This Can't Be Happening!

Well, now we know. Scientists have documented that the Bush/Cheney administration has been a greater threat to Americans’ health and safety than Osama Bin Laden and his terror band.

President Bush, a lame-duck loose cannon, is traipsing around the Middle East calling Iran a state sponsor of terror and condemning what he calls Iran’s “provocative” acts in the Strait of Hormuz at the choke point between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

Could someone have messed with the vote in New Hampshire?

That is what some people are wondering, after looking closely at the totals in the votes for surprise Democratic primary victor Hillary Clinton, and for Barack Obama, who placed instead of winning as all the polls had predicted he would. And thanks to candidate Dennis Kucinich, we are likely to find out. Kucinich today filed a request, and a required $2000 fee, to order up a manual recount of the machine ballots cast in the state. (If it turns out Obama really won, he'll owe Dennis the post of secretary of a new Dept. of Peace at a minimum later, if he wins the White House!)

The news from the "Live Free or Die" state was bad. It was bad for peace and the anti-war movement (such as it is), and it was bad for progressives and progressive issues in general.

The two candidates who won, John McCain on the Republican side, and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, are both fervent supporters of the Iraq War and of American militarism. Clinton talks of permanent US bases in Iraq. McCain says the US will be in Iraq for a century. What could the voters in New Hampshire be thinking?

Not one news story about this week's latest chapter in the administration's ongoing effort to gin up a crazy war with Iran--the so-called "provocation" caused by Iranian naval speedboats approaching within 200 meters of a US destroyer--mentioned that the US, which sits some 7500 miles away from Iran, has sent a whole fully-armed armada into the Persian Gulf just off Iran's coast.

Or that the Vice President actually flew out to an aircraft carrier that was part of that US armada, and threatened, from the flight deck, to have the US massively attack Iran.

If a new article just published Saturday in the Times of London based upon information provided by US government whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, is correct, we have not only solid evidence of prior knowledge of 9-11 by high up US government officials, but evidence of treasonous activity by many of those same officials involving efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to America’s enemies, even including Al Qaeda.

The real message of the Iowa caucus yesterday was that the long-operative Clintonian/Democratic Leadership Council assumption that the independent or unaffiliated voter bloc is composed of conservative-leaning, dim-witted and easily manipulated people has got it all wrong.

Way back in October of 2005, when the publisher of St. Martin's Press contacted my agent and asked if I would do a book on impeaching President Bush, I remember thinking it was a wacky, if interesting, idea. Certainly almost nobody was talking about it. Not in the media, not in Congress, and not even at the occasional anti-war march.

I took the job (who's going to turn down a decent advance?), but had in mind a book written with a light touch--a sense of humor--figuring that as evil as the Bush/Cheney regime was, there was also much to laugh at.

Like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, Brattleboro, VT-based John Nirenberg stopped midway through his impeachment hike from Boston’s Faneuil Hall to the halls of Congress to plant some seeds of revolt at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, just a block north from Independence Hall, the old brick building where the nation’s founders wrote and passed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

It was good to see reports in the national media, including the New York Times and my own local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, on an effort by citizens in Brattleboro, VT, to have the next annual town meeting in March consider a motion to instruct the local district attorney to draw up a war crimes indictment against President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.