the Republican years, in order, then creates a cumulative total by year, then does the same for Democrats.  This allows you to see that after 10 years of Democratic presidents, the total number of deaths was almost undetectable, but after 10 years of Republican presidents, the the better part of 1,000 Americans had died in war or terrorism (illustrating that this difference preceded 9-11 and is not simply a function of Republicans being in office longer (so having more time to have Americans die violently on their watch).  You can also use this graph to imagine - were these trends of the last 30+ years to continue, how many more Americans might be alive today if we had only Democratic administrations or if presidents of either party would read their Presidential Daily Briefs, never put troops in harm's way to look tough or win an election (Reagan sending Marines into Beirut in 1983 or Bush invading Iraq in 2003 come to mind), and have a rational foreign policy that is not so dependent on violence and the projection of violence. 

President Reagan, We Hardly Knew You... And the Tea Party Hardly Remembers What You Did and Didn't Do

Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann continues to cite Reagan and his "economic miracle" as something to be emulated.   But I believe that she, Sarah Palin, and other Tea Party members of the Government-Hating Ronald Reagan Fan Club must be talking about a different Ronald Reagan.
The Reagan I remember once said, "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes... it is his right to do so" and launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi - where 3 civil rights workers had been brutally murdered - with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink speech about state's rights, code word for the right to own slaves, later morphed into the right to segregation.  He's also the guy who coined the phrase "welfare queen" and popularized the notion - which would be witty if true - that government is not part of the problem, it is the problem, an interesting stand for someone who spent most of his life as a government employee in one form or another.  He even voted for FDR every time he could.   In fact, before he was against Democrats, he was a Democrat.  Not only was he for unions before he started to bust them, he actually was president of a large and powerful union, the Screen Actors Guild.
Bachmann perhaps didn't get the memo, but Reagan is not all that popular.  Reagan's popularity averages 52.8% (behind JFK, Clinton, Ike, LBJ, and even Bush I).  A third of Americans wanted him to resign after Iran-Contra.   Reagan said he hated taxes but raised them every year except for his first and last, and although he lowered the top marginal tax rate, it was still a "socialist" 50% by the time he left office (now Bachmann believes that raising it from 35 to 40% would be the mother of all tax hikes, unaware perhaps that Obama has the lowest income tax rates of any president going back to the 1930s, and the only real area where Reagan unquestionably was superior was in his propensity to tax.  If nudging tax rates up to Clinton levels is socialism, then Reagan must be an outright communist.  In fact, Reagan's 1982  Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act was the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.
Even the nonsense that Reagan won the Cold War is revisionist history at its worst.  4 days after the Berlin Wall fell, a USA Today poll found far more people credited Gorbachev (43%) than Reagan (14%).   The Cold War did not end with the nuclear sword, but with the negotiating pen.  START would have been mocked as "appeasement" by the Tea Party today, but it worked.
Reagan had some oddly progressive views on terrorism, calling the death of civilians in anti-terrorism operations "terrorism itself."  He was foolish enough to put American Marines in harm's way in Beirut, but wise enough to withdraw them (cut and run) shortly after our country's first introduction to suicide bombing.  Had Bachmann been president, perhaps we would still be fighting and dying there.
Reagan's adviser, Paul Bremer, took the decidedly un-Republican position that terrorist suspects should be tried in civilian courts to "delegitimize them."
And let's not forget Reagan's strong stance against torture.  In 1988, he signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which stated that torture could be used under "no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever."  A Treaty signed and ratified becomes US law, so isn't it ironic that Reagan's action criminalized the behavior of Bush and Cheney decades later?
Oh, and that whole "smaller government" thing was as much a myth under Reagan as under Bush II.  Federal spending grew by 2.5% after inflation under Reagan.  Since he did not think it necessary to pay for his expansion of the size and scope of federal government,  national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion, a far greater proportional increase than even under Bush and certainly than under President Obama   For someone who hated federal employees, he sure created a lot of them, increasing their ranks by 200,000, from 2.8 million to 3 million;  government-loving Clinton, in contrast, trimmed that number back to 2.7 million.
Reagan violated a campaign pledge to get rid of two Cabinet agencies as promised - Energy and Education - and even managed to add a new one (Veterans).
Oh, and let's not forget that the "pro Life" (meaning abortion prohibitionist) Reagan legalized abortion in California as governor in the late 1960s (we all owe him a debt of gratitude for that), never sought a constitutional ban on abortion, and appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court.
In short, Reagan (President Reagan, not the B Movie Actor Bachmann is obviously confusing him with) did some good things, but they are generally things the Tea Party hates, and the reasons they say they love him fit their faux populist pseudo-libertarianism far more than Reagan's actual record as president.  
As you run through his accomplishments, many of which should please Americans who are not on the far right, we might even like him if it weren't for his lying to Congress, selling weapons illegally to Iran (while openly supporting our Man in Baghdad Saddam Hussein (remember him?) in a bloody, US-supported war against the Great Satan du jour) then using the profits to illegally support terrorist groups in Central America, like the Contras in Nicaragua or those CIA-supported operatives in the Honduras who had a penchant for throwing nuns out of helicopters far out at sea.  If he didn't misrepresent his own actions and philosophy, demonizing the federal government while expanding it greatly, then he would not have legitimized a generation of overt "starve the beast" gubment-haters.   If he had stopped blathering about the importance of empowering this "problem" government to force a woman to carry an unintended pregnancy to term, instead pointing out to the religious right that he had neither the intent nor the ability to overturn Roe v. Wade, we would have all moved on to other topics (or they would have abandoned Reagan for someone even more right wing who would not have been electable).
I think Reagan should have stuck to his first impulse, remaining a loyal Democrat while dabbling in B Westerns.  He could have had a happy life with his second wife and none of us would be bothered if an occasional Republican would get confused as to whether he really was the Gipper or simply played one on the silver screen.

