Washington is a moral swamp. When the chief executive can stand at the presidential podium and make an unabashed appeal for torture, then the American dream is dead.

Bush hates America and only God knows why? He’s been buoyed-along his entire life on a raft of wealth and privilege; distancing himself from his endless failures, one after the other…flop, flop, flop. Still, Bush wants more; another pound of flesh to inflate his battered, alcohol-saturated ego.

He wants to snuff out anything that even vaguely resembles honor or decency or dignity so he can permeate the world with his own fiendish image beaming from TVs across the globe.

Who could ever have imagined the President of the United States making the case for torture like some flannel-mouth medicine man at a tent show?

“Where is your sense of decency, sir?”   more »

For many months, the administration of US George W Bush has been complaining that Iranian meddling in Iraq is a threat to the country's stability and to US troops.

The irony of this publicity campaign over Tehran's alleged bid to undermine the occupation is that Iran may well be the main factor holding up a showdown between militant Shi'ites and US forces.

The underlying reality in Iraq, which the Bush administration does not appear to grasp fully, is that the United States is now dependent on the sufferance of Iran and its Iraqi Shi'ite political-military allies to continue the occupation.

Three and a half years after the occupation began, the US military is no longer the real power in Iraq. As the chief of intelligence for the US Marine Corps revealed in a recent report, US troops have been unable to shake the hold that Sunni insurgents have on the vast western province of al-Anbar.

But the main threat to the occupation comes not from the Sunni insurgents but from the militant Iraqi Shi'ite forces aligned with Iran, led by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army. The armed Shi'ite militias are now powerful enough to make it impossible for the US occupation to continue.   more »

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.

An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: "The Devil's Recipe."

As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.   more »

London: It's impossible to see Peter Morgan's brilliant new play, "Frost/Nixon", and not consider the similarities between Dick Nixon and George W. Bush.
Wonder: did Americans suffer through the agony of the Watergate era only to forget the hard lessons we learned?

Frost/Nixon focuses on the events leading to Nixon's disintegration during the last of four extended interviews with British TV personality David Frost--the most widely watched news program in history.

Nixon's advisers expected the 1977 taping sessions to augur the rebirth of his career, where the 37th President would be honored as an elder statesman. Instead, three years after Nixon was forced to leave office, the interviews marked his swan song.

After thirty years, it's useful to dust off the tumultuous history of that period to see the many similarities with our own: In November of 1972, Nixon overwhelmed Democrat George McGovern and won a second term as President.   more »

Brian Williams:
Mr. President, thank you so much. I was interested. You wanted to be
able to gesture with your hands while you spoke. What else should
Americans know about you as a person, sir?

Ahmadinejad: About me? I'm an individual amongst the many of the Iranian people.

Williams: You are traveling with your wife on this trip.

Ahmadinejad: Yes.

Williams: May we know anything about her?

Ahmadinejad: She is an Iranian woman. And just as I am an Iranian too.   more »