Paul Craig Roberts pulls no punches in describing the fascists currently in power and the fascists who may follow

Does The Brownshirt Party Have Aces Up Its Sleeve?

By Paul Craig Roberts

The Brownshirt Party has chosen John “hundred year war” McCain as its presidential candidate. Except for Cheney, Norman Podhoretz, and billy kristol, McCain is America’s greatest warmonger.

In a McCain Regime, Cheney will be back in office with another stint as Secretary of War. Norman “Bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran” Podhoretz will be Undersecretary for Nuclear War with General John “Nuke them” Shalikashvili as his deputy. Rudy Giuliani will be the Minister of Interior in charge of Halliburton’s detention centers into which will be herded all critics of war and the police state. billy kristol will be chief White House spokesliar.

The whole gang will be back--Wolfowitz, Perle, Wurmster, Feith, Libby, Bolton. America will have a second chance to bomb the world into submission.

With the majority of voters sick of war, sick of lies, sick of fraud from the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, and sick of stagnant and falling incomes, McCain is poised to capture 20% of the vote--the Christian Zionists, the rapture evangelicals, and the diehard macho flag-waving thugs who believe America is done for unless “Islamofacists” are exterminated.

The accumulated lies, deceptions, war crimes, the shame of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, Bush’s police state assault on civil liberty, countless numbers of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children murdered for the sake of American and Israeli hegemony, and the collapsing US economy indicate a political wipeout for the Brownshirt Party. In a country with an informed and humane population, the Republican Party would be reduced to such a small minority that it could never recover.

What will happen in America? Polls show that Americans have had it with Bush, and the 2006 congressional election showed that the voters have had it with Republicans. But the Republicans have seen the message and ignored it, and the people and the Democrats have continued to tolerate and to enable that which they claim to oppose.

Meanwhile Bush holds on to his determination to find a way to bomb Iran, dismissing along with the neocons the unanimous NIE report that there is no Iranian weapons program, just as Bush and the neocons dismissed the Iraq weapons inspectors who reported truthfully that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. What the American people and the Democrats have not understood is that a party with an agenda could care less for the facts. As Lenin declared, truth is what serves the agenda.

The Democrats are far from pure, but they lack the fervor and determination that only ideology can provide. The Democrats might have issue-specific ideologies, but they lack an over-arching ideology that makes it imperative for them, and only them, to be in power.

In contrast, the Brownshirt Party is fueled by the neocon ideology of American (and Israeli) supremacy. The neocon ideology of supremacy is more far-reaching than Hitler’s. Hitler merely aimed for sway over Europe and Russia. The neocons have targeted the entire world.

Neocons have prepared plans for war against China. They are ringing Russia with military facilities and paying millions of dollars to leaders of former constituent parts of the Soviet Union to sign up with NATO, which the neocons have turned into a mechanism for drafting Europeans to serve American Empire.

All this work, the neocon Project for a New American Century, the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the demonization of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, the ghettoization of the West Bank and Gaza, the police state measures that Bush has succeeded in putting on the books, the concentration of power in the executive branch, these are successes from which the Brownshirts will not walk away.

Possibly the neocons and their Brownshirt followers are so delusional that they do not realize that their glorious aims are not shared. Maybe they are no different from Americans, maxed out on credit and unable to make mortgage payments, who believe that next week they will win the lotto.

On the other hand maybe the Brownshirts have a plan.

What could the plan be?

They can steal the election with the Diebold electronic voting machines and proprietary software that no one is allowed to check. There are now enough elections on record with significant divergences between exit polls and vote tallies that a stolen election can be explained away. The Democrats have been house trained to acquiesce to stolen elections. The voters, whose votes are stolen, dismiss the evidence as “conspiracy theories.”

Or what about a well-timed orchestrated “terrorist attack” to drive fearful Americans to the war candidate. False flag events are stock-in-trade. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to turn German democracy into a dictatorship overnight.

And what about the widespread spying on Americans? The Bush regime’s explanation for its violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes no sense. Bush’s violation of the law is clearly a felony, grounds for impeachment, arrest, indictment, and a prison sentence. Moreover, no intelligence purpose was achieved by Bush’s illegal acts. The FISA law only requires the executive branch to come to a secret court to explain its purpose and obtain a warrant. The law even allows the executive branch to spy first and obtain the warrant afterward. The purpose of the warrant is to prevent an administration from spying for political purposes. The only reason for Bush to refuse to obtain warrants is that he had no valid reason for the spying.

Does this mean that during the presidential campaign we will hear from Attorney General Michael Mukasey that candidate Hillary is under investigation for a Whitewater related offense, or that candidate Obama is linked to an alleged crime figure or Islamist?

