Holy SHIT! MAJOR slap at the administration by Powell aide!

[dave123williams]

Not sure if this has been posted yet?

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/afdb7b0c-40f3-11da-b3f9-00000e2511c8.html

[GetTheRightVote]

1. An American Hero, standing against the evil adminstration

Wow, I can only say Wow !!!

:kick:

[knowbody0]

2. amazing

thanks for posting. most dysfunctional, most destructive admin in our history

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

3. And to think that we still have three years and three months left

of this administration. Unless of course justice takes its course through the actions of Mr. Fitzgerald.

I was particularly struck by Wilkerson's comment on Condi Rice, saying that instead of giving the President good advice, she said whatever he wanted to hear in order to enhance the intimacy of her relationship with him. I have a feeling that Condi isn't alone in taking that particular route. Most of the 'yes' men and women, like the current Supreme Court nominee are doing exactly that.

[Neil Lisst]

8. Absolutely correct on Condi. She's good at one thing.

And that one thing is kissing Bush's ass.

Same as Harriet.

Same as Gonzales.

He is surrounded by mental mini-mes.

--------------------------------
Neil Lisst ;) has learned there is a short list of possible VP applicants Bush could go with, in case Cheney has to go. http://www.webcomicsnation.com/neillisst

[endarkenment]

33. As dimson is himself a mental mini-me

his sycophants are mental micro-mini-mes.

[FreedomAngel82]

24. That is what is truly scary

Remember when Bush said it'd be "heck of a lot easier if this was a dictatorship, as long as I'm the dictator"? He thinks he's a dictator. And imagine if this was Clinton, Gore or Kerry?

[Historic NY]

4. Well praise the Lord....someone is finally coming clean......

cabal indeed........this isn't about defending freedom, its about making a mockery of it.

[texpatriot2004]

5. Well Thank You Col. Wilkerson nm

[Historic NY]

6. give us a vote to move it up , please.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. you got the vote

this is the moment we face the rubicon... students of classical Roman History will get the reference... the crisis we are living through IS our version of the Rubicon River... and the Colonel is the Praetorian Gaurd Commander warnign us that Caesar is about to cross it.

[achtung_circus]

9. It's in LBN and Greatest

Here:
<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1863267>

[Quadrajet]

10. Too bad he'll be written off as a whiner/kook.

Unfortunately he'll be written off by the Republicans, much the same way that Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill were. They'll say he was mad at the administration and upset that he lost his job when Powell resigned or something along those lines.

[FreedomAngel82]

25. Hopefully he's gone to Fitzgerald

Has he testfied yet?

[Wordie]

11. Did ya notice where he said that Condi was ineffective due to ass-kissing?

I really liked that part! :) (Although I did paraphrase a bit there.)

AND the part about Bush Sr. being a good president, and Bush Jr. being a not-so-hot one.

Another night owl has recommended this thread!

[dalloway]

13. I like your paraphrasing better than his words

[Tesla]

14. Rice needs to go!!!!!

Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.

[FreedomAngel82]

26. Everything was planned from the beginning

Their actions show it looking back at the past.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

12. Maintaining a calm and...

...deliberate style throughout, he's essentially warning that our country's in great peril from this administration. Particularly scary coming from a recent insider.

[Tesla]

19. when Timmy went to Fitz

Russert questioned in leak probe
Interview tied to Cheney aide, CIA agent's ID
- Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Washington -- The special counsel investigating whether the Bush administration illegally leaked the name of a CIA operative has questioned a second journalist about conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, officials said Monday.

NBC News said that its Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, was interviewed Saturday by prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in connection with a conversation Russert had last summer with top Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The network said Russert, the host of "Meet the Press," was asked "limited questions" about a telephone conversation, which Libby had disclosed to the FBI, that the White House aide initiated in early July of last year.

The network said in a prepared statement that Russert told Fitzgerald during the interview that he did not know Valerie Plame's name or her identity as a CIA operative until reading Robert Novak's syndicated column published July 14, 2003. NBC officials had previously said that Russert was "not a recipient of the leak."



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/10/MNGLG85BC11.DTL&type=printable

[jarnocan]

15. OMG! this should be

mandatory reading! That quote in the paper should be posted around!
Obviously this guy was in the 'know'. dang

[Tesla]

16. I have emailed it around to my friends, now I'm hitting the papers

[crispini]

17. Wow, the speech should be read in its entirety.

It's great. I like this quote:

You’ve probably all read books on leadership, 7 Habits of Successful People, or whatever. If you, as a member of bureaucracy, do not participate in a decision, you are not going to carry that decision out with the alacrity, the efficiency and the effectiveness you would if you had participated.

When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions on us out of the blue on that bureaucracy, you can’t expect that bureaucracy to carry your decision out very well and, furthermore, if you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in that bureaucracy, as they carry out your decision, you’re courting disaster.

And I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita and I could go on back, we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c925a686-40f4-11da-b3f9-00000e2511c8.html

[stevedeshazer]

18. And the last shred of decency Colin Powell had left swirls down the drain

<snip>

Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.

“He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The world's most "loyal soldier" encourages silence in the face of disaster, making him complicit and enables the treasonists.

I hope he goes down WITH them and stops going down ON them. :grr:

[Fly by night]

20. "It is the patriot's duty to protect his country from his government."

Tom Paine said that, not Colon Powell.

We don't need no steenkin' "loyal soldiers" helping prop up this fascist regime. And the longer Colon does that, the more he betrays his people (he and his family must be the 2% of Black folks who still support Bush) and his country.

[rateyes]

21. As always, Steve....

you are right on the money...Powell wears a "mask" of integrity...loyalty to a traitor makes one a traitor.

