With his usual hilarious bad timing, George W. Bush picked today to endorse Mitt Romney:

Matt Negrin / ABCNEWS:
George W. Bush: ‘I’m for Mitt Romney’  —  Mitt Romney has the support of George W. Bush.  —  “I’m for Mitt Romney,” Bush told ABC News this morning as the doors of an elevator closed on him, after he gave a speech on human rights a block from his old home — the White House.

G. Dubya Bush assuring residents of The Big Easy that
nothing bad actually happened in Katrina, and even
if it did, everything would be hunky dory. The square
was lit by emergency generators : virtually the only
electricity IN New Orleans that night…

I wrote this to the Eugene Register-Guard in 2003:

Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.

Letters in the Editor’s Mailbag

June 19, 2003

A question of war crimes

After 80 days, it’s time Americans confronted a grave question: If no weapons of mass destruction are found, then members of the Bush administration are guilty of war crimes.

The U.S.-sponsored United Nations Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2, states: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.” And “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.

In the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, there were four counts, and one, if not two, are applicable here. Count one: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and count two: waging aggressive war, or “crimes against peace.” When it was argued that the court had no jurisdiction, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, lead prosecutor, rejoined, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Remember that in the near year of spin leading up to this war the term “regime change” was never used until 48 hours before the war began: because such a war would have been unlawful.

If war crimes have been committed (thousands are dead), those who screamed about the “rule of law” in 1999 better step up to the plate, else there is no such “rule.”

HART WILLIAMS

Well, at least one court now backs me up. Interestingly, not much comment in the American press. One short page on Google yesterday and one long page and another short overflow story on the next (and that’s when you turn off the redundancy filter):

Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia

by Yvonne Ridley
The Foreign Policy Journal
May 12, 2012

Kuala Lumpur — It’s official; George W Bush is a war criminal.

In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison….

Interestingly enough, the Nuremberg Trials at the end of WWII (“watch the great movie “Judgment at Nuremberg” with Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster for a bit of the flavor) were cited by the court. Thus far, it’s Yvonne Ridley’s story, her having done the best job of early reporting, having seemingly read a good portion of the transcripts.

It is a sad day, my friends, when old Lenin Era Pravda now online in the XXIth century with a new direction and mission does a MUCH more credible reporting job than the US press and most of the blogosphere. Here are links to four parts of the transcript — such as it is — of the findings of the court with a suggestion that the story has been hacked at least once in the notes to one of the interior parts:

Part 1:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/09-05-2012/121063-accusations_war_crimes-0/

Part II:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/10-05-2012/121082-united_states_torture-0/

Part III
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/12-05-2012/121089-us_torture-0/

Part IV
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/13-05-2012/121099-usa_dock_four-0/

Here is the citation of our own hypocrisy in staining the national character before the whole world (who were watching):

The charge against the accused here is very similar to the charge for which the Nazi war criminals were convicted at the Nuremberg trials: “the charge of conscious participation in a nation-wide governmentally organized system of cruelty and injustice, in violation of the laws of war and humanity, and perpetrated in the name of law by … authority”: Alstotter case.

This is because after 9/11, all the pronouncements from the top made a conscious decision to set aside international rules constraining such treatment. A combination of factors account for this: fear, ideology and almost visceral disdain for international rules and norms. There are others who have also committed war crimes but those that have been charged are the key players. Against them there is overwhelming evidence and they bear direct responsibility for war crimes.

That is how it ends. You owe it to yourself to go and read the English translation put up in full by good ol’ Pravda. Time was, citing Pravda was a guarantee that you was at least a pinko, if not an outright commie. Boy times sure change.

George W. Bush, Agent of Al Q.A.E.D.A. is a post you should read

But what I said then was true. It remains true and as this story gains traction, every force in serpentine media and slithery supplication will attempt to convince you that our good nation did NOT commit War Crimes. These are the same bastards who maintained that no US soldier had ever or would ever do anything bad in our invasion and toppling of the regime of that guy who was responsible for Nine-Lebben.

Oh wait.

You see: we Americans are REALLY GOOD at ignoring important problems we find inconvenient. Slavery. Segregation. Child labor. Sweat shops. Women’s rights — promised them during the Civil War by politicians as part of expanding suffrage. Women’s actual rights, and not just the right to vote. Hispanic rights. Minority rights. Disabled access. The right not to be sexually harassed in the workplace. Gays and gay rights and no rights for “illegal aliens” who force sweatshop owners to fire all their American workers and employ the dirt-poor illegals to work for much lower wages, with zero rights.

