Hersh is worried that America doesn't have good intelligence within the Iraqi insurgency. "We don't know what's going to happen next," he says. "We have no endgame."
Whether you agree with him or not, this kind of frankness makes Hersh an anomaly among his tightly buttoned investigative peers.
"The fragility of our government is terrifying," he tells his U. of C. audience. A handful of neoconservatives took control of the levers of government "without a peep from the bureaucracy, the Congress, the press," he says. "It was so easy. . . . What is it about us that made us so vulnerable to these people?"
The Bush administration announced Thursday that it would conduct a lottery to select 50,000 people who will receive Medicare coverage of prescription drugs in the next 18 months, before drug coverage becomes available to all Medicare beneficiaries in 2006.
The lottery is part of an unusual experiment to test the new benefit among people with cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis and a few other diseases.
In authorizing the experiment, Congress provided $500 million. Forty percent of the money, or $200 million, is earmarked for oral cancer drugs that patients can take on their own, as a replacement for drugs they receive by injection or infusion in a doctor's office.
Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, said that 500,000 to 600,000 people might be eligible to compete for the 50,000 slots.
The government, Mr. Thompson said, will select participants at random from the pool of applicants, alternating between cancer patients and those with other serious diseases.
It's the Bush administration's new reality TV show: "Competing for Chemotherapy."
This compassionate conservativism know no boundaries. They can take away Grandma Millie's cancer medicine at the same time they're cutting her electricity: "Just cut 'em off. They're so f----d. They should just bring back f-----g horses and carriages, f-----g lamps, f-----g kerosene lamps."
Senate aides with knowledge of the encounter Tuesday said the vice president confronted [Democratic Sen. Patrick] Leahy about some of the Democrat's criticism about alleged improprieties in Iraq military contracts awarded to Halliburton Co. (HAL). Cheney, who as vice president is president of the Senate, is a former chief executive officer of Halliburton.
Leahy responded by saying the vice president had once called him a "bad" Catholic.
Cheney then responded, "F--- off" or "F--- you," two aides said, both speaking on condition of anonymity.
When Cheney has a "cardiac incident" later this summer so John McCain can become the new Republican vice presidential candidate and messiah, the Republican hate machine will blame Leahy (who, with Tom Daschle, was one of two senators targeted by the still-unsolved anthrax assassination attempt in October 2001) and continue to call him a "bad" Catholic.
And, even with Cheney in retirement, Halliburton will continue to siphon billions from the US Treasury.
Phyllis Schlafly, one of the chief agitators for Clinton's impeachment, told the Sun-Times she still supports Ryan because the charges are unproven and were made during a custody fight. "Sure they're disturbing. They're unpleasant," said Schlafly. "But considering where they're coming from, I would wait for the proof before judging him."
Robert Novak, the conservative commentator, said on Crossfire, "The judge allowed joint custody of their now nine-year-old son to the two parents. Number two, it was Mrs. Ryan, not Jack Ryan, who was guilty of adultery. … Jack Ryan, unlike Bill Clinton, did not commit adultery and did not lie."
House Speaker Dennis Hastert "still has a Thursday fund-raising event for Ryan on his calendar," according to Wednesday's Sun-Times. Hastert's spokesman told reporters Hastert had no comment.
Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill., who voted to find Clinton guilty on both articles of impeachment five years ago, said, "Divorce cases and child custody cases are by nature acrimonious, and allegations on all sides are often unreliable or sensationalized. The Jack Ryan that I know very well is a good and decent man. … I support him and continue to support him with enthusiasm and confidence."
Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News host, fretted about the politics of personal destruction. After O'Reilly's legal analyst pointed out that Ryan hadn't denied the story and "in a Clintonesque way, splits hairs" about it, O'Reilly complained, "Just think about it, any politician or somebody thinking about running for office, if they have an ex-wife who is mad at them or an ex-girlfriend, they are dead, they are toast, because you can make any accusation in the world. … It discourages everybody from getting into the arena."
Now we know why Bill Clinton got impeached. He was in the wrong club.
The reaction to Jack Ryan right now has everything to do with the insane, trumped-up perjury entrapment of Bill Clinton by Kenneth Starr six years ago. No one really gives a shit about Jack Ryan's stupid sex life, but a lot of us are still quite angry that 1998 was a wasted year in American discourse and progress, a year in which Clinton attacked Osama bin Laden (remember him?) and was loudly accused of wag-the-dog tactics.