[KansDem]

29. I've been looking for a word to describe the Bush Junta.

You just gave it to me: "treasonists"

No doubt this word will become even more powerful after the (suspected by most) indictments are handed down. We should began peppering the Internet and car bumpers with this word.

Thanks! :hi:

[stevedeshazer]

31. Glad it works for you

:hi:

[Peace Patriot]

22. Truly a blistering criticism of the Bush junta, and he isn't very kind to

...his former boss either--seemingly. He seems to damn Powell with faint praise (a "loyal soldier" who saw them putting the U.S. in great danger and still won't speak out) but doesn't go quite as far as he does with Rice (a Bush ass-kissing toady--to paraphrase).

It's possible that Wilkerson has just had it up to here with the Bushites and is speaking his mind (now that Fitzgerald has paved the way), but my first hit on this speech was that it is the opening shot in a Republican strategy to separate Bush's foreign policy disasters from their cruel, fascist, unbelievably greedy financial policy, in order to preserve the cruel, fascist, unbelievable looting of our government and of the poor. Those bad old neocons have led their clueless president down the garden path of mass slaughter, torture and crime, but we still have the bankruptcy bill and gas price gouging and windfalls for the super-rich and draconian cuts to programs that help everybody else.

He does at least mention Katrina--so his focus is not entirely foreign policy--but his criticism is more of Cheney's "Dark Vader" style of governing with regard to foreign policy ("off with their heads" to anyone, even knowledgeable bureaucrats and professionals, who voice contrary opinions), rather than fundamental questioning of the neocons' goals (would it have been any better to bludgeon Iraq with everybody's consent?), and has nothing to say about massive looting of the federal treasury by entities like Halliburton nor the impacts of that looting and other policies on the poor and middle class.

Let's just put a better Republican manager in charge, he seems to be saying--someone who knows what he's doing in foreign policy, someone who is better at persuading subordinates--and all will be well.

And, of course, given the new control over vote tabulation by far rightwing corporations, Diebold and ES&S--with SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code in the new electronic voting systems--as the underpinning of their power, they (the Republicans, the miltary/corporate establishment, the super-rich) can do that. They can remove Cheney, prop up Bush Jr., install a new VP more to their liking (a better CEO), and "select" that person in '08.

I had thought it would be a War Democrat, but I may be wrong. This Republican VP strategy mentioned in the blogs recently fits their utter arrogance--as if they can just substitute one Republican corporate shill for another, just as a board of directors might remove a CEO who isn't squeezing and firing the real workers enough, and isn't larding the owners with enough profits--maybe kindly remove him, with a golden parachute, maybe not--and bring in some barracuda who will run things "more efficiently."

As if we, the people, could be made to just forget all that has gone before.

Well, as I said, maybe Wilkerson has just had it, and is just speaking his mind within the context he knows--that this utterly disastrous regime is plagued with toadyism and that's the problem. But we can be sure that some such strategy as I have outlined has been discussed and possibly decided upon in rightwing circles, and that "poor management" will be one of its "talking points."

And I'm not altogether certain that Powell was truly against Wilkerson speaking out; Powell is a very ambitious man, who may be thinking of himself as a candidate to replace Cheney and ascend to the crown in '08, and needs some rehab of his reputation in order to do that, and what better way than to have an aide plant the notion that his crimes with regard to the Iraq war are attributable to Cheney's poor management style?

That may be the purpose of Wilkerson's dissing of Rice as a toady--to harm a rival to Powell (for the slot of VP and future Diebold-selected president). Republicans ARE toadies. That is what they do. (Look at Bush's "pod people" in Congress--all speaking the same Rovian lines over and over!). So, it strikes me as--what?--an odd note, something that doesn't ring quite true, that a "good soldier" who won't speak out is better than a Bush ass-kisser. But Republicans will read this message differently than we would. Powell will not upset the super-rich and the powers-that-be but will run things better for them (as opposed to Rice, who is just too close to this "bad management")?

One other thing: Wilkerson holds up Bush Sr. as a model CEO (as compared to Bush Jr.). Ye gods.

[grace0418]

23. Except for when he calls George H. W. Bush "one of the finest

presidents we have ever had” I say "YOU GO LARRY!"

[PurityOfEssence]

27. Every little bit of this reeks of the truth

(Of course I totally disagree with his assessment of Poppy as a president, though, and I don't think Powell is praiseworthy for being a good soldier to murderous gangsters.)

To point out that it's Rumsfeld AND Cheney running the foreign policy is long overdue; it's pretty damned obvious.

The slap at Condi was masterful:

Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.

Euuuugh. Intimacy. Blah.

[dave123williams]

28. I would disagree with your assesment GHWB

He kept the world from degenerating in to total war after the collapse of the Soviets. He knew better than to go in to Bhagdad. He was able to build the first unanimous world-wide coaltion, ever.

His son, however, is a incompetent lout.

[npincus]

30. like the part where he unfavorably compares Dumbo 43 with Daddy 41:

Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.

“There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.”

[BamaBecky]

32. Why didn't he address all the OUTSIDE influences

on this administration. Correct me if I'm wrong, but his remarks seemed largely administrative. It seems to me to completely miss the point of the Corporate and Financial OUTSIDE influences on this Administration. His focus seemed short sighted to me.

Bama

[roseBudd]

34. a yahoo link to vote up

same story, already most popular woo hoo

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usdiplomacypowell;_ylt=AqeYhVlwJfVXdFfje5ZzGE.s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3ODdxdHBhBHNlYwM5NjQ-

[judaspriestess]

35. lovely, CHRISTIANS FROM HELL n/t