The neocons control most of the print and TV media, and the right-wing radio talk hosts are no friends of Democrats. As Americans have fallen for every other fraud perpetrated upon them, they are likely to be suckers as well for “investigations” or rumors of investigations of the Democratic candidate. Hillary is widely disliked and easy to distrust. Obama is a new face with which voters have little experience. He is partly black and has a funny name.

John McCain is a war hero, a graduate of the US Naval Academy. His father and grandfather were admirals. On his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam in one of America’s orchestrated wars, he was shot down and injured. A POW for 5.5 years, he was tortured by communists due in part to traitorous actions by Democrats like Jane Fonda.

McCain has been in Congress and thus in the public eye since 1983. The only scandal with which he is associated is that he was one of “the Keating five,” one of five senators associated through campaign contributions with S&L owner and real estate investor Charles Keating and alleged interveners in his behalf. Keating was framed by prosecutors, but was later exonerated by a federal judge.

Adolf Hitler never had the support of a majority of the German electorate. In the November 1932 election, he received 33.1 percent of the vote. His peak was March 6, 1933, with 43.9 percent following the Reichstag fire a few days before on February 27, blamed on the communists. Hitler’s minority support in a democracy did not prevent him from becoming dictator of Germany.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.

Original article posted here.

The end of Ghouliani and the politics of fear

Rudy defeat marks end of 9/11 politics

By: Ben Smith and David Paul Kuhn

Giuliani's failure will force a major shift in Republican campaigns, some GOP strategists said. Photo: AP

Rudy Giuliani's distant third-place finish in Florida may put an end to his bid for president, and it seems also to mark the beginning of the end of a period in Republican politics that began on Sept. 11, 2001.

Giuliani's national celebrity was based on his steady, comforting appearance in Americans' living rooms amid the terrorist attacks, and his campaign for president never found a message beyond that moment.

The emotional connection he forged that day, it seems, has proved politically worthless. After months of wonder that the former mayor seemed to have no ceiling to his support, he turned out to have no floor, trading fourth-place finishes with Ron Paul, a little-known Texas congressman.

"There's a paradox for Rudy," said former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission. "One of the things he did very well on 9/11 was say, 'We've got to get back to normal.' And that's what's happened. We've gotten back to normal."

Giuliani's failure reflects a broader shift in the American landscape, in which Sept. 11 has so diminished as an emotional touchstone that neither The Gallup Organization nor The Pew Research Center has even polled Americans about the attacks for a half year.

"We have 9/11 fatigue in the United States," said Mitchell Moss, a professor at New York University and an adviser to Giuliani's successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a technocrat who has focused on the future, and away from 9/11 and terrorism-related concerns.

Giuliani isn't the only one who suffered from the declining salience of the terror attacks. The Partnership for a Secure America, a bipartisan group that's still pressing to fulfill the recommendations of the 2004 9/11 Commission Report, announced Tuesday that it had produced a 30-second television advertisement to remind Americans of the threat of nuclear terrorism. A country that was brought to war less than five years ago in part by the specter of a "smoking gun" in the form of "a mushroom cloud" now needs reminding that the threat even exists.

"The American attention span has always been very short," former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, the former chairman of the commission and an adviser to the Partnership, told Politico.

When Gallup last asked about Sept. 11, in the summer of 2007, only 43 percent of Americans considered the war in Iraq "to be part of the war on terrorism which began on Sept. 11, 2001." Four years earlier, in the summer of 2003, 57 percent of Americans believed the war in Iraq was related to the Sept. 11 attacks.

It was that perception shift that made a Sept. 11 campaign far more effective in 2004 than in 2008. The image of George W. Bush standing amidst the rubble of the World Trade Center gave the Bush campaign an anchor to effectively tout their candidate's leadership qualities.

But in the ensuing years — as the war in Iraq plummeted in popularity, concern over imminent attacks ebbed, and Americans became increasingly worried about the economy — the evocative image of Giuliani managing a city under attack became less and less relevant.

The Giuliani campaign failed to shift with the country. Last year, as Sept. 11 was receding from the American zeitgeist, Giuliani's strategists made his performance that day the bedrock of his campaign.

"They never made the pivot from success as a leader after 9/11 in New York to the ability to make success as a leader in federal or national government," said Matt Dowd, the chief strategist for George W. Bush's 2004 campaign. "They over relied on 9/11. There was no reason to talk about that. It was baked into his DNA. What they had to do was to make the transition from why what he did in the aftermath of 9/11 why that would make him a great leader at the time of any situation."

Instead, Giuliani managed to do something that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: He turned 9/11 into a punch line. The late-night television riffs bubbled into prime time during a Democratic debate in October, when Sen. Joe Biden dismissed the former mayor scornfully.

