Unlike that old Julie Roberts movie, the enemy this time isn't some controlling freak with a penchant for too easy apologies and red roses. Nope. This time the enemy is our military industrial base, the old friend, lover, who turns out to be the wife beater in the end.

I wasn't a big impeachment fan until the last few days....Then this nonsense started. Bush is going to veto SCHIP which has relatively large bi-partisan support. It's a good, fair, just policy that is probably the only decent legislation to come out of congress in the last 6 years. That's just ugly. But not unusual. There is still the horrific violation of civil liberties with the continued suspension of Habeaus Corpus, the eviscerated FISA program and the off the books crap that is certainly happening with extraordinary rendition which has not yet been formally repudiated and, of course, the detainees at Gitmo who live in a kind of sense deprived vacuum. That's bad and ugly and impeachable all by itself. But is it enough to pull the trigger?

Lost in the brou ha ha over the Moveon.org's ad criticizing a single misguided general's lies and distortions about Iraq, is the testimony of twenty U.S. Generals who didn't betray us, but demanded a diplomatic 'surge' and political solution to Iraq as well as bringing the troops home--not unlike Moveon.org's position.

Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in nightmarish dystopian fiction, like "1984," or in fevered passages from Dostoevsky—or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.

The moral vacuum of Iraq—where Blackwater USA guards can kill 10 or 20 Iraqis on a whim and never be prosecuted for it—did not happen by accident. It is yet another example of something the Bush administration could have prevented with the right measures but simply did not bother about as it rushed into invading and occupying another country.

This is a short, but I think important diary. Sifting through my comments on my diary about Petraeus's failures yesterday, I found this jewel linking to a Petraeus thread in Jeffrey Feldman's diary from Jiminy Cricket. The gist of it is, the "Betray Us" nickname came from troops who served under Petraeus.

Note: I posted this a day ago on General Petraeus. It made diary rescue last night and, I guess because of the relevance, I've had a few requests for a re-post. I don't know what the net-tiquette is for such a thing, but here it is

That General Petraeus has been shucking and jiving about Iraq for the last 3-4 years is probably pretty well known for those of us who follow these things. As one accute commentator put it, "He is the man the president chose for the public to believe in, now that they are done believing in George W. Bush."

What's less well known --and what's a far more serious matter than his obvious prevarications and fudging of casuality statistics-- is that General Petraeus's policies have been fueling the disastrous civil war in Iraq.

Note: This diary has been re-posted. If you like it, you can recommend  it here ...

That General Petraeus has been shucking and jiving about Iraq for the last 3-4 years is probably pretty well known for those of us who follow these things. As one accute commentator put it, "He is the man the president chose for the public to believe in, now that they are done believing in George W. Bush."

What's less well known --and what's a far more serious matter than his obvious prevarications and fudging of casuality statistics-- is that General Petraeus's policies have been fueling the disastrous civil war in Iraq.

From TPM
Public Approval numbers in Pakistan for a few international political figures ...

Osama bin Laden (46%)

Pervez Musharraf (38%)

George W. Bush (9%)

That pretty much sums up where the US is in Iraq as well. Will someone please
call General "Surge" BetrayUs and tell him we're no longer in need of his services? Just a quick voice mail, nothing mean  (he's apparently very sensitive).

For a long time after World War II, and then for a long time after the 9/11 debacle, everyone was supposed to play kid gloves with the U.S. military command. To doubt their opinions was tantamount to being anti-American. They were privy to top secret classified information that made their decisions unquestionable, precisely because you, the mere public, could'n't possibly know what they knew. In many ways, the CIA and the various alphabet agencies that represent our intelligence community still lay claim to that same rare super duper top secret info that supposedly gives them the edge in any debate. We are to treat military commanders with deferrence.  To suggest that these high ranking officials might put political considerations over principal or that their judgment was necessarily warped by their position was --gasp-- treacherous.

Today Larry Craig did probably the only thing he really could do considering Mitt Romney had thrown him under the bus, his own party had thrown him under the bus, and even his state's governor didn't have a good word to say about him. But I think it really is surprising the level of vitriol that the Republicans have unleashed on this man. Now, of course, it's entirely predictable and entirely utilitarian. Vitter must be at least as embarassing, but two things work in his favor:
 1) He was fucking women
 2) If he walks, a Democrat will take his seat, if Craig walks, a Republican gets appointed.

