Right-wing bloggers and pundits spread lie about First Lady Michelle Obama and books in the White House Library. The lie originated with the Christian Broadcasting Network, who has either never read the commandment about baring false witness or are practitioners of right-wing Christianism - a cult-like deviant variation on true Christian values. A thourough debunking of CBN's hate mongering gossip here - Forensic analysis of propaganda: “Michelle Obama Keeps Socialist Books in the White House”. Most of the books in the White House including the ones about black nationalism were in the library while Bush was president - More Shocking White House Library Books!
There's also ... The Autobiography of Malcolm X! Oh my God! The Obamas are socialists and militant black nationalists. That New Yorker cover was true! Oh, wait a second — that photo was taken on December 18, 2008, before the Obamas moved into the White House. So, George W. Bush was a militant black nationalist? We're confused now."Conservatives Unveil ‘Mount Vernon Statement’ — Declare That America’s ‘Founding Ideas’ Are ‘Under Sustained Attack’ - If the Nobel committee gave an award for bulls*it, Conservatism would be buried under it.
Conservatism has moved further and further to the Right - a trend started under Nixon - that it no longer contains any actual conservatism. Republican have become - take your choice - the party of ultra-nationalism or soft fascism - it is devoid of any of the Founder's ideal of enlightened democratic republic ideals. Dick Cheney was a despicable example of that uber nationalism and shallow patriotism as VP and dispute the utter failure of his ideas, has the robotic tendency to preach and repeat the same mistakes over and over, Cheney's War - He's fighting not Obama but his own, long-lost battles. By Fred Kaplan
"It's very important," Cheney said, "to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, 'This is not a criminal act. … That was an act of war.' "
But, in fact, this distinction has never been so clear-cut or mutually exclusive, not even during Cheney's time as vice president after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a plane with a shoe-bomb three months after 9/11, was found guilty in a civilian court and is now serving a life sentence in a maximum-security federal prison. His prosecution occurred during George W. Bush's presidency.
Karl asked Cheney how the Reid case was different from Abdulmutallab's. Cheney replied that Reid "pled guilty," so there was no need for a trial of one sort of another. This response skirted the issue of whether Reid should have been brought before a federal judge in the first place.
Then Karl, who'd done his homework, went further and quoted the statement read by Reid's sentencing judge. "You are not an enemy combatant," the judge told the would-be bomber. "You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature." Is that a good point? Karl asked Cheney.
"I don't think so," Cheney replied. The judge's reasoning implied that these are "individual criminal acts," he said. Once they're called "acts of war," we can draw on "a much broader range of tools" to go after the combatants—including military force, punishing those who offer terrorist networks safe haven, money, weapons, or training.
There are at least three problems with Cheney's response. First, nothing said by Reid's judge, or by anyone else in this debate, suggests or implies that these attacks were "individual criminal acts." In fact, many defendants have been convicted in federal courts for aiding and abetting terrorist organizations.
Second, trying these people in criminal courts—treating them in a legal forum as thugs, not soldiers—in no way precludes the administration from going after their organizations with the full range of the U.S. government's power, as, indeed, Presidents Obama, Clinton, and, yes, George W. Bush have done.
This leads to the third problem: The Bush administration, in which Cheney so actively served, held the very same "mind-set" that Cheney finds so disturbing in Obama.
From 2001-08, according to the Bush/Cheney Justice Department's own data, 512 individuals were charged with terrorist-related crimes and, as of 2008 (i.e., when Bush was still president), Justice had won 319 convictions. (Most of the remaining cases had yet to come to trial.)
Human Rights First has parsed and updated this data and concluded that, as of June 2009, 195 of those convictions were in cases where the defendant proclaimed ties to al-Qaida or some other Islamist or jihadist terrorist group.
How many terrorists did the Bush/Cheney administration bring before military tribunals? Three. And only one of them was sentenced to life in prison. The other two were allowed to serve out their sentences at home—one in Australia, the other in Yemen—both while Bush was still president.
In other words, the vast bulk of terrorist cases were handled by the civilian criminal courts—in the Bush and Obama administrations—in part because they have proved much more successful than the still-fledgling system of military tribunals.
Cheney claimed on ABC that "we"—meaning he and George W. Bush—"were successful for seven and a half years in avoiding a further major attack against the United States" precisely because they treated terrorism as a "war" and its practitioners as "enemy combatants."
Yet as its own data clearly show, the Bush administration did no such thing. Or, rather, Bush and his Justice Department officials saw no contradiction between fighting a "war on terrorism" while, quite often, trying the terrorists as criminals.
And here is where it's worth wondering: Just who or what does Dick Cheney represent?
The standard view is that he was the vice president of the previous Republican administration; and, though it's unusual (and a bit un-classy) for someone of his standing to speak out so vehemently against his immediate successor, it is without question newsworthy.
But here is what's really going on. It's not so much that Cheney, the former Republican vice president, is railing against Obama, the standing Democratic president. It's that he's refighting the battles that he decisively lost within his own administration and party.
Cheney admitted as much in the ABC interview. Karl quoted from a 2006 Justice Department report that boasted about how many individuals the Bush administration had indicted and convicted for terrorist-related crimes. And Cheney replied, "Well, we didn't all agree with that."