"There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11," Biden said.

Giuliani's campaign tried in vain to awaken the country to the urgency of terrorism with a television ad released Jan. 2, which featured chanting terrorist hordes and the images of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Osama bin Laden. Another ad, released Jan. 18, flashed an image of the ruined Twin Towers.

"When the world wavered and history hesitated, he never did," said the narrator.

His ads, though, drew more snide jokes than votes, and he closed out his campaign in Florida on the relatively anodyne question of insurance policy.

After growing accustomed to tapping into fears of terrorism and faith in Republican strength, Giuliani's failure will force a major shift in Republican campaigns, some GOP strategists said.

"Between the trauma of 9/11 and the civil war we had over the present policy in the Gulf — people have reached a point where they're just exhausted by it. I think that's a terrible, terrible thing," said Rick Wilson, a Florida-based GOP adman who produced perhaps the iconic post-9/11 television ad: Saxby Chambliss' searing attack on the willingness of Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, a Vietnam War hero, to keep America safe — a spot illustrated with the visages of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

"Americans want to watch 'America's Top Model' — and they really, really don't want to be reminded that bad people want to kill them," said Wilson, who worked for Giuliani's 2000 Senate campaign and advised him informally this year. "Talking about 9/11 now is like 'Remember the Maine.'"

Original article posted here.

To know him is to despise him . . .

Giuliani trailing on home ground: poll

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is trailing in the race for the Republican presidential nomination even on his home turf of New York state, a new poll showed on Monday.

The WNBC/Marist poll ahead of the February 5 primaries in New York showed 34 percent of registered Republicans support John McCain, compared to 23 percent for Giuliani. Among Republicans likely to vote, McCain kept his 34 percent support, while Giuliani was tied in second place with Mitt Romney at 19 percent.

McCain's campaign has been boosted by wins in New Hampshire and South Carolina in the state-by-state race to pick the two candidates to contest the November 4 election to succeed President George W. Bush.

Giuliani, whose once large lead in national polls has evaporated, largely bypassed early voting states and focused on Florida, which votes on January 29.

As the former New York mayor who won national recognition in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Giuliani would hope for a strong showing in New York.

But the poll showed 46 percent of registered Republicans in New York think Arizona Sen. McCain is the Republican most likely to beat the Democratic candidate in November. Nineteen percent saw former Massachusetts Gov. Romney as the most electable and 15 percent picked Giuliani as most electable.

Another local politician, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, appeared to be in a strong position ahead of the New York primary for the Democratic Party nomination.

The poll showed her with the support of 48 percent of Democrats likely to vote in the primary, followed by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama with 32 percent.

The survey of 1,467 New York state registered voters was conducted January 15-17, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent, the poll said.

Neither party has established a clear front-runner, as the first major state-by-state battles produced multiple winners.

Responding to the New York poll, the Guiliani campaign issued a statement from New York Republican Rep. Peter King saying the former mayor would win in the state. "The people of New York know better than anyone that Rudy is the bold and gutsy leader our country needs right now to tackle the tough challenges," King said.

Original article posted here.

Ghouliani: A great candidate to follow the Bush Moron and criminal cabal

Ghouliani going bust

Top Giuliani staffers to go without pay

Top Giuliani staffers are going without a salary in January, CNN has learned.

MYRTLE BEACH, South Carolina (CNN) — CNN has learned that top staff members of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign were asked to work without pay for the month of January, and perhaps longer, so that campaign resources could be focused on the Florida Republican presidential primary.

Two sources in the campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity, insisted the campaign was not in dire financial straits. A third campaign source, however, said "things are starting to get tight" and that "it was more telling than asking" the senior staff to forgo paychecks beginning the first of the year.

Another source disagreed, saying it was a "voluntary" move by senior staff members "so all of our resources could be targeted toward Florida…Our campaign is not living hand to mouth right now…"

The officials did not immediately provide a number of staffers who were subject to the new policy. Nor would campaign officials disclose the amount of money the campaign had in the bank.

Original article posted here.

Rudy's 911 Disaster

Fearmongering 101 by Ghouliani

Democracy breaking out in Georgia at Ghouliani, NWO and echoing media's expense

Jackass Ghouliani, slave to military industrial complex, not satisfied with spending half the world's military expeditures, wants more

Giuliani advocates military build-up to counter Putin

Giuliani said a larger military will help counter Russian and Chinese influence.

OKATIE, South Carolina (CNN) – Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani on Friday advocated a strong military build-up by the United States as a bulwark against the oil-rich Russian President Vladimir Putin and his increasing consolidation of power in the country.

