ANOTHER 9 - 11 ANNIVERSARY

General Petrayas and the so called "Ambassador" finally put on a show before congress. I would not call it testimony because it was staged managed from start to finish and you can bet despite wyat the General espressly said, that Bush aids were in control of every phrase out of his mouth. He said that "The success in Anwar privance" is now spreading to other areas of Iraq. He says violence is way down all over Iraq. It's down from 170 to 120 incidents per week or something. But as Randi Rhodes points out they wern't counting Shiite on Shiite violence or Suni on Suni violence, and apparently you had to be hit in the back of the head and not from the front, because that didn't count. General Petrayas said that in July, that is, of 2008, we will be able to have reduced our troop levels to pre-surge levels. The General says he wern't at full Surge strength untill this past June. The general warns that if we cut our forces one man beyond what he recomended, that disaster will fall in all areas of the country. The general didn't speak right away. They had a lot of other people making speeches first talking about "the testimony we are about to receive", reminding me of a church offering invocation or something.

Joe Byden was on Meet the Press and John Kerry was on This Week last Sunday and he says that partitian is still the way to go in the country and both he and Kerry said
that politically the nation is a disaster area with no progress in the Meliki regiem. The general had first said that politics didn't matter until the nation was militarily secure. The general says that the Sunis im Anwar provance "finally accepted our offer of cooperation". Conversely, it's more like "WE finally decided to accept THEIR offer of cooperation and get our men out of the province so that they could take care of the Al Qaida forces that were troubling them. But this is not the same Al Qaida forces that attacked us, where Bin Laden is now hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, but this is a home grown Al Qaida of Iraq, an Al Qaida wanna-be. The General warned us about alliances with the Iranian Shiites, but they don't even have the same culture or the same language as the home grown Shiites of Iraq. Once again every relivant fact that could be distorted WAS distorted. But once again it looks as if the democrats are going to roll over and play dead and give the President anything he wants in the way of unlimited funding. The President vetoed the funding bill of last May of course, and were I congress I would have told the President, "It's either that bill or nothing, and YOU wouldn't want to be responsible for cutting off funding for the troops, would you?" Unfortunately there was talk on the Randi Rhodes show that the President might cut off funding and not give them the ability to get home.

Fred Thompson got into the Presidential race and on Thursday gave a half hour or so speech that was televised on station 4.4 and was even repeated. It's like a free campaign commercial for Thompson. It was to the tune of country hick music. There is no doubt about it; the Southern rednecks have their man. Thompson is going to do one thing and that is split off the vote that would normally go to Rudolph Giuliani. Because both of them were thumping the same security mellon. Fred spent half the time talking about how if we don't fight Al Qaida over there we'll have to fight them here. He spent the other half talking about the cutting of government services. Thom Hartman gave an interesting analogy today of what would happen if we ran this country like Iraq and there were for instance simotaniously a major tornado in Detroit and a major earthquake in San Francisco. If this were Iraq we'd cut out all but military and police govt. services. That would mean all the free medical care that Saddam Hussein provided would be gone. Therefore all the doctors would leave as well as other rich people able to do so. There would be fighting in the remaining ghettos and perhaps even genocide, and so we'd send in the national guard and kill more people. If the Churches, that is Synagogues, Mosques, and the like filled the power vacuum they might in time restore some order as clerics took charge. Bush would no doubt say "You see- - military force works". Of course the infre-structure would be gone and that would suit the Bush adminestration just fine. Of course all the business and home grown industry would be put out of work as Bush brought in corporations from Texas and Wyoming to do all the rebuilding construction work. Bush doesn't care a rat's ass about building up national economic pride. Some have even argued we shouldn't have engaged in de-bathification of the Iraqi army. Well, General Patton was against de-Nazification after World War II. I don't know who is right. There are arguments to be made on both sides. I don't want any part of this scenario to take over in the case of some unforseen disaster. If either Thompson or Giuliani were in charge, I think civil rights would go out the window in this country. Fred Thompson's vision of America isn't suitable for the 21st. Century. He needs to talk about energy research and global warming and cracking down on polluters. If Thompson were President, the clock would run backwards even faster than it is.

We need ti impeach President Bush. We only need a majority vote and we don't need to do any more "investigations" or hearings. We can file charges and then take all the time we want to investigate the details after he's indicted, if we need to. We only need a majority vote and not a veto proof two thirds or clochure proof sixty percent. The argument can no longer made, "We need to get on with the Democratic agenda". As Rush Limbaugh says, "Roosevelt is Dead. His policies live on but we're doing something about that". The democratic message isn't getting out. The media seems much more interested in having the republicans define the democrats rather than visa versa. We need to take back posession of the partizan football.

This democratic congress needs to start another investigation. They need to start an investigation of the events surrounding 9 - 11. I suggest three topics to begin with. First NORAD or whoever is in control of air traffic. The next area is the asbestos and other particulate pollution in the area around Ground Zero. We need to haul Christeen Todd Whitman up there and also the Mayor. What was Guiliani doing at that time and how come he didn't warn about the particulate pollution and foresee all those people who came down with serious lung ailments. The third is the buildings themselves. It's a known fact that there just wasn't enough fire to take down those two buildings in the space of a half hour. High-rise buildings that are much more of an inferno than those two were have been known to burn for twenty hours without collapsing. We need to investigate the possability of deliberate detonations causing the loss of so many human lives. Sure it will be embarrassing to the Mayor and some will say the investigation may be political, but at least it will be congress that is calling the tune and setting the terms of debate. Getting people up there and watching them squirm of one of the supreme powers that congress has. It wouldn't be the first time somebody did something politically oppertunistic. You all will remember last year's made for TV ABC movie. Since nobody is dropping the topic of 9 - 11 anyhow we might as well get everything out in the open and all the facts on the table.