A Gentleman’s view.

We’ll find out just how Grand the ‘Ole Party really is.

If in the spirit of baseball’s upcoming season vernacular, this was the top of the ninth and the visiting team being shut out until now, is down 5 runs, the Republican Party has just struck out with sending up Palin in leadoff, Jindal attempting to make contact, and the man of “Steele” making some attempt to get on base for whoever they can come up with for the cleanup spot. To date, choices this Party has made when selecting equality first, the black U.S. Secretary of State: Colin Powell, first black female Secretary of State: Condoleezza Rice, first black Republican Party Chairman: Michael Steele, there will most likely be no claims from the black masses that they were the best we have to offer, and in many cases, maybe some shame. The concept of being the party of the “big tent” is still not one of success for the Republicans, and the strange rants of one black in particular; Alan Keys claiming that the President is an illegal alien communist, bent on destroying America, is not helping at all.

First, in the spirit of understanding the different mindsets that exist between cultures, I will explain my thinking about some of the failures with their selections that personally, I feel they represent as a major defective flaw as a party when selecting leaders period. Empathy and caring about others. This is always primarily about themselves and the seemingly connective moments with a theme that can be manipulated to their particular interests while gaining them power, position or privilege. How else can you explain the first black Secretary of State testifying and stating a lie to all of the participating members of the United Nations and in particular, to the United Nations Security Council Members. Those who were responsible for either not voting on the resolution, looking the other way by not opposing the resolution, or actually voting for the resolution that gave the United States of America the perceived permission to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq. Western civilization was under threat of a nuclear bomb from Saddam Hussein. Knowing the information given as evidence could not hold up in court of law to prosecute, and having served in various war capacities, very well aware of the price paid. Secondly, the first female black to be Secretary of State, willingly accepts the job to carry on the torch for this aggressive position of the use of our country military and resources, a woman did this. Third and finally, we end up with black Grand ‘Ole Party Chairman who dismisses allowing the failure of the banking and auto industries to take place, allowing the housing market to collapse while making massive profits from the supported legislation that created the derivatives that brought it down, then have the audacity to include with this backhand, the billions in lost treasury “fighting terror” with the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, also being dismissive of the lives of over four thousand of our American “homies” we lost using the ultimate in hip hop dissing, “My Bad!”

So, the dirty game of politics is always about maneuvering as one would on a chess board, but more cutthroat. It is always about either what move can I make that will at least give me the appearance that I think I can sell to my choice of constituents as being mostly in their best interests, whether of the moment or of their perceived reality. This can be both fortunate to the politician and their followers if there is actually an issue running concurrent to our mutual gain. Whether benefitting the whole community or just a particular segment, hopefully more than just ourselves as that may come across as an impropriety. This appeared to be the case in the choices of each: Palin, Jindal, and Steele. After Bush, the Grand ‘Ole Party started this with the selection of Governor Sarah Palin with the base assumption this would siphon off a good portion of the disgruntled supporters of former Senator Hillary Clinton’s Pantsuit Army. The former New York State Senator may had gotten a late start in her life, but by this time, had become a very skilled politician and earned her army’s support over a long period of almost two years on the campaign trail for one thing, and had developed a more polished national political skill set in the Senate for another. Then, we as a nation, watched her growth during the campaign, which was pretty tough this time around. They sought to capture the genuine resentment that existed from her lost and what her victory might have been for them.

The problem was their choice to accomplish this mission, Governor Sara Palin was apparently not ready for her 15 minutes when the opportunity came her way. The deer in the headlights interview with Katie Couric of CBS News was a terrible start, the mean-spirited attack dog rhetoric at her campaign rallies’ may have worked for a small base, but not with today’s progressives, a major lack of curiosity as a potential continuation of mindset of George W. Bush, then aligning herself with an even more selective segment of our society and adopting the mantra of “Real Americans”, as though many of the rest of us were not. As though it would okay to just be an representative of all “White Americans”, or all “Black Americans”, or all “Asian Americans” or just all “Hispanic Americans”. Need I say more? Then the party follows this chaos up with the selection of Michael Steele as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, but no one falls as far as fast as one major prospect, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal with his most definitely not ready for primetime response to personally for me was the best speech the President has given to date. Who selected that back ground for the youngest governor in the country, why not set him leaning back in front of his desk? What about that huge carved around staircase going up beyond nowhere for a backdrop, whose idea was that? What was this new second generation immigrant doing sounding like many of his party’s old faithful who wouldn’t have the time of day for this man of color. This small frail man looking ever so much more smaller that night, even more so now with his false tale of about human connection during one of the most catastrophic experiences of our times, Katrina.

