http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012407A.shtml
The Tiniest President
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Wednesday 24 January 2007
George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday
night, and nobody gave a damn.
There was, to be sure, keen public interest directed at Bush's audience
for the speech, mostly focused on the woman sitting behind and above him.
For the first time in history, the Sergeant-at-Arms announced the arrival of
a president before Congress by addressing "Madame Speaker." The mere
presence of Nancy Pelosi in that high place, along with the majority crowd
of Democrats arrayed across the floor below, at least partially explained
the lemon-pucker grimace worn by Vice President Cheney throughout the
evening.
The rest of the explanation rolled across the news networks hours before
the speech even began: "Attorney Theodore Wells, in the opening statements
of I. Lewis Libby's perjury trial," reported the UK Guardian on Tuesday
afternoon, "said Libby went to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 and
complained that the White House was subtly blaming him for leaking Valerie
Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak. 'They're trying to set me up.
They want me to be the sacrificial lamb,' Wells said, recalling the
conversation between Libby and Cheney. 'I will not be sacrificed so Karl
Rove can be protected.'"
Thus blows a hard wind toward this house of cards constructed by the
Bush administration. Patrick Fitzgerald is prosecuting Libby in the perjury
trial resulting from the Plame CIA leak case, which involves a plot to
discredit Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Libby's lawyers, in
rebuttal, have painted their client as a patsy, the one expected to take a
fall for Cheney and Karl Rove. Neither avenue of this courtroom discourse
bodes well for these two men.
Interestingly enough, it was an earlier State of the Union address
delivered by Bush that set all the Libby-Cheney-Rove mayhem in motion, an
address that also explains why almost nobody on the planet could summon the
will to care a whit about what Bush had to say last night.
In January of 2003, Bush stood before the assembled Congress and the
American people to deliver another State of the Union address. In that
speech, he claimed that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax,
38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which equals one million pounds)
of sarin, mustard and VX gas, almost 30,000 munitions to deliver the stuff,
mobile biological weapons labs, connections to terrorism and the 9/11
attacks, and uranium from Niger for use in a "robust" nuclear weapons
program.
This was Bush's final case for the invasion of Iraq, which was
subsequently undertaken two months later. That invasion, the continuing
occupation, the resulting civil war, the ever-growing list of dead United
States soldiers - 3,060 killed to date, with 29 of those having come since
the weekend - and the utter absence of the weapons Bush claimed were in
Iraq, are the main reasons why Tuesday's address was, for much of the
country, little more than an exercise in enunciated hot air.
It was one of those claims - the uranium from Niger for use in Iraq's
robust nuclear weapons program, delivered by those now-infamous sixteen
words - that landed Libby in hot water, and which is why Mr. Cheney is
suddenly looking very much like a wing-clipped quail himself. Ambassador
Wilson, having traveled to Niger to investigate the Iraq-uranium story and
found no basis for it, was astonished to hear that line in 2003. His July
2004 editorial in the New York Times, which eviscerated the uranium
accusation, motivated the White House to try to torpedo his credibility.
They decided to do this by exposing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a
deep-cover CIA agent, hoping somehow to paint Wilson as nothing more than an
inept bureaucrat who got the Niger gig through wifely nepotism, and
therefore not to be believed. When Wilson's accusations proved true, when
neither uranium nor anything "robust" was found in Iraq, and when it was
revealed that Plame was an NOC (Non-Official Cover) whose job it was to
track down illicit WMD, the excrement began flying into the fan. It has been
spraying ever since.
This was the remarkable background for Tuesday's address, a speech that
was, in the end, an empty exercise. If a measure were needed to gauge Bush's
crumbling standing, it could be found in the overwhelming obsequiousness
with which he greeted the new Democratic majority, and in his craven pleas
for bipartisanship. We got, as well, the usual litany of reasons for
continuing and expanding the massacre unleashed by his generational
catastrophe in Iraq. The bloody shirt of 9/11 was waved once again. Sabres
were rattled against Iran and Syria, again. The word "nukular" made its
annual appearance. The word "Katrina" was nowhere to be found.
A few economic and domestic agenda items made a desultory showing before
fluttering limply to the plushly-carpeted floor, each failing utterly to
accomplish Bush's most desired goal: to divert the conversation away from
his manifest and myriad failures. It was, weirdly enough, very much like a
Bill Clinton address from the 1990s. Balancing the budget, saving Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, health insurance, the environment,
global warming, alternative energy sources ... and if you believe he meant
any of it, there are bridges for sale all across the country you should
check out.