"The good part with Russia is we're not in a Cold War, there is no longer a Soviet empire, their desires are still of a matter of concern but they're not nearly what they used to be and we don't want to get ourselves back into that," said Giuliani, who described Putin as both "good and bad."

"Long term the way we prevent getting ourselves back into that, both with regard to Russia, and even China, is to become militarily even stronger."

The former New York City mayor was responding to a questioner at a town hall meeting who asked: "What are you going to do about Putin?"

Giuliani provided little detail on what being "stronger" would mean, other than saying the "best answer" to the Kremlin would be "a substantial increase in the size of our military."

He justified his claim, explaining that a robust military was the primary reason behind the United States' success in the Cold War. Giuliani said U.S. and European demilitarization after the two World Wars was a mistake that contributed to the growth of Nazism and communism, and he also criticized the post-Cold War peace dividend as "way too big."

Giuliani predicted Putin's "energy extortion" would create more global allies for the United States than it would for Russia.

Still, he said he would maintain a good economic relationship with Russia, but would criticize the Kremlin as needed.

"You keep pointing out the ways that which they are sliding back, because Putin is to some extent sliding back, and you keep making the world know that," he said.

The Putin question is partially moot on the campaign trail, because the Russian president's term expires next year, before Americans cast their ballots.

However, Putin's United Russia Party is expected to maintain its hold on power in this Sunday's Parliamentary elections, and it's been suggested Putin could play a role in the government even after he leaves the presidency.

Original article posted here

The Highlight of Joe Biden's Career: A one liner on Ghouliani

But not if you listen to Joe tell it. Introducing the most absurd political ad of all time:

Ghouliani's more bullshitting on 911 (and he hasn't begun to come clean yet) And reveals the farce, sham and complicity of the US selection

MSNBC: Leaked memos show Giuliani's ignorance of terrorism before 9/11

Mike Aivaz and Muriel Kane

David Shuster, substituting for Keith Olbermann as host of Countdown, reported on Thursday that Rudy Giuliani's description of himself as the only candidate who foresaw the danger posed by al Qaeda before 9/11 has now been refuted by a leaked document.

Typical of Giuliani's claims on the campaign trail is a speech he gave last summer in which he said of the pre-9/11 period, "Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn't hear it. ... I thought it was pretty clear at the time -- but a lot of people didn't see it, couldn't see it."

Wayne Barrett, a reporter for New York's Village Voice and author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, has now obtained leaked memos describing Giuliani's testimony before the 9/11 Commission which directly contradict that claim.

Barrett told Shuster that taken as a whole, Giuliani's testimony "was a confession of ignorance. He basically said, 'I knew nothing about al Qaeda.'"

For example, Giuliani acknowledged that even though he had received information on threats between 1998 and 2001, "At the time I had no idea it was al Qaeda." He further told the commission that after 9/11, "we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda. ... We had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake."

Giuliani's testimony, like that of other witnesses describing New York City's response on 9/11, was supposed to remain secret until after the 2008 presidential election.

Barrett also emphasized Giuliani's continuing ignorance of technological systems involved in the fight against terrorism. As late as April 2004, when he testified before the commission, Giuliani admitted that he didn't know much about a New York Police Department system called ComStat -- which he's now saying he'd like to see extended nationwide. He was also unable to answer questions about the malfunctioning radios which caused many deaths among firefighters or about a repeater installed in the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing to amplify radio communications.

"He still wasn't studying the response issues," Barrett said.

Original article posted here.

A foreshadowing of the familiar: Ghouliani and his criminal friends

Prosecutors expected to file charges against Bernard Kerik

BY GREG B. SMITH

Ex-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik will likely face new federal charges, sources say, some linked to meeting at Walker's, a bar in Tribeca allegedly attended by Kerik and two then-city officials.

Walker's
Bernard Kerik's legal nightmare is about to get worse, with federal prosecutors expected to file charges against the former police commissioner that will likely include allegations of bribery, tax fraud and obstruction of justice, the Daily News has learned.

The indictment, expected next month, could prove to be an embarrassing obstacle for Kerik's former mentor Rudy Giuliani, who is cruising at the top of the polls heading into the presidential primary gauntlet.

The bribery allegations against Kerik stem from a secret meeting at a bar in Tribeca, according to two sources familiar with the federal probe.

Kerik's lawyers recently agreed to waive the statute of limitations on the tax charges until Nov. 17, which will allow them to make one last plea to try to ease the pain.

Kerik will go to the Justice Department in Washington in the coming weeks to try to get expected criminal tax charges reduced to civil fines.

Meanwhile, witnesses have been appearing before a grand jury in White Plains, several sources said.

Last spring, Kerik turned down a deal to plead guilty to tax charges. Since then, the probe has expanded to include other charges, the sources said.