One must also consider the fact that most of, if not all of the mess we are in as country today has been at the hands of many of white males of this Grand ‘Ole Republican Party allowing financial carnage to this country and different strategic segments of our society in particular and wonder of this constant. I have to wonder again if these choices of party leadership is an attempt to regain control of the mindset of supposed psychological implied advantage is in the security of having a white male in charge. The visual media failures of these selections have served the interest of neither implied “Grandness of the ‘Old Party” or the reason to continue to offer these opportunities of equality as to the lack of skills being displayed by those who just don’t understand what it truly means to be an American. So the status of the Grand ‘Ole Republican Party will once again be back in the control of the mean spirited non-inclusive segment with new and different faces using old ideas from narrowly focused individuals with the singular purpose of restoring true conservative values of “Real Americans” once again.

I watched MSNBC’S Hardball with Chris Matthews yesterday and listened to Jim Cramer of “Mad Money” and Peter Morici, Business Professor of the University of Maryland give their view of how President Barack Obama should tackle the mortgage mess. The Republican Party has made it their business despite deregulation, taking this country to war and cutting taxes at the same time, not to support cleaning up the deep hole they have led this country into. Based on what I heard last night this is my brief, but possible 10 point plan to tackle the mortgage meltdown.

1. A flat across the board 4% standard mortgage financing rate.

2. Monthly payments may be no more than 33% percent of net income.

3. Only primary residence will qualify for this financing.

4. 15% reduction across the board on the principle of the current value of the home.

5. Remove toxic loans to a resolution trust as was done during the savings and loan failure.

6. Secondary house financing at 7.5% i.e. Summer homes, rentals.

7. Only legitimate banks can handle financing of these loans.

8. Bank must hold loans for 50% of the life of the loan; i.e. 15 years on 30 year mortgage.

9. Banks must repay toxic loans before paying dividends, bonuses or raises to CEO’s.

10. All loans sold after half life be sold at cost, no increases in interest rates to home owners.

Take this proposal to the Republicans after sharing this with all of Americans and posting it online, then start bargaining from there.

Change in American greed will take some work.

The American media gathered this week in Florida to bask in the glow of the most recent superstar to fall from grace by way of steroids; Alex Rodriguez. He spent several hours basically lying to the public for the second time about his involvement with cheating and its impact on his game of choice; baseball, the American pastime. Many names have come up over the last couple of years being accused of the same; Roger Clemens, Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Jeremy, his brother, Gary Matthews Jr. Rafael Palmeiro, Denny Neagle, Andy Pettitte, Gary Sheffield, Miguel Tejada, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire just to name a few. Some of these men were called before Congress to testify and are facing legal issues and possible banning from the Hall of Fame as a result. The BALCO Investigation, The Mitchell Report and who knows what other legal actions have been just about that sport. Not to paint baseball alone with this tainted brush there are others from different sports with the same issues; Marion Jones, U.S. Olympian track star, Ben Johnson, Canadian Olympic Sprinter, and Floyd Landis, American Cyclist.

There have been countless apologies, crying scenes and reasons for these athletes basically cheating to become winners. Stupidity, recovery from injuries, impetuous youth, looking to gain an edge, and Alex’s choice; taking his medicine wanting to be the greatest player ever. Some have admitted to taking these drugs, doing some wrong or an error in judgment. I like to suggest their reasons were more closely related to the same mindset that in the face of the financial distress this country is in CEO’s can’t make the connection to laying off people while paying themselves bonuses; greed plain and simple. There was a time in sports when the complaint was the owners were making all the money at the expense of the players and strikes at different times in all sports were to address those issues. True there were those who made big sums of cash while a small percentage filtered down to the players, but that time has passed. Now we see sport stars getting 4 year, 50 million dollars, 7 year 119 million dollars, and Mr. Alex Rodriguez second of two large contracts in a row; 10 year, 275 million with the Yankees. The basic problem here is not just the size of these contracts, but as with the CEO’s getting paid large while laying employees off; greed.