This was a tiny, tepid performance by a tiny man who is shrinking, even
now, before our very eyes. Let all the gods that are or ever were be thanked
that he only has one more speech to go before history swallows him, before
this nation and the world is faced with the grueling challenge of cleaning
up all the bloody messes he has made.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling
author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know
and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. His newest book, House of Ill Repute:
Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation, will be
available this winter from PoliPointPress.
***
----- Original Message -----
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Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 9:26 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR2007012
401957.html
Washington Post
Large Rally Planned Saturday on Mall
Organizers Oppose Increase in Troops and Plan to Seek Withdrawal
Deadline
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 25, 2007; B06
Tens of thousands of peace advocates from across the country are
expected in Washington on Saturday for an anti-war rally that could be
among the biggest since the war in Iraq began, organizers said
yesterday.
They said the rally on the Mall, followed by a march near the Capitol,
will target President Bush's intention to send more troops to the Iraq
war.
The president's policy is "fight, war, occupation, death, destruction,
spend our tax dollars," Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United
for Peace and Justice, the umbrella group that is one of the main
organizers of Saturday's events, said at a media briefing.
Citing what she called "this devastating debacle of lies and horror,"
Cagan said: "The people of this country have had it. This Saturday,
January 27, on the heels of the Bush administration's decision to send
another 21,000 U.S. troops into Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people
from all across this country will come to this capital city to make it
clear."
The marchers are calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq and the
beginning of "an orderly, speedy and safe" withdrawal of troops, said
Hani Khalil, a spokesman for the group. They want dates announced for
the start of troop withdrawal as well as a specific deadline for its
completion, he added.
United for Peace and Justice describes itself as a coalition of 1,400
local and national organizations. Among them are the National
Organization for Women, United Church of Christ, the American Friends
Service Committee, True Majority, Military Families Speak Out, Iraq
Veterans Against the War, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli
Occupation, CodePink, MoveOn.org, and September 11th Families for
Peaceful Tomorrows.
Among the featured speakers will be Vietnam War-era protester Jane
Fonda, according to the organizers. Others include actors Danny Glover,
Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson,
and Carlos Arredondo, who in 2004 set himself on fire after learning of
the death in Iraq of his Marine Corps son, Alexander.
The rally is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. at the east end of the Mall,
at Third Street and Madison Drive NW, the organizers said. The march is
to kick off at 1 p.m.
The route and march permits were being finalized yesterday, the
National Park Service said. Cagan said organizers want to march from
the Mall north on Louisiana Avenue to Union Station, then south on
Delaware Avenue to the Capitol.
The march comes after several large Iraq war protests, which date to
before the March 2003 invasion. One of the biggest was held Sept. 25,
2005, and was billed as the largest since the war's start. Organizers
at the time claimed a turnout of 300,000, while police pegged the
number at about half that.
Cagan declined yesterday to predict a Saturday turnout. "We learned a
long time ago not to put out numbers," she said. "There are many
variables, especially in the winter."
An anti-war protest described as the largest since the Vietnam War drew
several hundred thousand Jan. 18, 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, in
subfreezing Washington weather. The high temperature reported that day
was in the mid-20s.
Saturday's weather should be sunny, with highs in the low 50s,
according to the National Weather Service.
Fonda, 69, an actress, author and peace activist who was vilified
during the Vietnam War for making an appearance in Hanoi on a North
Vietnamese gun emplacement, has previously avoided attending anti-Iraq
war functions.
"I realized that I would provide too much of a distraction for the
right-wing media," she told the San Jose Mercury News last year. "I
didn't want to take away from what's happening in the movement."
Cagan, the protest organizer, said Fonda was traveling yesterday and
was unavailable for an interview, but "Jane Fonda is definitely coming.
She is speaking at the rally and marching in the lead contingent."
Fonda is scheduled to be joined at the rally podium by Bob Watada, 67,
of Honolulu, a retired executive with the state of Hawaii whose Army
officer son, Ehren, is to be court-martialed next month for refusing to
deploy to Iraq.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the invasion and occupation of Iraq
is wholly unwarranted," Bob Watada said in a telephone interview. "The
Iraqi people have done absolutely nothing to the United States. They've
done nothing to deserve the massacre and the pummeling they're getting
. . . the plunder, the torture, the rape, the murder of innocent
people. It's got to stop."
Watada's son, a 28-year-old Army lieutenant based at Fort Lewis, Wash.,
"refused to deploy to Iraq after he found out that the president had
lied to the country, lied to the military, about there being weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq," the elder Watada said.
Watada said his son refused to get on a deployment plane in June and
spoke out against the war. The younger Watada has been charged with
"missing a movement" and conduct unbecoming an officer, his father
said.
Watada said he plans to participate fully in Saturday's rally and
march. "I got my plane tickets and hotel reservations, and I'll be
there," he said.
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