And that brings up the second thing I'd like to talk about:  this fill in for Craig.

This morning's Washington Postdropped a small bombshell that's seems to be slipping away under the weight of Bush's non bailout, bailout.

Namely, someone -- we don't know who -- but we've got some pretty good hunches -- someone has been telling lies again.

Of course, this happened in the Royal Court of the US GreenZone where apparently only pro war zealots and Republicans are supposed to lurk. Only, Of late, the Democrats have been arriving, wanting to get a look see for themselves. Only, the Pentagon (or some interested party, we're not saying who) doesn't seem to want the Democrats to learn much. They're only shown the best rooms, facing the most excellent desert view, and apparently someone (we're not saying who) is handing out hundreds of 'talking points' pamphlets, about what to say AND which way these Democratic political entities lean--kind of like classic oppo research for someone on a political team, and not, for example, rank and file soldiers in the middle of an occupying military base in the middle of a very hostile country. At least that's how we thought this kind of stuff was supposed to work. Guess not.

That was the headline for the lead editorial of The Times-Picayune, New Orleans paper. The editorial chided the Bush administration for giving Republican-dominated Mississippi a share of federal money that it said was disproportionate to the lesser impact the storm had there than in largely Democratic Louisiana. "We ought to get no less help from our government than any other victims of this disaster," it said.

Moral Relativism was the big, bad bugaboo of the Right during the 80s and 90s.

A moral relativist argues that neither divine revelation, nor human reason nor natural law can provide a path to certain truth. This infuriated many people on the right who thought God or a close facsimile ought to get final dibs on what's right. This infuriated many on the left who thought that the rule of law and human reason should prevail.

Stanley Fish something of a moral relativist out of Duke University underwent a deluge of protests when he noted his philosophical position in the context of the 9/11 attacks:

Michael Moore is a flame throwing TERRORiST. Well, actually a revolutionary, but that’s close enough for these paranoid times. String him up, send him to Gitmo! His latest movie, SiCKO is the last straw. How can he expect folks to get free healthcare if our HMOs are to continue to be supported? Doesn’t he know that their CEOs alone - even for so called non-profits -- pull down nearly a million a year? Wake up and smell the moolah, fat dude.

Well, actually a revolutionary, but that’s close enough for these paranoid times. String him up, send him to Gitmo! How can he expect folks to get FREE healthcare if our HMOs are to continue to be supported? Doesn’t he know that CEOs alone - even for so called non-profits -- pull down nearly a million a year? Wake up and smell the moolah, fat dude.

Amazingly, or perhaps not, given the state of our nation, after his son's death, among the hundreds of messages that Andrew Bacevich and his wife received, two held him personally culpable, insisting that his public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that his son's death came as a direct result of his antiwar writings.

Below the fold, Bacevich responds:  

Underlying both American’s sense of innocence and the idea of an exceptional destiny and purpose is America’s religiosity. Has ever a country been more religious? According to Samuel Huntington writing for a recent American Heritage Foundation report overwhelming majorities of Americans affirm religious beliefs.

When asked in 1999 whether they believed in God, or a universal spirit, or neither, 86 percent of those polled said they believed in God, 8 percent in a universal spirit, and 5 percent in neither. When asked in 2003 simply whether they believed in God or not, 92 percent said yes. In a series of 2002–03 polls, 57 to 65 percent of Americans said religion was very important in their lives, 23 to 27 percent said fairly important, and 12 to 18 percent said not very important. In 1996, 39 percent of Americans said they believed the Bible is the actual word of God and should be taken literally; 46 percent said they believed the Bible is the word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally word for word; just 13 percent said it is not the word of God.

Closely tied to the notion of American innocence is a sense of our exceptional character. We believe we are an exceptional people, as George Will is often at pains to point out, we’re the only country founded on an ideal—actually a series of ideals. G. K. Chesterton put it this way:

"America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence."

Seymour Lipset has noted that this 'Creed' is really "liberalism in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century meanings". It was "essentially the rebellion . . . against the monarchical and aristocratic state--against hereditary privilege, against restrictions on bargains." He argues, that the spirit of America was essentially--and exceptionally -- anarchistic.

"It was anti-State."