The indictment will have direct implications for Giuliani, the sources said.

For one, another Giuliani commissioner and a top inspector general during Giuliani's years as mayor will be called as witnesses to describe the secret meeting in Tribeca.

The Giuliani officials are Raymond Casey, former head of the Trade Waste Commission, a city agency set up to keep the mob out of the carting industry, and Michael Caruso, former inspector general with the city Department of Investigation.

In July 1999, Casey and Caruso met with Kerik, then the city Correction Department commissioner, at Walker's bar on North Moore St., court papers reveal.

At the time, Casey was investigating Interstate Industrial Corp., a company that employed Kerik's brother Donald and the best man at Kerik's wedding, Larry Ray.

An Interstate affiliate had applied to operate a waste transfer station in Staten Island, and Casey was looking into allegations that the firm had ties to the Gambino crime family.

During the meeting, both Interstate and Ray were discussed, according to an affidavit filed in a civil suit by Caruso's lawyer, Mark Freyberg.

Kerik has admitted that at the time Interstate was secretly paying to renovate his Bronx apartment. Prosecutors are now expected to allege that the free renovations amounted to Kerik accepting bribes, the sources said.

In return for the renovations, the feds will allege, Kerik used his city position to try to influence the city's probe of Interstate, the sources said.

During the Walker's meeting, Kerik allegedly told Casey that he did not see the allegations concerning Interstate's ties to the mob as credible, according to a source familiar with the case.

Kerik noted that his brother worked for the company, and said, "If I thought Interstate was mobbed up, do you think I'd let my brother work there?" according to the source.

Kerik also urged Casey to complete his probe and either reject or accept the application - but either way, to do it expeditiously, the source said. Years later, the agency recommended denying Interstate the license.

Kerik's lawyer Kenneth Breen did not return a call seeking comment. Casey's lawyer and Perry Carbone, the prosecutor handling the case for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia, also did not return calls.

Last year, Kerik pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges brought by the Bronx district attorney in connection with receiving payments totaling $165,000 from Interstate, but he was not charged with bribery.

The expected obstruction of justice charges from the feds are related to Kerik's statements to Bronx prosecutors, the sources said.

The expected federal tax fraud charges are linked to Kerik's failure to pay taxes on the income he received from Interstate, the sources added.

Giuliani has extensive ties to Kerik, promoting him to correction commissioner, then to police commissioner. Giuliani later also hired him at his firm, Giuliani Partners, and recommended him to President Bush for the job of Homeland Security secretary.

The relationship soured in December 2004 when Kerik withdrew from consideration for the Homeland Security job and a torrent of accusations of wrongdoing poured forth.

Giuliani has since admitted he had erred in pushing Kerik for the Homeland Security job.

"It was a mistake," Giuliani told CNN's Larry King in February. "I think the answer is I made a mistake and I took responsibility for it."

Original article posted here.

Ghoulani and the Neo Cons

As weazl said, why the media is pushing Billary and why they are supporting Ghouliani

Funny how media suggests presidential vote has been determined and there hasn't been one single vote cast.

Ron Paul Patriots Taking it to the Ghouliani

Ron Paul Supporters Taunt Rudy on Ferry

Blake Dvorak

At a Ron Paul rally in Chicago on Saturday, campaign manager Lou Moore regaled the crowd with a story about Paul supporters heckling Rudy Giuliani on a ferry boat ride to Mackinac Island, Mich. The story was, as told by Moore, that Giuliani, suddenly confronted by enthusiastic Paul supporters chanting their guy's name, had to take refuge inside the ferry's pilothouse.

The Chicago crowd, needless to say, went wild. An unscientific sample of applause noise told me that if there was a candidate more loathed by the Ron Paul folks than Hillary Clinton, it was Rudy. In any case, I filed the story away, not sure what to make of it, until the Detroit Free Press reported on it:

Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul does not believe that 9/11 was an "inside job" and his campaign distanced itself from a raucous pro-Paul demonstration on a Mackinac Island ferry Friday night, a Paul spokesman said Monday.

In the incident, Paul's supporters taunted former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for alleged complicity in the attacks.

Spokesman Jesse Benton said the campaign was aware of Internet reports about the demonstration, which occurred late Friday when Giuliani boarded a ferry loaded with Paul supporters leaving a Michigan GOP conference. No Paul campaign officials were involved, Benton said.

According to one eyewitness, Giuliani was beset by dozens of Paul enthusiasts as he was leaving the island, some of whom shouted taunts about 9/11, including: "9/11 was an inside job" and "Rudy, Rudy, what did you do with the gold?" -- an apparent reference to rumors about $200 million in gold alleged to have disappeared in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

Ed Wyszynski, a longtime party activist from Eagle, said the Paul supporters threatened to throw Giuliani overboard and harrassed him as he took shelter in the ferry's pilothouse for the 15-minute journey back to Mackinaw City.