I am a fifty four year old black man of meager means, who as a young kid in my twenties was working as a department store manager in the city of New York that no longer exist; E. J. Korvette. I was making about 27 thousand dollars a year at the time and thought one day to myself, if I could make it to about twice that salary by time I was married with children, I would be living pretty nice with a house, family and health benefits and be rather satisfied with my accomplishments. This, considering as a child, I was homeless at 14 through no fault of my own, had dropped out of high school and did my share of what today is called gang banging. In my humble opinion, as with most Americans, we just want to be able to take care of our own and make a decent living, not worrying about poverty along the way. I have been to a couple of basketball games at the garden; love those Knicks, and to a game at Yankee Stadium when then pitcher Ron Guidry struck out 18 batters to match a previous record for the club. You want to go to a game today? Do you want to make a trip to Giants Stadium in New Jersey, want to make it an all day outing and include your wife and kids? There is no way this is happening on that salary today. So, then many would say okay, you can’t go the game, you can’t take your kids to a game so what, there is cable TV, you can watch it there.

How many homes are still using TV’s with the rabbit antennas of old? The government decided to delay the transition as there are many who really will be cut off, but again many will say big deal. A trader from Chicago; Rick Santelli, made a big deal this week about paying for all the losers benefitting from the bill signed by our President Barack Obama. I worked for both E. F. Hutton Company, and Frank Russell Securities Corporation, companies in the business trading of various types of securities and money management. The first went in the 1980′s after a bogus check kiting scandal became known, and got brought up by Shearson Lehman Brothers, yes the same Lehman Brothers that recently was allowed to go out of business. The second has become Russell Investments after going through a change of hands and winding up as part of a subsidiary of Northwestern Mutual. The mindset of the trader is very similar to the that of the sports star, I am going to get mine at the expense of everyone else. Anyone who gets in my way be damned.

My point in making this connection is about the mindset that needs changing. The mindset is that of gaining at the expense of others, the CEO’s who layoff people while collecting huge sums of money, of super stars making 10 – 25 million dollars a year while spectators no longer can afford to come to the stadium. Greed plain and simple. Former Senator Phil Graham may have started the deregulation that became the toxic derivatives that are the underlying waste that has become our present day mortgage mess, Congress may have sat on the selective rear ends as no one was minding the store, but many were making money while this happened. Sports stars of all of the major leagues may have collected larger and bigger yearly salaries as did the CEO’s of America at the expense of their companies bottom lines, but this was allowed to develop while no one asked about the state of the average American. No one cared if they could keep up and in many cases there was a perception that they were losers as put by the trader Mr. Santelli. Greed was never about caring if your teammates got a piece of the pie, if they didn’t, they could not hang, didn’t belong or just plain incapable. Change can’t just take place in the boardrooms of America, this caring for your fellow American has to extend itself to all members of this great country. If we can’t do that, then capping executive pay won’t have any impact at all.

Bipartisanship of politics in this country will be damned again as usual in Washington.

So, here we go again, it’s the Bloods vs. the Cripps, Red States vs. Blue States, Us vs. Them. Our President campaigned on the concept, though spouted often, but hardly realized, of cooperation between both political parties. There has long been complaints that Washington doesn’t work because the parties as they exist, can’t seem to get things done. Personally, I feel we need a third strong political party that will force coalitions to be formed for the good of getting things done, but that’s just me. This theory worked in the practice of getting many divergent mindsets to elect President Barack Obama into office. It was even picked up by some Republicans running for office during the last election cycle such as Oregon’s Gordon Smith. President Obama, the eternal optimist, has made attempts to reach out to the opposition party in putting together a package to clean up the mess he found sitting in the Oval office when he got there. He went up to the hill to address their concerns, he invited them to come to the White House for cocktails, when have you ever heard of any politician doing something like that?