Kind of like that slave labor in China that builds our computers and our i-Phones® and all the rest of the Wal-Marted, Four Bank and Four Oil Company America.

We are REAL good at it.

The (graven) Image Makers at work

We Americans have never met a problem so big that we couldn’t all agree that it wasn’t actually there, and, therefore, nothing needs be done, nor talkin’ about that bothersome … thing. WHAT thing?

My point.

But the Bushies have PROVEN that you can be lied to with a straight face and will buy ANY crap they want to shove a feeding tube down your throat and ladle into your poor stomach.

Only next time, the country they topple and install their “approved” government after writing its “pillage and loot” constitution won’t be in the Middle East.

It’ll be in the Middle West.

Remember when I said “Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values”? Well, here’s a piece of news for yas: “American values” are now whatever we SAY they are. So …

What is the blogosphere rambling on about?

Romney v. Obama blah blah blah, and it’s only the Fourteenth of Freaking May. Democracy in America is ill-served by this obfuscatory persiflage masquerading as journalism. It is not journalism: it is sycophantism and infantilism and paroxysm. But it is NOT journalism, which, in its finest flower doesn’t merely report the news (with hefty chunks of gossip and hot air speculation thrown in to pad out the segment), but finds the IMPORTANT news and goes after it like a terrier after a rat.

Sure: One of these days we’re going to have to face up to the crimes of the past thirty years. That is guaranteed.

But not today.

That is guaranteed, as well.

Genuine; not PhotoShopped.

Courage.

====================

Kudos to Thom Hartmann for having the cojones to write about this on TruthOut and mention it on his program today(?).

====================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

Welcome to the Etch-a-Sketch.

Now, if you’re paying attention, you just learned the Achilles heel of the Romney campaign. If you haven’t been paying attention, that’s YOUR Achilles heel, which they intend to exploit.

I speak of course, of Ann Romney’s dirty crack.

ABC News leads off with this Orwellian horse-puckey:

ABCNEWS:
Ann Romney Fights Back: Debuts on Twitter to Counter DNC Advisor’s Insult  —  PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Ann Romney’s debut on Twitter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.  —  Ann’s first tweet came just moments after Democratic strategist and DNC adviser Hilary Rosen lobbed an insult at Ann Romney …

It’s only an insult if it ain’t true, just like it’s only libel if it’s not true, and it’s only news if the soulless imbeciles at ABC news actually used facts.

They did not.

The logical argument was this: is there a war on women? and, if so, is Mitt Romney’s astonishing assertion that NO, Republicans aren’t engaged in it, OBAMA is engaged in it (false 90%+ figure of women’s job losses under Obama). Oh, and Ann Romney is Mitt’s advisor on female matters.

Mitt Romney put his wife in the cross-hairs. Moreover, she was placed on the public stage by her own volition and by her ambitious husband. (This will be important later.) It was her CHOICE.

Ann Romney as she sees herself

In a season of mendacity, it seems a strange thing that so blatant an untruth, a lie, a fiction would pass so easily through the catamite press corps(e), but there you have it.

See see the “firestorm” on Memeorandum this morning.

Hilary Rosen, a CNN talking head identified as a “Democratic strategist” made the logical statement in rebuttal that Ann Romney was not in the least qualified to discuss the travails of working women and single mothers in this economy, including the “unfortunate” statement “she’s never worked a day in her life.

By this, of course, it is CLEARLY meant that Ann Romney has never worked in a W-2 wages time clock commercial job in her life.

But the mendacious Romney campaign (who have issued lie after unchallenged lie throughout this poisonous primary season) intentionally misconstrued the word “work,” so that Ann Romney could pull herself into high dudgeon — even creating a Twitter account to plead her sooty purity as a voice for vee-jay-jays everywhere — that she’s raised several Orthodontically engineered children, which is “hard work.”

Perhaps.

Working mother?

But clearly she didn’t “work” in the context the statement was made in.

And she and her lying husband and his Cthuylu corps of advisors well know it. The lie is clearly intentional, and the phony outrage is all the more demonic for it.

But we live in a Goebbels-style media age, and the “Big Lie”ers of Romney cry great crocodile tears that those awful Jews are abusing the poor Brownshirts by repeatedly smashing their knees and jackboots with their Semitic testicles. And, to add insult to injury, they repeatedly smash the Brownshirts in the fists and elbows with their eyes and noses.