Reflections on 9-11 Ten Years Later

10 years ago I was then as now in Switzerland, although for different reasons (we live here now, but were vacationing then) perhaps the safest place on the planet, and the remoteness of the event in some ways amplified its urgency and confusion.  What on earth was happening and why?   My sister-in-law had flown back to London only the day before and she was the one who called us in the afternoon to tell us to turn on the TV, that "they were flying airplanes into buildings."  
The United States seemed like a different, more solemn place when we returned in late September, 2001.   There were flags everywhere and a sense of unity that I had never sensed before.  Being an American, something I took for granted, seemed almost palpable.  It was sad that it took such a horrific crime to remind us of what generations passing through Ellis Island knew - that the 7% of the planet lucky enough to call themselves American live in a special place, if for no other reason than that we can respond with such shock and horror to the idea that violent death can come literally and suddenly from a cloudless blue sky.  This is a reality known all too well in places from Afghanistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Palestine and Israel, from the Sudan to the Congo to Somalia.  War with its random mass killing of innocents who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time was supposed to happen There, not Here.  

The fact that we continue to feel that this fundamental, un-written rule had been violated is part of what makes our country so great on one hand but so insensitive on the other.  American Exceptionalism quickly took on an ugly, retributive, militaristic form and the horrors of that day were used to justify at least two wars and countless actions of questionable legality whose horrors made the deaths on 9-11 a rounding error in an unspeakable international body count.   I hope that a decade out, we can unlearn the false lessons of 9-11, the ones politicians used to start wars and win elections, and take time to reflect on our common humanity, on the insanity of the idea that whether you live or die, whether you have a right to an existence free from random terror whether from suicide bombers or attack helicopters or predator drones, should be a function of where you happened to be born and whether someone somewhere was mad enough about something your government did that they were willing to make your life so much collateral damage.   

I remember the Parisian headlines declaring that "We are all Americans now" or the candlelight vigils for the 9-11 victims in Tehran and the Gaza strip.  I remember our media intoning solemnly about how we would be forever changed, a truth that for the 99.8% of Americans who did not lose a loved one that day lasted for all of 6 weeks.  We quickly returned to partisan bickering, with the party in charge during the greatest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor managing to turn it into a megaphone moment then use it to justify two wars and some of the most viciously dishonest political campaigning seen in any Western country since Germany in the 1930s.  Senator Max Cleland, a man who lost 3 limbs in Vietnam, sponsor of the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security, was called an ally of al Qaeda because he did not think it was right to strip federal workers transferred to the new department of their existing benefits as Bush proposed.  Another decorated Vietnam combat veteran had his service record impugned by a well-financed campaign that introduced a new synonym for slick, dishonest, character association into our political vocabulary:  swift-boating.  You were either for Bush or against him, and he expanded the size and power of the federal government in ways the Tea Party (had it been invented yet) should by all rights have been up in arms against.  Tax cuts in a time of war, historically unprecedented, were not only continued, but deepened.   They neither paid for themselves nor stimulated the economy.  Disastrous deregulation of everything from coal mines to deep oil drillers to the financial industry (who lobbied hard to make sure that options on mortgage backed securities were not regulated as insurance products) created disaster after disaster until we now face a fiscal shortfall that those who intoned about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein's WMD are telling us is the next imminent threat they have a great idea about how to fix.  

