Over at Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum writes:
A HIGHER POWER....Did you know that Bush family fixer James A. Baker III is busily beavering away on a task force to figure out what to do in Iraq? It's not exactly a secret (the New York Times wrote about it here), but I sure hadn't heard about it until I read "A Higher Power," featured in our current issue:
Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in — or, perhaps, to get the hell out of — Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work as well. "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home — that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me.
Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. "I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train."
I guess if anyone can talk sense into W, maybe it's Baker. Still, this might be a tougher nut to crack than strongarming a few election monitors in Florida.
My biggest complaint with people who call themselves "centrist" democrats and moderates (Kevin Drum) is that they legitimize the continued raping of the American middle class by promoting a belief that people like James Baker (and everybody in his Iraq group) are noble statesmen, and not what they really are: groomed, well-dressed personality disorders. Yes, you can be twisted and still make it to the top - financial success is not a measure of mental health.
All that Baker wants is for Democrats not to win control over either house in congress. He's not working on a solution to Bush's failed foreign policy for the good of the country, the good of the world, for the good of any people EXCEPT those people who have been prospering mightily from decades of repressing ordinary people. Baker's working on how to prevent Democrats from gaining a majority of seats in Congress with Bush's foreign policy continuing.
The members of the group are political rat-fuckers.
Clifford May? Alan Simpson? What expertise on the Middle East, pray tell, does anybody on that list bring to the table? And Lee Hamilton??????
Lee Hamilton is up to his eyeballs in Bush cover-ups. Or is it covers-up? Just when you think Hamilton couldn't possibly want to be more penitent for his past enabling of Republican crimes that enabled Republicans to do even worse crimes, he enables their cover-ups again! [The 9/11 White Wash Commission - They actually made America worse. "Bipartisan" now means telling lies, so as not to make waves. It's spin that allows the corrupt and the incompetent to escape responsibility, and go on to do it all again, and worse.]
It was the policies of the old establishment that evolved into the smash and burn policies of the neocons - that poor, brown people can be enslaved and exploited to make W.A.S.P.s rich, and if the poor brown people resist, have millions of pounds of radioactive bombs rain down on them.
If the people in the Middle East rose up and overthrew their governments, Americans wouldn't be any worse off than we are now, after fifty years of corporate-crony leadership. It's been the pro-corporate, unrestricted-growth, anything goes capitalist governments, led by Republicans and Democrats alike (the Establishment), that are destroying America. With men like James Baker doing the heavy-lifting. With Democrats, at least we got some regulation. Monitoring, and restrictions that required that corporations couldn't bottle poison and pour it down consumers' throats without financial penalty. With Republicans, all regulations are off.
Baker's law firm (Baker & Botts) represents the Saudi Royal family's interests in the U.S. The Saudi Royal family, with their vast holdings in the U.S., and whom holds most of America's 'paper.'
Baker has masterfully blocked efforts by 9/11 families to hold Saudi Arabia financially liable for the damages that their policies have caused - 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Baker works for the people whose policies continue to turn their young men into jihadists, hellbent on killing their oppressors in the west. The Saudis haven't changed any of their policies. Their schools still teach hatred, intolerance and jihad against Westerners - anybody who doesn't follow Islam.
The Saudis have made Jim Baker a very rich and powerful man. Baker works for a government that savagely and brutally tortures its own citizens after the Bush-Negroponte CIA has kidnapped them from street corners around the world and renditions them back to the House of Saud.
Baker put Bush in the WH with his football strategy, as opposed to the actual baseball strategy that rule of law in the U.S. requires (make sure the recounts stop while Bush has more tallied votes, then run out the clock before the other side can get the law to step in and require counting all of the ballots).
Go back even farther and it was Baker whom the Reagan staff brought in to observe their demented leader after they noted his disordered thinking - Baker was to decide if Reagan was compes mentis. When this story was revealed long after Reagan left office and it was announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, nobody in the media asked "When did Baker get a medical degree?" or "Shouldn't the staff have brought in a physician?" and "Shouldn't there be a protocol in place about regularly testing a President's mental, as well as physical, health?" We are living in the 21st century, after all.
Baker is a power brokering politician. Whatever he is up with his Iraq group, it's not good for the people of Iraq or the people of America, or the people anywhere else in the world. It's about getting it off of the front pages, out of sight, behind closed doors, so that the rich and powerful can continue getting richer and more powerful. Haven't we all had enough of Jim Baker, his friends, their policies, their view of America and their plans for us?
I'm ready for a change.
Filed under: James Baker, Baker & Botts, Iraq, Kevin Drum, Reagan, Bush, Lee Hamilton
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