"It was awful," said Wyszynski, who supports Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination.

"I was embarrassed to be a Republican. Never, ever, have I seen such a disgraceful performance."

Of course Moore never mentioned the 9/11 chants in his quick story to the Chicago rally. Moore presented the story as a show of Paul's growing, enthusiastic support, which the crowd loved. But in the crowd there were several 9/11 "Truthers," as they're called, handing out fliers and preaching their screed to otherwise normal Paul fans. When asked if Paul supported the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, one "Truther" told me that the most Paul has said is that he would support another investigation into the attacks. I took that as an acknowledgment that Paul isn't on board with the "Truthers." But at the same time these type of people should have no place in any campaign. You don't see them at a Hillary rally, you don't see them at a Rudy rally.

Now imagine you're a libertarian-leaning Republican (or Democrat -- there were several at the Chicago rally) who's interested in hearing from Paul. You go to a rally and are immediately confronted by the "Truthers" who cheer wildly at this candidate you're thinking of supporting. What would you do? The Paul campaign obviously can't be responsible for everyone of its supporters, but it can do a lot in distancing itself from some of the more unsavory elements. If Paul has any hope of influencing more Republican voters with his message, he would be wise to disassociate himself from these nutjobs. That means more than a simple press release or statement from a spokesman. It means saying it out loud.



Original article posted here.

Rarely is weazl at a complete loss for words, but he can add little but note his absolute disgust. President? Fuck no.

Backer of Giuliani hosts '$9.11 for Rudy' fundraiser

WASHINGTON (AP) — The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd said Tuesday a fundraising party for Republican Rudy Giuliani seeking $9.11 each from guests exploits the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks for political purposes.

The Dodd campaign called on Giuliani to refuse the money raised at the event, saying the theme "is absolutely unconscionable, shameless and sickening." A Giuliani spokeswoman said the $9.11 idea was selected without the campaign's knowledge.

"Mr. Giuliani was quick to express much vitriol for the independent ad created by MoveOn.org last week; we would hope he would express the same kind of outrage and indignation about this group that he is the beneficiary of," Colleen Flanagan, a spokeswoman for Dodd, said in a statement released by his campaign.

Giuliani and other GOP presidential candidates strongly criticized the liberal, anti-war group MoveOn.org for a full-page advertisement the group bought in The New York Times. The ad included the headline "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?," a reference to Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq.

The Dodd campaign also said Giuliani "should reject and/or return any money raised" through the party, which is to be held Wednesday night at the home of Abraham Sofaer in Palo Alto, California. Giuliani's campaign is sponsoring house parties across the country that night for the candidate's backers.

Sofaer said he had nothing to do with the decision to ask for the $9.11.

"There are some young people who came up with it," Sofaer said when reached by telephone Monday evening. He referred other questions to Giuliani's campaign.

"I'm just providing support for him. He's an old friend of mine," Sofaer said of Giuliani.

Sofaer was a State Department adviser under President Reagan and is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Federal election data indicates Sofaer has given nearly $50,000 to Republican causes and candidates, including Giuliani, since 1995.

Giuliani spokeswoman Maria Comella said: "These are two volunteers who acted independently of and without the knowledge of the campaign. Their decision to ask individuals for that amount was an unfortunate choice."

According to the invitation, "$9.11 for Rudy" is an "independent, non-denominational grass-roots campaign to raise $10,000 in small increments to show how many individual, everyday Americans support 'America's Mayor."'

Giuliani was mayor of New York during the Sept. 11 attacks.

Original article posted here.

Difference on bombing Iran? Nope. AIPAC? Nope. But let's have pillowfights as a basis of picking presidents. Sad.

Popping Ghouliani's 9/11 Fiction

Matt Taibbi: May have his head in his ass when it comes to 9-11, but effectively rips into Ghouliani

Giuliani: Worse Than Bush
He's cashing in on 9/11, working with Karl Rove's henchmen and in cahoots with a Swift Boat-style attack on Hillary. Will Rudy Giuliani be Bush III?

Matt Taibbi

Early Wednesday, May 16th, Charleston, South Carolina. The scene is a town-hall meeting staged by GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, only a day after he wowed a patriotic Republican crowd at a nationally televised debate with a righteous ass-kicking of the party's latest Hanoi Jane, terrorist sympathizer Ron Paul. A bump in the polls later, "America's Mayor" is back on the campaign trail -- in a room packed with standard-issue Adorable Schoolchildren, in this case beatific black kids in elementary school uniforms with wide eyes and big RUDY stickers pinned to their oblivious breasts.