The pain of watching of this process was the fact that after the Republicans got us into an illegal war with Iraq, stuck in Afghanistan fighting “terror” with no particular resolution in sight, having not captured anyone responsible for 9/11, deregulated us into this financial abyss with banking, the mortgage crisis, cutting taxes during wartime, and allowing the rich to get richer at the expense of everyone else. They now want to get back to the supposed Republican principles of fiscal responsibility. The Democrats can’t make any moral claims against them as they sat on their prospective rear ends and let this happen. These Bloods having lost control of the both houses, bitching decide to take more of a stand than did the Cripps and declare in the interest of Americans, they won’t participate in cleaning up the worst financial disaster since the great depression. One of the most conservative organizations in business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and just about every liberal and conservative economist state the nature of this economy is so bad that it would be detrimental to the long term fiscal health of the country to do nothing. Their answer to this problem is holding the party mantra of more of the same.

The amazing thing about their assault on the approach to fixing things is they say we need more tax cuts. First; it amazes me that they continue to want to cut taxes while we are still at War, their response to that is increase the defense budget for the war effort. I want to know, because they never ever tell us how to do this, where is the money supposed to come from. The government in and of itself is not a business per say, it doesn’t exist to make money like IBM or Sears, so how do we get the billions we are now throwing away in these foreign lands we now occupy if we don’t raise the funds one way or another. We as a nation are losing jobs hand over fist, so even if we continue down the road of taxing the poor and middle class of this country, if the pool of people who had jobs keeps shrinking due to their lack of diligence in so many areas of our economy, how are we to get them back?

They say they agree that something needs to be done, and then suggest more of the same failures that got us to this point. More importantly, they are willing to see this whole thing fail just to get back to being in power once again, yet they are the ones claiming patriotism and fiscal responsibility, they claim to have the best interest of the country at heart. Not one vote in the House, only 3 in the Senate, this is their statement and gamble, predicated on our country failing during this experience so they can regain control of both legislative branches of government. I say stand on principle, intestinal fortitude and grit, you don’t believe this is the way to correct this mess, don’t accept the money for your state. When Uncle Sam sends that borrowed Chinese money to your state make sure you do everything in your power to have it returned to Washington. Stand up for what you say you believe in, make your state and your constituents suffer through this trying time without the dirty Democratic stimulus money you don’t believe in. Tell Washington to take that partisan money and shove it up their prospective non-Republican asses. That will show them what it takes to stand up for something you believe in.

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I never voted for former President George Bush, and I honestly felt his brother assisted with helping the Republicans in stealing that election from Al Gore. I thought that I should mention this upfront. In spite of this, I am an American, and want all of us to succeed, that means any and all of our Presidents, whether Republican or a member of my Democratic Party. I really wanted Bush to be a success as our President, I never wanted him to fail as the most prominent representative of this great nation. What I now want is to crush the Republican Party as it exist today for allowing Bush to do what he did to this country after 9/11. The reputation ruined over the last seven years happened to all Americans, Republican and Democrat. Yet the Republican Party claimed patriotism through war, claimed to be the party of strength and protection and used these themes to paint the opposition as weak and ineffectual. They invested major efforts to paint the Democratic politicians running for various national offices as anti-American, unpatriotic and aiding and abetting the enemy.

This time has finally come to an end and we have a new administration in charge in Washington. Former President Bush led us to participate in two wars still ongoing, spied on our own citizens without legal authority, accused people of being enemy combatants, picked them up and shipped them around to countries willing to abuse them in our name of searching for more enemies to kill. We rounded up innocents and locked them up in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons and held them without charges and are still holding them. Former Vice President Cheney believes all of these things were done to protect this nation from further attack and takes credit with pride for making those decisions. Now, I am not naive enough to believe all those locked up within those prisons are innocent, or not members of some radical Islamic group wishing our demise. The fact that several detainees have been released is more than enough evidence to say the possibility innocents were imprisoned and that is wrong. The new sheriff in town says from now on, we do this differently, we do this by rule of law, without stealing around like a thief in the night. We don’t torture, Guantanamo gets shut down, and put a hold on all military tribunals.