So we are firing teachers and first responders (after the Party of 9-11 voted several times to refuse to pay for the healthcare of first responders who risked everything to search for survivors in a smoking toxic pit), closing public health clinics, defunding Planned Parenthood (97% of whose services have nothing to do with abortion and who provide life-saving pap smears and mammograms to a disproportionately indigent population) and at least 45,000 Americans every year, over 15 9-11's worth of people, die for want of health insurance in one of the world's most prosperous countries (the battle now is being shifted to coverage for cancer, which 9-11 volunteers are being denied despite the study published in Lancet showing a 19% higher risk of cancer among those working in The Pit).  But because we don't see those 45,000 dead, half a million perhaps since 9-11 itself, jumping from a smoking building, our telegenic culture has trouble mobilizing a concerted response, even though insuring our children is much less costly and involves far less sacrifice than combating politically-inspired violence, something our cash-strapped government somehow managed to find a spare trillion dollars to fight.
I was as angry, saddened, and heart-broken about the anguish of those in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on that awful day a decade ago, but our response to it has taken the lives of so many more innocents, most of whom are not commemorated or even acknowledged, many of them Americans, that my response to the memories of that day are tempered by awareness of what followed.  Until and unless we can never again allow such radical, disproportionate, and self-defeating behavior in the face of politically-inspired violence, behavior that crowds out efforts to address things that really do kill Americans in significant numbers, then we are only one attack away from the next catastrophic over-response.  The fact that no one in our government went to prison for ordering torture, indefinite detention without charges, or for illegal spying on Americans suspected of no crime, whereas Republican governors are spending billions suing that same government for forcing citizens to stop free-riding our healthcare system does not inspire hope. 

And for those who want us to believe that Greed is Good, that without further lowering of their taxes the top 1% of earners will refuse to hire anyone (or anyone in America, at least), let's remember those unionized government employees who ran into burning buildings when everyone else (including many of those in the top 1% who would later join the Tea Party and support slashing the funding for their rescuers' healthcare, pensions, and right to collective negotiation) was running out did not do what they did because of the promise of a fat bonus.  I doubt anyone in the police departments of the Port Authority or of New York City thought of their top marginal tax rate before deciding whether or not to help make sure everyone they could help had been rescued.  The America that inspired the world on the day and in the weeks since was not about getting and spending but about giving and serving.  Government service had not yet become an open term of derision in the right wing of one party, and no one cared if the bodies found in the rubble were Democrats, Republicans, independents, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or agnostic.  We were all Americans and when we are at our best it is not about greed or materialism.   We are better than that and if we hold the ideals of sacrifice and shared purpose, of not leaving anyone behind to die whether in a burning building or for want of healthcare, up as the model of what we can be, then there might just be hope for us all.

Karl Rove Courage and Consequences: my book review; "If you look for honesty, you might as well be blind..." - Billy Joel

I read this book looking for some insight into what went wrong, or at least some explanation or sense of compassion.  I was not expecting an apology - I have never heard Rove apologize for anything or even admit he did anything wrong  - but at least some attempt to explain why policy decisions that may have seemed a good idea at the time turned out so catastrophically.   Perhaps he could help future generations learn from his and his boss's biggest blunders.   After all, sometimes people who came across as arrogant and unfeeling in real time write memoirs that reflect more insight and sensitivity than they could show at the time events were unfolding.

But not Karl Rove. Few of the rationalizations and excuses in this book are new.  Most were Fox News talking points repeated with the mind-numbing discipline Republicans are famous for.  Most have been discredited, but they are repeated here.   Perhaps Rove realizes that if he were to admit those talking points were wrong, he would have to admit when he was wrong, and that would create a time line that would make it clear he was lying then and he is lying now.  

Far from contrite, Rove comes across as almost triumphant, lashing out at his critics instead of addressing the merit of their criticism.  In other words, Rove's book is classic Rove.  

"Because of his success, Rove has been attacked," the book's blurb proclaims.  It wasn't his divisive, unethical tactics, from playing on racial prejudice to torpedo the Republican primary frontrunner McCain in South Carolina in 2000 to homophobia in the 2004 election to the vicious attacks on a decorated Vietnam combat veteran's service record.   And it wasn't his role in maliciously outing a covert CIA operative and destroying her career in the hopes of getting back at her husband who dared to state the obvious:  that President Bush was lying when he claimed that Saddam Hussein had recently sought to obtain uranium from Africa.  (According to Rove (see below) Wilson didn't even say this!)  No, we who find Rove's tactics repulsive, dishonest, and deeply injurious to the fabric of our democracy just attack him because he is successful.  Really. 

