Random Thoughts on Other Notable Headlines of the Day — Issue XIII

April 29, 2009

• In this article by Porter J. Goss, Director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006, he talks about the need to consider security before politics. Goss is referring to the recent release of documents on the torture issue. Being a Republican, naturally he is defending the processes that were used to interrogate prisoners, and insisting that for security reasons the documents should not have been revealed. I most certainly agree with Goss that politics should never, ever come before security. However, there is a down side to this policy. Knowing that such actions can be hid under the guise of national security, and that they, the offenders, will be protected under that guise, will always be a security blanket (no pun intended) for them to go as far as they wish with no fear of accountability. Therefore, the question becomes what qualifies as national security and what doesn’t? Vice-President Dick Chaney, and at times, President Bush, unlawfully used that security blanket to their advantage. So if we want to bring everything under that blanket, I suppose the next time we want to torture someone, we can just bring in their children and threaten to kill them if the “prisoner” doesn’t tell us what we want to hear, whether what we want to hear is the truth or not.
• The global financial chiefs met this past Saturday “to reshape the International Monetary Fund“. They want to become a “bolder IMF”. Naturally something has to be done to bring our own financial chiefs under control, but what I fear is that we will only be shifting the headquarters where financial monsters do business. The IMF and the World Bank is already under attack. Also on Saturday, protestors caused over a hundred thousand dollars in damages to two domestic bank branches in Washington, although the attacks were aimed at the IMF and the World Bank. If these two entities become the worlds financial police department, they’d better be prepared to deal with a much more violent society (than we are here in America) if they decide to cater to the wealthy & wealthy corporations while leaving out the commoners like our bankers have done. Compared to commoners in many countries, we Americans are nothing but pacifist weaklings.
• Cheney for President — Ross Douthat’s title to his latest Op-Ed column. In it he says the “vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism” [bold added]. That bears repeating; tax cuts and pre-emptive warfare. Douthat references a part of the series “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency” to support what he says. That segment points out that Cheney met with Republican leaders in 2003 to sell them on the economic centerpiece of President Bush’s first term, which was a $674 billion tax cut. Got that? A 674 billion dollar tax cut, of which not a single penny went to the common people. (This was on top of the $1.3 trillion tax cut Bush got passed in 2001/2002.) At the same time Cheney wanted “deep reductions in the capital gains tax on investments”. Surprisingly Bush rejected that. Can anyone imagine what kind of damage Cheney could and would do to America if he were President? We’d be wishing Bush was back in office.