As I said earlier, I never wanted Bush to fail, but our American Republican patriots who have claimed superior moral authority in spite of all the noise against them are not wishing this new American President the same. Rush Limbaugh has gone live on air stating that he wants President Obama to fail, he wants the Republican party to defeat him at every turn including the issues created by their poor management of the institutions vital to this country’s survival. They left Obama with two wars that could be debated about their legitimacy, they left him with a financial mess created by their lack of oversight, they left him with a reputation to clean up around the world.

You would think that all Americans would have the best interest of all Americans doing well as that would suggest there is a chance for all of us to be successful in our pursuit of happiness. But, this Republican party has taken on an unpatriotic turn to the extreme degree, three weeks into an new administration, and the honeymoon is over as they publicly demand their party wreck havoc on the new president by not supporting his efforts to clean up the mess they left him. Not one vote for the bill to clean up the fiscal abyss we now find ourselves in, this from the patriotic rightwing moving in lockstep with the leadership responsible for getting us here. The patriots are in full effect now, the party wins as the country loses and they continue flittingly along their merry way without consideration of the people who sent them to Washington to look out for their interests. The Nationall Republican Trust PAC is working to defeat the stimulus package as though  they were immune to it’s failure. Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney, just two of the wonderful Republican patriots looking on with glee to be proven right at the expense of the rest of the United States of America.

Keith Olbermann

Keith Olbermann Anchor, ‘Countdown’ • Profile

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on former Vice President Cheney’s remarks about the prospects of future terrorist attacks in this country. Flatly, it may be time for Mr. Cheney to leave this country.

The partisanship, divisiveness and naiveté to which he ascribed every single criticism of his and President Bush’s delusional policies of the last eight years, have now roared forth in a destructive and uninformed diatribe from Mr. Cheney, that can only serve to undermine the nation’s new president, undermine the nation’s effort to thwart terrorism, and undermine the nation itself.

Mr. Cheney’s remarks were posted yesterday at Politico.com. They are a reiteration of all the manias of his vice presidency. Only they now come without the authority of office. They insist, he insists, on the imminence of attack, of the maintenance of Gitmo, of the necessity of waterboarding, of the efficacy of torture.

Time does not stale nor custom wither your infinite variety, Mr. Cheney. You will say it, and be wrong and you will still say it anew. You will say it, and undercut a President 17 days on the job and you will still say it anew. You will say it, and help terrorists and you will still say it anew.

“The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

The first glimmer, in years, of sanity in any your remarks, Sir. That’s not at all what the Obama administration appears to believe. It seems to be ready to use all avenues and all emotions, seeking love, respect, fear, diplomacy, shared experience, education, principle, and, yes, even rational thought. This President, unlike yours, seems intent on living in the real world rather than trying to re-shape an imaginary one, by force.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaida terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry.”

More concerned, Mr. Cheney? What delusion of grandeur makes you think you have the right to say anything like that? Because a president, or an ordinary American, demands that we act as Americans and not as bullies; demands that we play by our rules; that we preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States; you believe we have chosen the one and not the other? We can be Americans, or we can be what you call “safe” — but not both?

“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again. Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

Mr. Cheney, you are lying. As the cloud of fear you deliberately fostered in this good-hearted and courageous nation finally begins to dissipate, the nonsense that you and Mr. Bush presented as “evidence” of this childish claim, this perverse example of wishful-nightmare-thinking, has become apparent, and it should shame you.
The “major-casualty attacks” on the U.S. you think you stopped, involved would-be hijackers who were under constant surveillance and had neither passports nor plane tickets. They involved feeble-minded braggarts so clueless as to even the most obvious steps of organization that they believed they could enter Fort Dix in New Jersey disguised as delivery men, and kill hordes of Americans, and get out alive, even though Fort Dix teems with soldiers who have an almost inexhaustible supply of weapons.

They involved embittered ex-Airport-employees so uninformed about where they used to work, that they thought dropping a match in a fuel supply line thirty miles away would cause the airport to explode. These are the plots that by your own proud, strutting, crazy admissions, were the ones you “got us through.”