In his Prologue, Rove has the audacity to claim that he faced "moments of peril, enormous stress, and danger," citing the legal inconvenience Scooter Libby faced when he was convicted of obstruction of justice and lying in the investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame.  I think any soldier who served in harm's way, or any of the hundreds of thousands of civilian killed by the Iraq invasion Rove helped champion, shill, and spin, could give him a lesson on what real peril, stress, and danger look like.  This sentence reflects the arrogance of Mr. Rove equating his legal jeopardy with the very real physical danger those in war face every day.   Of course, Mr. Rove did not serve in the military, so he would have no way of appreciating how insulting and self-serving this comparison is.  

He spends much of the book protesting his innocence about charges against him, and there are many, some even I have not heard of.  On page 62, he goes into detail about the "myth" that he spurred the FBI to investigage Democratic officeholders in Texas. 

He manages to prove his critics right on page 64 in responding to the observation that a "Rovian style" of political campaigning is "fear-based, smear-based, anything goes."   Instead of responding to whether these charges have merit, he instead uses voters as human shields, equating criticism of him with criticism of "the electorate", implying they are "stupid, easily misled by smashmouth TV ads, dirty tricks," etc.   If Karl Rove did not believe these tactics worked, then why on earth has he made a career using them?   On this single page, he managed to do what he has done his entire political life:  take a criticism of a specific behavior (the use of attack ads that play on people's fears of homosexual marriage or terrorism, let's say), twist it into a global and noble issue (this is not an attack on Rove's behavior but on the electorate), then create a strawman argument that was never made (those who criticize me must be calling the electorate stupid).  It's brilliant, just like portraying serious questions about whether Bush deserted his National Guard unit as an attack on all National Guard soldiers everywhere.  People were not criticizing Bush because he served in the National Guard but because he didn't, or at least did not complete his service and voters had a right to know why not.  Instead, thanks to "change the subject" Rove, we heard a shameful attack on a wounded Vietnam veteran which managed to twist Senator John Kerry's service records into something sinister (did he deserve 3 Purple Hearts or 2?).  It was masterful distraction, making us all think about something other than the fact that we might have a Commander-in-Chief who not only was not in Vietnam but for some reason or other failed to complete his cushy stateside billet in the Texas Air National Guard. 

Even his redefinition of what is a Rovian style of campaigning is creepy and undemocratic.  Yes, of course politicians want to win elections, but a campaign should be about ideals that matter to people, not finely targeted micro-advertising that slices Americans into demographic wedges that can be sold a war or a ban on gay marriage the same way the could be sold a deodorant or car.   I don't want a candidate who figures out that gun-owning churchgoers who shop at Walmart and live in Northern Virginia are far more likely to respond to a political advertisement that uses wolves and scary music than one that uses flags and an upbeat cadence, let's say.   I want a candidate with a set of core principles presented consistently and honestly, regardless of what targeted polling says will be popular.  

Rove writes about the importance of "big ideas" but what "big ideas" were reflected in the parallel push to make sure anti-gay marriage initiatives were on many voters' minds in 2004?   Or the systematic destruction of Senator Kerry's war record, a campaign that clearly was successful enough to make Americans choose the American who had never been in Vietnam over the one who had served with honor and distinction.  "Attack their strength" is the hallmark of that particular character assassination and it had no more to do with lofty ideals than the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush had anything to do with Truth. 

His defense of President Bush's decision to engage in torture - a decision Rove clearly and wisely (for self-preservation reasons) states occurred "unbeknownst to me at the time" (p. 295) - is once again put through the twisted lens of politics.  Those who recognize that drowning someone (there is no simulated about it), a technique invented by the Spanish Inquisition, who called it water torture  (I would posit they were in a position to know) are not all "Democrats" trying to "score points" as he alleges, something he calls "reprehensible and dangerous."  I would imagine the torture itself would be far more "reprehensible and dangerous" but then again I am not Karl Rove.  He does not even address whether Democratic critics have merit, instead shifting the argument to one of silence passing as assent.  Is it possible that  Democrats and Republicans who were briefed about these torture techniques were both wrong?  Of course.  There is no exception in the Torture Protocols that have been signed into United States law that mentions anything about party affiliation, national security, or the popularity of the proposed torture.  In fact, even a unanimous Congressional Resolution to authorize torture would be illegal and subject the government to a potential war crimes tribunal.  There are certain things a government simply is never empowered to do, and torture is one of them.  Period. 