And the “civil” morons of the media and the “left” go right along, demanding that Hilary Rosen publicly APOLOGIZE to Ann Romney for the “insult” to her hyper-productive genitalia. Which Rosen did.

I will stipulate that Ann Romney has done “hard work” in raising her children in the lap of luxury — even though that assertion, in itself, is probably laughable; but the mere functioning of her reproductive apparatus no more makes her an “expert” on women’s issues than owning a cheap telescope (never used) makes one an astrophysicist.

playing to the fools

The fundamental argument here is so laughable that only the criminally insane and those who have sustained organic brain damage could possibly take it seriously.

But no: the Obama Administration and its functionaries all instantly distanced themselves from Rosen, even as the Right Wing Smear Machine sprang into sulphurous action. As per usual, all the Righties banded together in their alibi, and all the Lefties fled the field of rhetorical battle, tails tucked twixt tibiae.

Has no one been paying attention, say, since George H.W. Bush based his 1988 election on smearing Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” and “Willie Horton”? (Implicitly, of course, that they were AGAINST civil liberties, as has been amply demonstrated in the intervening years — emphasis on “demon.”)

The functionality of Ann Romney’s lady parts no more makes her an expert on women’s issues than her imputed ability to drive two Cadillacs (at the same time, seemingly, a sort of Amazon Ben-Hur, astride the twin yoked mechanical beasts), or her assertion that, with nine figures in hubby Mitty’s account, she “doesn’t think of herself as wealthy.)

Ann’s two Cadillacs, ‘Willard’ and ‘Ben’

Someone is comatose here, and that needs to be pointed out.

Especially noteworthy are two sleazeballs at Politico, who write this bit of offal:

“There’s no such thing as a mom who’s not a working mom, so this was an unfortunate incident,” said Virginia Del. Barbara Comstock, a longtime Romney backer. “But it highlights some of the division that we’ve been seeing from the Obama campaign because they don’t want to talk about the fact that the Obama economy isn’t working for women.”

Utterly begging the question throughout, taking GOP talking points as gospel and pretending that they, in Olympian detachment, are “judging the facts” when their conclusions (implicit and explicit) belie the actual facts.

What we have to ask ourselves is this: are the reporters from ABC, Politico, et al so STOOPID that they don’t know what’s being pulled? (Hardly.) Or, rather, are they willing participants and collaborators  in what is transparent mendacity and Rovian lies?

We EXPECT the cynical manipulation of OUR civility to barbaric ends, of course. But, inevitably, we give in to Republican bullying tactics, and hide under our bedclothes while we wet our pants (or, panties, in deference to actual working women) in terror.

And it is getting OLD, people.

This entire phony controversy has been ginned up to distract from the irrefutable FACT that there IS a war on women, and four more bills were signed in Arizona and Wisconsin just this week, in case you were needing an exclamation point to drive it home.

But the soulless vampyres of the GOP/Romney Etch-a-Sketch machine know that merely gainsaying naked facts creates a false controversy, and, ultimately, reality — in the minds of the viewers of the swill that CNN, ABC, Fox, et al, ad nauseum produce like pink slime as a political additive to their rhetorical scheiss-burgers.

The Achilles heel of the Romney (or is that the Romany?) campaign is the Truth.

The Achilles heel of the rest of us, seemingly, is the Lie.

It’s really as simple as that.

I just want to see somebody have Hilary Rosen’s back,  and somebody challenge Ann Romney’s affront.

She IS a part of this campaign, and, having made herself a public figure, is undeserving of any special benefit or protection. She has to face the same political ugliness that the Obamas have (where are the cries of wounded womanhood when Michelle Obama is called “The Mooch” and derided as a mad spendthrift, behaving as Marie Antoinette in the midst of this horrible Recession?), that Hillary Clinton has, that every other man and woman in the political arena must face.

The “iron maiden” of the Romney Campaign

But, such would be sane.

And again, the Morlocks have shamed the Eloi, even as they feast on their warm, tender flesh.

Get a grip America, before we truly become Amerika.

A man who will say anything to get into office will do anything once IN office.

Or haven’t you been paying attention.

You spoke correctly, Hilary Rosen, and I do not accept your apology.

Because you had nothing to apologize for.

The truth is the truth: Ann Romney has never done an honest day’s work in her life. Vee-jay-jays and output  excluded.

Pity the poor multi-millionairess?

In a pig’s eye.

Courage.

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Personal note: Today marks my 28th year back from Boulder. Happy Rebirthday.