You and Mr. Bush, sir—you are the old men who cried wolf. The Politico story continues:

“Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration – “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” – have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

Mr. Cheney, you made this statistic up. Perhaps not you personally, but your people made this statistic up! As the new reality-based administration has discovered, there are not enough records of detainees still at Gitmo to suggest that there is any reliable database on those released.  That McCarthy-esque number, Sir, is also as fluid as the infamous Senator’s was.

As Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University noted on this network last month:

“The government has given its 43rd attempt to describe the number of people who have left Guantanamo and returned to the battlefield. Forty-one times they have done it orally as they have this last time. And their numbers have changed from 20 to 12 to seven to more than five to two to a couple to a few – 25, 29, 12 to 24. Every time, the number has been different. In fact, every time they give a number, they don’t identify a date, a place, a time, a name or an incident to support their claim.”

Mr. Cheney, which orifice are you pulling these numbers from? Y’know, in the movie “The Manchurian Candidate,” the character based loosely on Joe McCarthy had trouble remembering all the different numbers. His Lady Macbeth-like-wife pointed out to him that the reason she kept changing the number of purported communists in the state department, was so that people would no longer be asking “are there communists in the state department?” but would begin only asking “how many communists are there?”
And, six years and more since General Powell, and Dr. Rice, and all the rest, played the trump card of terrorizing this nation, the mighty Cream of Mushroom Cloud soup, you played it again… nuclear weapon, biological agent, deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”

“The Bush System,” as John Yoo so aptly re-christened it the other day. Start the wrong war, detain the wrong people, employ the wrong methods, pursue the wrong leads, utilize the wrong emotions.  Beat up first, ask questions later. You know, just like Al-Qaeda does, or Iran. Save this nation from terrorists by doing the terrorists’ work for them, Mr. Cheney. To your credit, sir, you have added a new monster under a new bed, to try to continue to foment a national policy of panic. It’s the Terrorists-on-our-streets ploy.

“Is that really a good idea to take hardened al-Qaida terrorists who’ve already killed thousands of Americans and put ‘em in San Quentin or some other prison facility where they can spread their venom even more widely than it already is?”

As opposed to keeping them in an extra-legal facility mixed in with some unknown number of innocents mistaken for terrorists. Who’s likelier to be more influenced by terrorist venom, Mr. Cheney?  The characters from the TV series “Oz?” Or a bunch of guys who we’re holding in chains without trial and without even some token attempt at rehabilitation? And by the way, what about Ahmed Ressam, sir? Benni Noris, if you prefer. The Millennium Bomber.

Caught at a ferry crossing from Canada to Washington State in December, 1999, on his way to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. He had a car, a legit passport, nitroglycerin, and timing devices. And what did we do to him, Mr. Cheney? Did we send him to Gitmo? Or Pre-Gitmo? As “high a value” terrorist as ever we’ve caught in this country. Trained by Abu Zubaydah.

Days away from his target and ready to go. We tried him. In U.S. courts. With U.S. lawyers. Part of the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. He got 22 years in U.S. prisons.No torture, no Gulag, no stories of him proselytizing fellow prisoners. Oh, but he did cooperate long enough to tell prosecutors about al-Qaida cells in this country.

That was his info they stuck in the President’s Daily Brief of August 6th, 2001. That’s probably news to you, since obviously you and Mr. Bush didn’t read it, stalking Saddam Hussein as you were. Of course, none of that mattered to Mr. Cheney, just as none of this matters to Mr. Cheney. Because, at heart, Mr. Cheney is not interested foremost in protecting this country. He is interested foremost in protecting Mr. Cheney. And the business of being Dick Cheney, of rationalizing one’s own existence after one of the most reprehensible, myopic, unprincipled, and even un-American careers in the history of our government, depends on continuing to convince the gullible of us to live in abject fear and not with vigilance and common sense and principles.

We, sir, will most completely assure our security not by maintaining the endless, demoralizing, draining, life-denying blind fear and blind hatred which you so thoroughly embody. We will most easily purchase our safety by repudiating the “Bush System.” We will reserve the violence for which you are so eager, Sir, for any battlefield to which we truly must take, and not for unconscionable wars which people like you goad and scare and lie us into.