Rove's morality is more relativistic and opportunistic.  He gropes for narrow legalistic technicalities rather than first principles and his own conscience to defend the use of torture.  Torture is prohibited by, among other things, the Geneva Conventions, but, he assures us, the Geneva Conventions do not apply to "international terrorist attacks" not "civil wars."  By this definition, Hitler's torture of captured partisans (although it predated some of the Conventions since written) would have been OK, since he called those partisans international terrorists (and some indeed were).    Occupied France was not engaged in a "civil war" so Germany, by Rove's logic, should have been free to torture away.  I don't buy that for a minute and neither should he. 

He states falsely that "broader Geneva protections were meant to apply only to signatory nations, which means they don't apply to al Qaeda."  Never mind the fact that al Qaeda is a group, not a nation, and that those tortured had been caught in countries that were signatories to the Geneva Conventions, this statement is both dangerous and false.  ALL people, combatants and noncombatants are covered by the Geneva Conventions that demand a minimum level of humanity in how we treat those people caught in a war zone, even those we believe are trying to do us harm (that's why it's called a war zone).  WE signed the Geneva Conventions, we must therefore follow them.   We cannot grab someone, inquire about his nationality, consult our attorneys, then kill or torture him based on a legalistic quibble.  

We do not have a right to torture people because we are scared, angry, or our lawyers tell us we won't get in trouble if we do.   If lawyers for the torturing government have a right to give their own government the right to torture, no international agreement against torture would not be worth the paper it is written on (something that Rove should have considered when he engaged in this legal sophistry).  

It is shocking and at some level chilling to read him defend the use of water torture because "this wasn't a settled issue of law when President Bush put us on a war footing and still isn't today."  Really?   Mr. Rove must be unaware - surprising for someone who describes himself as a bookish nerd - that a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, was charged by the United States government (the same one Rove served) with war crimes for waterboarding and sentenced to 15 years' hard labor.  How can something that was a war crime in 1947 not be "a settled issue of law" in 2002?  There were no rulings since then that overturned or challenged that conviction, and indeed American troops in Vietnam were investigated for allegedly engaging in this form of torture.  Does Rove believe those investigators were wasting their time?  

At any rate, this legalism - something the Republicans attacked Clinton for in his Whitewater investigation defense - shows an appalling lack of morality.  Must we consult with attorneys before deciding if an action is just?  Does neither Bush nor Rove have any moral qualms about torturing other human beings, regardless of circumstances?   His, "well it wasn't technically illegal" argument - even though patently untrue - sounds like the sort of adolescent excuse a teenager would give for joy-riding and wrecking the family car  ("well, you didn't technically say I couldn't, so I assumed I could").  

But it is on the issue of Iraq that Rove seemed to do a real cut-and-paste job from 2002.   Nothing in his narrative reflects what has been established since and what we actually know he knew then.  Rove grossly misrepresents the case for war.  On page 304, he states that Saddam Hussein had not allowed "international inspectors to verify and oversee the process" of disarmament.  This is a flat-out lie.  At the time Bush ordered the invasion, as Rove should know full well, international inspectors had been re-admitted to the country and were busy continuing where they left off following their ejection much earlier (nuclear arms inspectors, the ones we worry most about, were never kicked out of the country, and the IAEA was operating continuously).   Perhaps I should correct myself because the weapons inspectors were ultimately kicked out of Iraq although not by Saddam Hussein, but by George W. Bush, who ordered them out so he could invade.  Technically, he had no legal authority to do so (the inspectors were working for the United Nations and no resolution gave Bush that power). 

Given that Saddam Hussein had no WMD program, how on earth does Rove still insist that Iraq was not "comply[ing] with the world's just demands."  And once again, notice the language:  not the United States demands, but the world's.   This grandiosity belies the fact that vast majorities in every country except 2 (Israel and the United States) opposed our invasion, the UN Security Council to whom Bush had made his case rejected it, and Kofi Annan stated that the war was "illegal."  If Saddam Hussein posed such a threat, why did none of his neighbors, who arguably would have the most to lose if he were, support the invasion?   For Rove to make this case in 2003 was irresponsible.  For him to repeat it years later is breath-taking in its audacity.  A lie repeated often enough might be believed in the controlled environment of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, but does Rove not understand that a schoolchild with an Internet connection and a pulse can fact check these 2002 sound bites?   

After all of this legalistic sophistry, Rove later states that Bush "was a man of his word" (p. 304).  To his credit, he is not alleging that Bush was honest, only that he was delivering on his long-stated, pre-9/11 threat to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power.  