If the arena gets smaller, as Bill O'Reilly complains, the Republican hate machine has only itself to blame.
Presidential poop. No, not gossip, we're talking $3,000 presidential toilets at the Crawford ranch where after a quick photo-op of brush clearing or bicycle crashing, Bush can luxuriate in defecatory splendor among "...vanity mirrors, flushable toilets, full sinks, piped-in music, air conditioning and dishes of potpourri [that] make the restrooms almost indistinguishable from those in a home or nice hotel." And you thought John Kerry was spoiled!
On the June 18 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Limbaugh spoke to a caller who posed a hypothetical question: What if the caller were a liberal U.S. soldier in Iraq who had been exposed to an hour per day of Limbaugh's rants that "liberals are bad for America" -- broadcast by the American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) -- and then was killed. Limbaugh responded that the soldier should "[b]e a man about it ... laugh it off and be wrong about it. If the bomb goes off, the bomb goes off. You chose to be there."
Rush says, "I don't say the words Liberals are bad for America."
But, in the fashion of a true cowardly hypocrite, Rush waits until he has safely hung up on his insightful caller to say, "Liberal ideology is dangerous for America."
Declaration of [ex-wife] Jeri Ryan, dated June 9, 2000.
I made it clear to [Jack Ryan] that our marriage was over for me in the spring of 1998. On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York and one to Paris, [he] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. These were surprise trips that [he] arranged. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways.
The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. [He] had done research.
[Jack Ryan] took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. . . . It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling.
[He] wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused.
[He] asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset.
We left the club and [he] apologized, said that I was right and he would never insist that I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system.
Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill.
[He] became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.
"He had done research."
Obviously this is bad behavior. But it only becomes politically accountable hypocritical behavior when politicians' private indulgences contradict the public piety and prescriptive moralism of their political party, a sad fact for the candidacy of Jack Ryan.
I'm not inclined to look the other way, explicitly because of Kenneth Starr.
Scott Turow’s remarks on John Kerry and why he is the right person to be President:
I could say the following without blushing: He is running against a man who was not fit for duty in 1968 and is not fit for duty today, a man who lacked the qualifications for the office when he was elected and has demonstrated it. We have been through a skein of national disasters, for which he accepts no blame, because he literally doesn’t understand enough about the job to realize how a better President would have responded. John Kerry has been in public life for 35 years.. He was a prosecutor when GWB was running an oil company into the ground. And he was already a seasoned United States Senator when GWB decided it was time to give up abusing substances. JK has a sharper grasp of foreign policy, and more experience with it, than any candidate for President in the last 50 years, with the possible exception of GHWB (see today’s NYT). His dedication to the cause of our military and veterans is long established. And his commitment to economic and social justice for all Americans cannot be doubted. A man can’t be the committed liberal Bush sometimes maintains Kerry is, and also the unprincipled waffler. Life and public service are complicated, as GWB doesn’t understand. JK does. He has a sense of nuance, and the experience and values to improve the life of the country.
You're at a photo op, reading a book with schoolchildren and an aide suddenly whispers that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. "America is under attack."
You're the president of the United States. What do you do?
There have been other moments like this in American history, when the chief executive was suddenly plunged into a crisis, but they weren't caught on videotape. George W. Bush was on camera in an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. He could see the pagers of reporters and photographers going off, one by one. He was on the spot like few people have ever been.
From two different angles, Americans have new glimpses of that historic moment. One comes from rabble-rousing Michael Moore, whose Bush-eviscerating film "Fahrenheit 9/11" premieres next week, and includes an uninterrupted seven-minute segment showing Bush's reaction after hearing the news of the attack. He doesn't move.
Instead he continues to sit in the classroom, listening to children read aloud. Moore lets the tape roll as the minutes pass painfully by.
And now from a second angle: The staff of the 9/11 Commission this week released a report that summarizes Bush's closed-door testimony about his thoughts as he sat there.
"The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis . . . The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."
This makes no sense whatsoever. If you're reading with a bunch of kids and the nation is attacked, what you do is excuse yourself from work, just like several million others did that morning, and go find out what the fuck is happening.
Bush's freakish behavior could represent cluelessness, fear, cowardice, second thoughts ("Dang, wasn't there that Presidential Daily Briefing a month ago...?") or even complicity, but nothing at all resembling leadership.
