Those who fail to remember the past… (Nuremberg series returns next week).
August 6, 2008

 
Share

Please REGISTER to post comments or be notified by e-mail every time this Blog is updated! Firefox/IE7 users can use RSS for a browser link that lists the latest posts!

 

WRITERS WANTED – Keeping this blog current can be a bigger job than for just one person. “Mugsy’s Rap Sheet” is looking for VOLUNTEER guest writers to contribute to our blog to help make it worth visiting more than once a week. To contact us, please send an email to the address on our About Us page along with a sample and/or link to your writing skills. – Mugsy

 
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

That’s not the actual quote by the way. The exact quote is:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, American philosopher – (1863-1952)

I’m often astounded by just how short the public’s collective memory is. This is one of the reasons why I created the BI30 Video Archive on YouTube in addition to our original “Bush in 30 Seconds” Archive. The mission of the BI30 Video Archive is to “get it on the record”, documenting comments or events, so that when some uninformed idiot says something patently false, there’s a place where you can pull up a video proving/showing otherwise.

Such was the case earlier this past week when the McCain campaign accused Senator Obama of “playing the race card from the bottom of the deck” (does anyone ever play “the race card” from the top of the deck? Whatever.) Such was the offensiveness of this slander, that I was forced to add a new category… “Deception”… to our “Master List of McCain Flip Flops & Gaffes”:

Deception: The McCain campaign was quick to jump on comments by Senator Obama at a July 31st campaign rally:
 

OBAMA: “[They say:] You know, ‘He’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name.’ You know, ‘He doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.‘”

By saying “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills“, the McCain campaign suggested Obama was “playing the race card”, indirectly accusing the Obama campaign of racism. When in fact, it was the McCain campaign who, in a TV ad just last June, ran a commercial replacing every president on Mt. Rushmore with the face of Senator Obama, and replacing the image of Ben Franklin on the $100 bill with Obama’s image as well. It was this ad that Senator Obama was referring to during his widely criticized comment.

The media when into full “hysterics” mode when the McCain camp cried “race card”, and *every* Sunday Network News Talkshow (“Fox News Sunday”, “Meet the Press”, “Face the Nation” and “This Week”) ended up talking about “did Senator Obama inject race into the campaign?” Not once did I hear *anyone* remember the McCain’s ad from barely six weeks earlier that Senator Obama was clearly referring to. It was Bloggers who quickly pointed out that it was McCain and not Obama that first injected “race” into the public debate with their “Mt. Rushmore” ad. Unfortunately, where a Google News search on “McCain ad” “race” “dollar bills” (no mention of the McCain ad) returns literally THOUSANDS of hits to stories accusing Senator Obama of “playing the race card”, with almost as many polls showing how that widespread belief has hurt Obama in the polls, a Google search on the words McCain, Rushmore, and “dollar bills” (“Rushmore” inserted to limit results to those mentioning the McCain ad) returns just three hits, one of which is the Huffington Post, which first broke the story.

Back in 2004, investigative author Ron Suskind uncovered documents from the Pentagon dated March 5, 2001 entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts” that clearly divvied up Iraq’s oilfields among the different U.S. and British oil companies.

On Tuesday, Suskind reveals in his latest book, “The Way of the World”, that The Bush Administration ordered the CIA to draft a phony letter from lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta to Saddam Hussein in order to cook up a nonexistent link between Iraq and 9/11.

Naturally, the White House denies this event ever took place. But keep in mind that prior to the invasion of Iraq and as recently as late 2007, Vice President Cheney was still repeating the debunked rumor that Atta met with Iraqi Intelligence in Prague. So pardon me if I question the sincerity of the Bush White House when they deny trying to link Atta to Iraq.

Also mentioned in Suskind’s book, the revelation that the Iraqi intelligence chief Tahir Habbush provided British intelligence evidence that Iraq had no WMD’s. The Bush Administration dismissed Habbush as “unreliable” and his claims of “no WMD’s” out of hand.

This brings up a serious question: We know of the infamous 2002 “Downing Street Memo”, where, in the recorded minutes of a meeting between President Bush in the London home of Prime Minister Tony Blair:

“There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action [against Iraq] was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.“

Then there is the “White House Memo” where Bush & Blair discussed painting an American U2 spyplane in UN colors and flying it over Iraq in hopes of luring Saddam into firing upon it, giving them an excuse for war.

And here we have the “Habbush” revelation where he provided British intelligence with evidence Iraq had no WMD’s prior to the invasion of Iraq. So the question becomes:

We know why President Bush was eager to invade Iraq and of his willingness to trump up an excuse for invading the country, but why was Tony Blair so willing to go along with it? This was Bush’s vendetta, not Blair’s. What was in it for him that he was so willing to overlook the Bush Administrations’ obvious eagerness to manufacture a false case for war?

Anywho… the collective memory of the American public seems to rival that of a week-old goldfish. It is the duty of The Media to keep the story straight and in context because the masses seem incapable of doing so on their own. But as we have seen, the Media also seems to suffer from the same case of journalistic-Alzheimers. So I guess it is up to WE, the bloggers, to do their jobs for them.

“Those who do not remember history…”, right?

Share

August 6, 2008 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: Politics

Leave a Reply