Giuliani has good stage presence, but his physical appearance is problematic -- virtually neckless, all shoulders and forehead and overbite, with a hunched-over, Draculoid posture that recalls, oddly enough, George W. Bush, the vestigial stoop of a once-chubby kid who grew up hiding tittie pictures from nuns. Not handsome, not cuddly, if he wins this thing it's going to be by projecting toughness and man-aura. But all presidential candidates have to play the baby-kissing game, and here is an early chance for Rudy to show his softer side.

"So," he whispers to the kids. "What do you all want to be when you grow up? Do any of you know?"

A bucktoothed boy raises his hand.

"I wanna be a doctor," he says, "and a lawyer."

The crowd laughs, then looks at Rudy expectantly. The obvious line is "A doctor and a lawyer? Whaddya want to do, sue yourself?" and you can see Rudy physically straining for the joke. But this candidate's funny bone is a microscopic thing, like one of those anvil-shaped deals in the ear, and the line eludes him.

"A doctor and a lawyer, huh?" he says, grinning nervously. "Uh . . . whaddya want to do, sue the doctor?"

My notes from that moment read: Chirping crickets.

Rudy moves on. "How about you?" he says to the next boy.

"I want to be a policeman!" the kid says.

Rudy smiles. Then the next boy says he wants to be a fireman, and the crowd twitters: Wow, a fireman and a policeman, in the same room! Rudy is beaming now, almost certainly aware that every grown-up present is suddenly thinking about 9/11. His day. As he leans over, the room is filled with popping flashbulbs. Then, instead of capitalizing on the sense of pride and shared purpose everyone is feeling, Giuliani utters something truly strange and twisted.

"A fireman and a policeman, huh?" he says. "Well, the first thing that I want to do is make sure that you two get along."

Huh? Amid confused applause, Rudy flashes a queer smile, then moves on to the heart of his presentation, a neat little speech about how the election of a Democratic president will result in certain nuclear attack and the end of the free market as we know it. I'm barely listening, however, still thinking about the "make sure you get along" line.

Although few people outside of New York know it yet, there is an emerging controversy over Giuliani's heroic 9/11 legacy. Critics charge that Rudy's failure to resolve the feuding between the city's police and firefighters prior to the attack led to untold numbers of deaths, the most tragic example being the inability of firemen to hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been "designed to work independently, not together," and that greater coordination would have spared many lives.

Given all that, why did Rudy offer this weirdly unsolicited reference to the controversy now? Was he joking? And if so, what the fuck? It was a strange and bitter comment to make, especially right on the heels of his grand-slam performance in the previous night's debate. If this is a guy who chews over a perceived slight in the middle of a victory lap, what's he going to be like with his finger on the button? Even Richard Nixon wasn't wound that tight.

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Rudy giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

Rudy's attack against Ron Paul in the debate was a classic example of that kind of politics, a Rovian masterstroke. The wizened Paul, a grandfather seventeen times over who is running for the Republican nomination at least 100 years too late, was making a simple isolationist argument, suggesting that our lengthy involvement in Middle Eastern affairs -- in particular our bombing of Iraq in the 1990s -- was part of the terrorists' rationale in attacking us.

Though a controversial statement for a Republican politician to make, it was hardly refutable from a factual standpoint -- after all, Osama bin Laden himself cited America's treatment of Iraq in his 1996 declaration of war. Giuliani surely knew this, but he jumped all over Paul anyway, demanding that Paul take his comment back. "I don't think I've ever heard that before," he hissed, "and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th."

It was like the new convict who comes into prison the first day and punches the weakest guy in the cafeteria in the teeth, and the Southern crowd exploded in raucous applause. Coupled with yet another implosion by aneurysm-in-waiting John McCain a few days later ("Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone else in the room!" McCain screamed at a fellow senator during a meeting about immigration), the Ron Paul ass-whipping revived Giuliani's standing among conservatives who lately had begun to abandon him over his pro-choice status.

The Paul incident went to the very heart of who Giuliani is as a politician. To the extent that conservatism in the Bush years has morphed into a celebration of mindless patriotism and the paranoid witch-hunting of liberals and other dissenters, Rudy seems the most anxious of any Republican candidate to take up that mantle. Like Bush, Rudy has repeatedly shown that he has no problem lumping his enemies in with "the terrorists" if that's what it takes to get over. When the 9/11 Commission raised criticisms of his fire department, for instance, Giuliani put the bipartisan panel in its place for daring to question his leadership. "Our anger," he declared, "should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone -- the terrorists who killed our loved ones."