Rove states that "the information Wilson returned with actually bolstered the case that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger" (p. 345).  I met Ambassador Wilson, heard him speak in detail about this matter, and read his book; the case against Bush he made was compelling, methodical, and painstaking.  If Wilson's charges were without merit, as Rove now wants us to believe, or even bolstered Bush's allegations, why then did Bush remove them from a speech and publicly express regret about having used them in another?  Was Bush wrong when he said he was wrong or does Karl Rove just hope that those of us who lived through those events forgot about them?  And if Wilson's charges bolstered Bush's case for war, why did Rove go after his wife so savagely?   None of this makes any sense.  If Rove can lie so blatantly about what Ambassador Wilson did not find in Africa, why should we believe him when he tells us anything else?  

I frankly do not trust Karl Rove.  I believe he has done more damage to our Republic than Osama bin Laden.   Not directly through driving planes into buildings, but indirectly through manipulating, cunning, and deceit.  Buildings can be rebuilt, victims can be buried, and families can heal.  We can and should hunt down those responsible for the almost 3,000 killed on 9-11, but who will hold those accountable for the higher number of Americans killed in our invasion and occupation of Iraq or the hundreds of thousands innocents killed as a result of Rove's successful selling of the war?    Who can put the torture genie back into the bottle and cross back over that line that Bush and Rove crossed because their lawyers said they wouldn't get in trouble if they did?  Who will restore the credibility and trust in America that it will never go it alone, violating the will of the international community while claiming to act on its behalf?   

And closer to home, how will political campaigns ever again be about ideals, values, and honestly presented choices instead of about which candidate you think is most likely to let gay terrorists marry?  Rove did not invent the attack ad, but he elevated it to an art form, a pornography of hate, a titillating but ultimately deeply dishonest portrayal of one's opponent as something evil, sinister, and dangerous.   We should have been talking about the best way to prevent another 9-11 or whether tax cuts justified by a surplus really made sense once that surplus disappeared.  Instead we had commercials with wolves and scary music and promises that an elected Democrat was a virtual guarantee of another 9-11.  

I still remember seeing the Rovian ads against Senator Max Cleland, a man who lost 3 limbs in Vietnam during the Battle of Khe Sanh, morphing his image into that of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.  I laughed and shook my head.  That would never work.   But I was wrong and Karl Rove was right:  attack ads reducing a complex idea - should the newly formed Department of Homeland Security federal employees have the same rights and benefits of other federal workers? - into a vicious smear - Max Cleland is an ally of Osama bin Laden because his position on this staffing differs from Bush's.  

Invading Iraq may not have been Rove's idea, but without his slick marketing campaign, does anyone really believe 60% of Americans would have supported something so transparently and mind-numbingly disastrous and counter-productive?  At the time we were hunting for al Qaeda and needed all the resources we could (including the Arab linguists fired by a homophobic Bush administration intent on appeasing religious fundamentalists at home even if it compromised our ability to hunt for religious fundamentalists abroad).  The rest of the world was outraged at what we seemed intent on doing, but the rest of the world did not have Karl Rove to slice their demographics and find out what buttons could be pushed to get otherwise reasonable, compassionate people to be scared enough or angry enough or confused enough to launch a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and triggered a civil war.  

History has not been kind to Mr. Rove or to the man he worked for.   When Bush left office, he managed to set a record for the highest disapproval rating of any President in American history, topping even Jimmy Carter and a post-Watergate Nixon.   As Rove admits, his name has become an adjective, a synonym for dirty campaigns that play to people's basest instincts.   Even his citing of  "Libya's Gaddafi" (p. 304) as proof of the wisdom of invading Iraq (the Libyan dictator and admitted terrorist was given lucrative oil contracts and brought in out of the diplomatic cold in exchange for promising never to develop a nuclear program he couldn't develop anyway) must be deeply embarrassing now.  

But of course to be embarrassed, one must have self-awareness, decency, and a capacity for shame.  If you are looking for evidence in those in the Karl Rove as presented in this book, you will be sadly disappointed.  

Why a Faith-Based Foreign Policy is So Dangerous

When Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell recently demonstrated unawareness of the fact that the First Amendment mandates separation of church and state it illustrates how far public discourse has sunk that such a person, long on platitudes about her love of the Constitution in theory but short on any evidence that she has actually read it, could have a real shot at public office.  Were it not for the fundamentalism of Palin, who no doubt found the fundamentalism of O'Donnell endearing, would such a candidate be viable?