You, Mr. Cheney, you terrified more Americans than did any terrorist in the last seven years, and now it is time for you to desist, or to be made to desist. With damnable words like these, Sir, you help no American, you protect no American, you serve no American — you only aid and abet those who would destroy this nation from within or without. More than 400 years ago, when a British Parliament attempted to govern after its term had expired, it was dispersed by the actions, and words, of Oliver Cromwell.

“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately,” he told them — exactly as, Mr. Cheney, exactly as a nation now tells you: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.
“In the name of God… go!

Water boarding is torture!

FYI: United States number one law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. stated before the world during confirmation testimony, the most telling words; “Water boarding is torture!” The Republican Congressional Delegation proceeded to hold up the confirmation vote on him for no legitimate reason other than discerning if that meant pursuing former administration officials in some partisan witch-hunt. In interviews, the Obama administration has put forth the perspective of moving forward re-modeling a new America with the same ideals developed by the creators of the already great although presently rocky union.

There is some legitimate rational for that position. Immediate questions are raised, why waste the nation’s resources at this point in time when we are in such a precarious state of affairs what with the economic collapse, worldwide recession, still no solution as to a reasonable approach to the real estate dilemma and two wars ongoing. The rationale can be pushed for by parties uninterested in partisan ownership for any of the above, no matter that their party is responsible for much of it generally speaking and the opposition as much for allowing it to happen and not doing all they possibly could have to prevent at least one of the events listed above from becoming the reality that is our broken down America today. We as a people cannot ignore the fact that we are at war and it costs us money. We as a people definitely have something wrong with our financial system and apparently it has taken down or at the very least, had some negative impact around the world. That is not including the impact of the Bernie Madoffs to date or those yet to be discovered.

So, an honest pause may be given as to the expense of pursuing an investigation to determine if there were crimes that were committed or not. However, that is not the case presently as we know it to be. There are now some known factors publicly stated one given in testimony before the country’s legislative body on camera before the world; the second, which actually came first by the former Vice President, Dick Cheney: “I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared,” Cheney said in an interview with ABC News.
Asked whether he still believes it was appropriate to use the waterboarding method on terrorism suspects, Cheney said: “I do.” Then the answer to a question that the previous presidential administration felt could be modified to fit the moment or the enemy. The statement, that 3 detainees had been water-boarded, once that statement was made, the next question, whether or not it was illegal, was answered by our now number one legal officer; the Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “I cannot assume that was the only option, as it should never be considered legally as an option to begin with”.

That means we the people had representatives of our nation wearing our country’s seal on a card somewhere on their person, an American flag, uniform or diplomatic portfolio pick up people around the world in any manner we deemed appropriate, presented information true or otherwise as to their status as enemy combatants knowingly to gain illegally obtained approval to invade another country by false declaration of war in association with the 9/11 attacks. That over four thousand Americans can never again decide if they can move forward with this price as citizens of this great country, is just be beginning. We may be yet find that we can rise to the occasion and fix the mess we are in, but if we won’t find out whether or not people died because of crimes were committed, how can we know what needs to be cleaned up? We need to know in order not to repeat them again. “Those who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We know that the former President, George W Bush, stated several times in press conferences: “We are the United States of America, and we don’t torture!” We know the Vice President contradicted that in the ABC News interview, stating methods were discussed and what he had encouraged because those in the field wanted to know how far they could go. We know that is a crime alone, without covering wiretapping, Valerie Flame, the false Niger yellowcake uranium claim, and alleged links to Al Qaeda to go to war. That any and all information that was obtained in such a way to bring question to the ethics and principles this country’s reputation was built on is beyond treason. It questions the veracity of any and all claims of honor and integrity. The blood of our brave citizens and the lost of our treasury demand that we know how this came to be. That investigation alone should be pursued to what ends the truth will bear and legal actions our country soul must bear. This may not be a feel good moment to move forward from until we found out just how bad we have been as this is our America hell or high water. So this is a crime, what are we going to do about it? Better yet, what does it mean to President Barack Obama? How about the Democrats and Republicans on that “need to know list” when this came out? Where was the opposition outrage in the very least, or true bipartisan American outrage for the lost of over 4 thousand of our own based on lies and deceit?