Whether Rudy believes in this kind of politics reflexively, as the psychologically crippled Bush does, or as a means to an end, as Karl Rove does, isn't clear. But there's no question that Giuliani has made the continuation of Swift-Boating politics a linchpin of his candidacy. His political hires speak deeply to that tendency. Chris Henick, formerly Karl Rove's most trusted deputy, is now a key aide at Giuliani Partners, the security firm set up by the mayor to cash in on his 9/11 image. One of his top donors, Richard Collins, is a longtime Bush supporter who was instrumental in setting up "Stop Her Now," a 527 group modeled on Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that will be used to attack Hillary Clinton. And the money for the smear campaign comes from the same Texas sources behind the Swift Boaters, including oilman T. Boone Pickens and Houston home builder Bob Perry.

To further emulate the Bush-Rove model, Giuliani has recruited some thirty Bush "Pioneers," the key fund-raisers who served as the president's $100,000 bagmen. In addition, he hired the woman who spearheaded the Pioneer program to be his chief fund-raiser. "Rudy definitely got some of Bush's heavier hitters, including all the Swift Boater types," says Alex Cohen, a senior researcher at Public Citizen, who tracks the president's top donors.

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Rudy's stump speech on the trail these days is short and sweet. He talks about two things -- national security and free-market capitalism -- and his catchphrase for both is "going on offense." When he talks about "economic offense," Giuliani is ostensibly communicating the usual conservative contempt for taxes and big government. But he means more than that. Like the Bush-Cheney crew, Rudy believes everything should be for sale, even public policy -- particularly when he's in a position to do the selling.

In his years as mayor -- and his subsequent career as a lobbyist -- Rudy jumped into bed with anyone who could afford a rubber. Saudi Arabia, Rupert Murdoch, tobacco interests, pharmaceutical companies, private prisons, Bechtel, ChevronTexaco -- Giuliani took money from them all. You could change Rudy's mind literally in the time it took to write a check. A former prosecutor, Giuliani used to call drug dealers "murderers." But as a lobbyist he agreed to represent Seisint, a security firm run by former cocaine smuggler Hank Asher. "I have a great admiration for what he's doing," Rudy gushed after taking $2 million of Asher's money.

As mayor, Rudy had a history of asking financially interested parties to help shape important government policies. At one point, he allowed a deputy mayor who was on the payroll of Major League Baseball to work on deals for the Yankees and Mets; at another point he commissioned a $600,000 report on privatizing JFK and LaGuardia from a consultant with ties to the British Airport Authority, Rudy's handpicked choice to manage the airports.

And let's not forget Bernie Kerik, Rudy's very own hairy-assed Sancho Panza, who was nixed as director of Homeland Security after investigators uncovered a gift he received from a construction firm with alleged mob ties that wanted to do business with Giuliani's administration. It is a testament to the monstrous breadth of Rudy's chutzpah that he used his post-9/11 celebrity to push his personal bagman for a post that milks the world's hugest security-contracts tit -- at the very moment when he himself was creating a security-services company.

Then there's 9/11. Like Bush's, Rudy's career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you'd want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He's traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the "WTC cough." This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy's 9/11 hero image -- the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city's Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.

The mayor pledged to reopen downtown in no time, and internal DDC memos indicate that the cleanup was directed at a breakneck pace. One memo to DDC chief Michael Burton warned, "Project management appears to only address safety issues when convenient for the schedule of the project." Burton, however, had his own priorities: He threatened to fire contractors if "the highest level of efficiency is not maintained."

Although respiratory-mask use was mandatory, the city allowed a macho culture to develop on the site: Even the mayor himself showed up without a mask. By October, it was estimated, masks were being worn on site as little as twenty-nine percent of the time. Rudy proclaimed that there were "no significant problems" with the air at the World Trade Center. But there was something wrong with the air: It was one of the most dangerous toxic-waste sites in human history, full of everything from benzene to asbestos and PCBs to dioxin (the active ingredient in Agent Orange). Since the cleanup ended, police and firefighters have reported a host of serious illnesses -- respiratory ailments like sarcoidosis; leukemia and lymphoma and other cancers; and immune-system problems.

"The likelihood is that more people will eventually die from the cleanup than from the original accident," says David Worby, an attorney representing thousands of cleanup workers in a class-action lawsuit against the city. "Giuliani wears 9/11 like a badge of honor, but he screwed up so badly."

When I first spoke to Worby, he was on his way home from the funeral of a cop. "One thing about Giuliani," he told me. "He's never been to a funeral of a cleanup worker."

Indeed, Rudy has had little at all to say about the issue. About the only move he's made to address the problem was to write a letter urging Congress to pass a law capping the city's liability at $350 million.

Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows -- but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning.

Now Giuliani is running for president -- as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.

Original article posted here.