Religious fanaticism is dangerous precisely because it blinds us to the obvious.  It makes the ignorance of an O'Donnell or Bush or Palin forgivable in the eyes of the true believers who, once they are in power, seem to have a dangerous propensity to promote a faith-based foreign policy.  The effects of such a policy are lethal. 

It's ironic that Jesus was the ultimate pacifist.  He even told his followers to put away their weapons when the Romans came to arrest him; he apparently didn't even believe in violence in self-defense which is a more extreme pacifism than I would personally advocate. 

So how is it that so many of his believers say Jesus told them to start various and sundry wars throughout the ages?  I think they are lying or delusional or both but the point is that overtly religious people can justify the most horrific atrocities in the name of religion which is why it is so divisive and dangerous when it enters the public arena.  As Voltaire said, convince people to believe absurdities and you can get them to commit atrocities.
Bush told Chirac (and Chirac told the world) that Bush told him Jesus told him to invade Iraq.  Many of  Bush's public pronouncements implied or overtly stated that he was acting on behalf of God (a much more self-confident position than Lincoln, who reminded his audiences that the South prayed to the same god and they could not both be right and that this awareness should humble them, not embolden them).   He arrogantly answered a debate question about how exactly Jesus provided political and philosophical guidance (a fair question since many people who claim the same thing interpret that guidance in radically different ways) by stating basically if you weren't a member of the Jesus club, you could never understand.  This is unacceptable in a democracy; we have a right to know who he was really talking to because it is unlikely an omniscient deity would have told him to seize weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, all at such horrific loss of innocent life.
There are several examples of prominent Army commanders appearing at churches in uniform stating that their god was bigger and badder than "their" god (implying that the Allah of the Islamic faith was different than the Yahweh of the Bible, something many Muslims might take issue with).   An American Arms manufacturer inscribed religious sayings (all Christian) on American armaments shipped to Iraq.  Evangelical "end-of-times" Christians reflexively support Israel and the war in Iraq (which I still refer to in present tense because a draw down of combat troops does not a war end) because it might usher in the rebuilding and destruction of the Temple and hence the rapture.   The United States Air Force Academy had its evangelical Christian scandal. The West's support of Israel, starting before the state was created, is rooted in religious prejudice; Balfour admitted that the declaration bearing his name granting rights to 5% of Palestine that was Jewish at the time (1917) that were not granted to the 95% who were not was based in the fact that as a Protestant he felt a kinship to Jews he did not feel to Muslims.  The religious justification of the illegal settlement activity in the West Bank could not be more obvious; a single line in Genesis has been responsible for so much misery.  Although Zionism (which began here in Switzerland (in Basel) in the late 19th Century) started as a secular movement led by assimilated European Jews, it has recently become much more overtly religious, and the changing demographics of Israel (with secular Jews having far fewer children on average than the conservative and orthodox) are changing the political landscape. 
One can argue for or against the invasion of Iraq or for or against support of the Israeli right wing, but when religion and admitted religious bias is used as a justification for these policies we should find that frightening.  Good things have not followed from faith-based foreign or domestic policies in the past.  I do not believe there is any empirical evidence that repeatedly stating that you are a believer and everyone else an infidel endows you with any unique understanding of the world.  There is plenty of evidence such religiosity may  inhibit your understanding of the world since if you believe a deity will guide your hand, you don't need to prepare as hard or at all, do you?  if someone will whisper the answers in your ear come test time, you need not read the book or study.  And if you're convinced that god chooses goodies and baddies at conception, that some he hates, others he has chosen, most he will punish forever, then you don't have to worry about all those infidels downrange, do you? 
I do think Bush's confidence that his morning prayers endowed him with a certain wisdom made him less likely to read such profane, earthly things such as his Presidential Daily Briefs in August, 2001, warning of a likely al Qaeda attempt to hijack airplanes.   There is no evidence he actually read these intelligence reports, prepared at great taxpayer expense, and certainly none that he responded to them.   The FAA was never put on high alert or even told of the contents, nor were any of the airlines.   None of the pilots on 9-11 had that knowledge.  The only hijacked plane that was aware of information that Bush could have disseminated was not successfully turned into a cruise missile, most likely as a result of that information. 
Afghanistan is admittedly more complicated, but were it not for the religious fervor that created the Taliban, and their decision (based again on religion) to admit and harbor Arab fundamentalists including Osama bin Laden, we would not have troops on the ground there.  After all, the Taliban did not attack us on 9-11, al Qaeda did, so the moral justification of our presence in Afghanistan, although infinitely greater than in Iraq, is indirect.   Were we truly at war with al Qaeda (which I believe we are) then we should be in Pakistan, but that country is still blocking the flow of supplies into Afghanistan because of outrage over our violation of their sovereignty and our killing of some Pakistani soldiers.  At any rate, I don't think invading and occupying countries is a particularly effective means of fighting terrorism (although it is a wonderful strategy for encouraging it, or creating it in the first place - 100% of suicide bombing campaigns are launched in response to military occupation).  
You don't fight religious fundamentalism with religious fundamentalism or intolerance with intolerance (well, you can try, and the last decade has shown the results).  I think you have to stand up to the religious bullies everywhere and if you don't do it in your own ranks, you will never have moral credibility when pointing the finger in other cultures.  But morality aside, religious fanaticism does not work.  You can't use prayer beads to find weapons of mass destruction anymore than you can use a divining rod to find water or patterns in the stars to predict the stock market.  The fact that many people fervently believe such things does not make them true. 
Religious fundamentalism led to the deaths of thousands in lower Manhattan 9 years ago and hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine.  The people who founded our country would not have been surprised at the lethal consequences of so much unchecked religious fervor which is why they tried to protect us from it by separating it from government.  Too bad Christine O'Donnell didn't take the time to read the documents Madison, Jefferson, and Adams worked so hard to hammer out.  

