In
another diary I posted as follows:
Why is every progressive blog not talking up Thom Hartmann's piece on Common Dreams about the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares" and demanding that it be shown in this country?
I was properly taken to task by Kagro X thus: "I don't know why every progressive blog is not talking about your particular favorite issue today. It could be that they're taking their cues from you. I notice you haven't written anything about it yourself."
Fair enough (barring some rather gratuitous sarcasm in the rest of Kagro X's post). So here is my first diary on Daily Kos, and with it I hope to show why I find it unconscionable that anyone who cares about our democracy will not pursue every available avenue to see that the Bush maladministration be blocked from governing -- between now and Inauguration Day if possible, and thereafter if it proves to be necessary. Excerpts from the Hartmann piece are below the fold.
But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of
Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was
intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear. Without fear,
how could Americans be manipulated?
Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then
openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of
fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War.
And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ford Chief
of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the Soviets had secret
weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the
CIA didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about. And, they said,
because of those weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away
from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors
for whom these two men would one day work.
[snip]
But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something
nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end,
they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their old
friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.
According to Curtis' BBC documentary, Wolfowitz's group, known as "Team
B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several
terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed
submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and
was, thus, undetectable with our current technology.
[snip]
But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had
been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and
Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs.
NB: assuming that all the efforts to reveal the fraud that has stolen the second presidential election in a row fail, Rumsfeld will still be the Secretary of Defence. Cheney will retain his promotion from Chief of Staff to Vice President -- and Wolfowitz will still be in the Pentagon.
It bothers me that the Republican fearmongering campaign appears to have had a perhaps unexpected success within progressive conversation: progressives have become so afraid of being tagged as in need of tinfoil hats that they shy away from all discussion of electoral irregularities in the three elections 2000, 2002, and now 2004. Thus ensuring, it seems to me that even more irregularities will crop up in 2006, and 2008, ad infinitum.
Unfortunately for us, wingnuts have no such compunctions. They don't care if we think they're nuts -- they'll just go ahead and repeat the memes, whether grounded in some fact or simply made up out of whole cloth, that will turn the rest of the country against us.
In any case, I hope some Kossacks will take a little time to read the Hartmann piece and that it will soon become possible to obtain DVDs of the Curtis documentary in this country, or even have a public airing of its three parts.