Most People Are Just Doing What Is In Front of Them: We Need to Make Sure What is In Front of Them Shapes Good Behavior and Discourages Harmful Actions

We teach the medical students and residents that 1-3% of males and about 1% of females are sociopaths, but this number is probably a bit low. I personally think that all of us are capable of doing some pretty horrific things not because we lack empathy but because our understanding of the impact of our actions is far too regional. I remember seeing pictures of the German guards at Auschwitz celebrating Christmas with their smiling families and to me that was most chilling of all, the sheer normalcy of it all, the way we can compartmentalize killing and go home and help our kids with their homework or tuck them into bed.
We can push a button or cast a vote that starts a war because we do not fully imagine the suffering of the human beings downrange. Most people, if confronted with the true horrors of war, would oppose it, which is why most Europeans opposed our invasion of Iraq (13% was the largest minority in support) but a majority of Americans supported it. The difference was coverage and this sense of Otherness. If it was our family accidentally shot up in a minivan approaching a checkpoint on the way to school, most of us would do whatever it takes to stop the war. I still hear decent, otherwise rational people, shrugging their shoulders and saying that it is better to fight terrorists "over there" than to fight them "here." In a nutshell (besides the lunacy of believing there is a Law of Conservation of Terrorism) this summarizes what is wrong with our way of viewing other members of our species. We have empathy in the same way mafia families have empathy for their friends and family. Our task is to broaden that empathy to people we have never met.
In financial matters, most people are trying to keep their jobs and do whatever it takes to meet their quotas, please their boss, generate revenue. No one in private industry has an incentive to see the whole picture. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate agents, and speculators are not all evil; they are simply responding to market forces that pay them based on volume of deals done. Everyone sees their little piece of the playing field; there is no effective referee in the game thanks to Bush-era deregulation, so the system can do some pretty strange and destructive things. It can even blow up from time to time.
I do think a handful of people at the top, CEOs who pay themselves hundreds of millions of dollars, are entitled, narcissistic sociopaths, but the vast majority of people in the food chain are just doing what is in front of them. I think our job as progressives is to make sure that what is in front of them - the rewards and punishments that shape and reinforce behavior - encourage more things that are societally beneficial and fewer that are harmful. Creative rules that shape good behavior and gives people a financial reward for doing right is the way to go, such as tax credits to companies whose ratio of CEO pay to median employee compensation stays below some obscene level, or a progressive income tax (what an idea) that makes obscene pay packages not worth the haggling because most of it will get shared with the least among us anyway. Or giving bankers who work out new terms with borrowers who are in trouble a strong financial incentive for doing so.
One thing we don't need is greed-gone-wild, government-off-our-back-chanting legislators who spend hundreds of millions to get in control of a government they philosophically do not believe in.

Ron Paul to Sunshine Patriots: Stop Your Demagogy About The NYC Mosque! | Ron Paul .com

Excellent article by Ron Paul, someone I rarely agree with:

The claim is that we are in the Middle East to protect our liberties is misleading. To continue this charade, millions of Muslims are indicted and we are obligated to rescue them from their religious and political leaders. And, we're supposed to believe that abusing our liberties here at home and pursuing unconstitutional wars overseas will solve our problems.

The nineteen suicide bombers didn't come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran. Fifteen came from our ally Saudi Arabia, a country that harbors strong American resentment, yet we invade and occupy Iraq where no al Qaeda existed prior to 9/11.