Geez, What Are You Smoking, And Where Can I Get Some?
It is my intention to discuss a number of items under this heading, the number of which I do not know.
However, I'm pretty certain that there will be widely cast subjects both old and new, hence this may again become one of my haphazard series. Hopefully there will be at least some decent articles coming out of the series, but we'll just have to see.
In part I will be bringing in some of my previous articles on such topics of which I have before written if indeed my prognostications have been proven correct, or at least not proven wrong. In some cases I will use portions of my own writing to expand upon a topic with a new slant.
In no case am I intending to use other people's ideas to support my own and then call the series my own writing. I've hated this form of writing, and I really hate the research required for footnoting. If I use quotes from other people, in some cases I will have the quoted source, but in others it is likely that everyone knows who said what when, and I will leave that aspect up to some easily done internet research.
I will include this prelude to each of my articles because I don't want to make everyone go back and find out what I was doing, as many blogs force you to do. I will do the research on my own material and include it, as much of what I've written over the last 10 years is actually printed out because no blog site properly did backups and I didn't trust them.
So this is just the introduction to this series. I've written a series before, and unfortunately I never got back to some of the topics I had desired to talk about, so these won't be numbered. They'll just be super-topics.
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In Ross Douthat's New York Times opinion column of today, 5/9/2011, titled "Who's Foreign Policy Is it?", I'd have to say if you have to ask, you don't know either.
Now why is that? Perhaps because you don't know who was making the policies in the Bush administration, or that you have no clue of just what these policies where?
Is it possible to assess that President Obama is just following his predecessor's policies, or that you believe those policies were in place when Mr. Obama took office?
So is President Obama following Dick Cheney's energy policy forum suggestions or not? How do you know? They were secret meetings, so you don't know what the energy policies of the Bush administration were, but we do know that Dick Cheney supplied all of the policy forum attendees (who apparently shall remain nameless under classification) with maps of Iraq's massive untapped oil reserves in 2001. This is before 9/11, before our incursion into Afghanistan and certainly before America even considered Iraq a part of the terrorism problem.
Most notably was attendee, Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, whose company in December of 2001 would collapse into a devastating bankruptcy which would take 6 years to iron out and leaving 800 employees with no value in their company supported stock purchasing program.
If one assumes that I am using the "guilty by association" tact, then yeah, you're probably right. But not so much. There is always a taint of one thing when trying to define another. That's why you don't use the word you are defining in the sentence you use to define that word.
So let me define President Bush's policies in a single word. Secrecy. This desire for secrecy started out within the first month of President Bush's administration via an Executive Order that all Presidential records were under classified restriction and that the order was retroactive to previous Presidents.
You may find a Minority Congressional Special Investigations Division report at http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/waxman.pdf.
I'll get to President Obama in a little while for the major differences, but in this particular case, he rescinded Bush's original Executive Order.
In the case of a Supreme Court decision on the Energy Policy meetings, the Bush administration won and did not have to supply the American people with the information of who the participants were, therefore leaving us with no knowledge of what those policies might be.
However, President Obama has drawn up a guide to what he'd like to see as a legislative plan to include nuclear, clean coal, wind and solar as a solution, which doesn't place Big Oil in the center of possible decisions made to invade oil rich countries.
Now I say this because of Congressional testimony by Marine General Smedley Butler, Expeditionary Forces in the late 1890s and early 1900s, that he resigned because of his distaste for the US military being used to support corporate American. Essentially his expeditionary force was used throughout Central America to force other countries to provide product to America, although ostensibly to provide support for corporations under siege by these countries. This was a byproduct of the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that we would "protect" both hemispheres of the Americas as if any attack was upon the USA.
The real idea of the Monroe Doctrine was to stop European expansion in the Americas, but obviously was used to provide cover for Dole and others exploiting the populations and governments of Central and South America.
After the testimony of General Butler, pretty much the concept of interfering with sovereign countries fell apart in terms of overt actions. Until the CIA.
But we're not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about why someone like General Butler wouldn't fight for corporations, and why the Bush administration would.
Now Dick Cheney, who "searched" for an appropriate Vice Presidential candidate for George Bush and decided that he'd be the best person for the job, was in control of the Energy Policy committee meetings. He presented these attendees with a map of the potential profits of oil futures with the invasion of Iraq. And he did so long before the concept was presented to the American people.
One not need blame Dick Cheney alone. There's plenty of blame to go around, and plenty of information to make one cringe on how these people got away with only one charge of obstruction of justice against "Scooter" Libby by a Special Council investigation in a totally different area of secrecy. (Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, CIA NOC, YellowCake, Iraqi nuclear weapons).
Now I'm already going long on this one article, and I haven't touched the concept of our current President following all the policies that were instituted under George W. Bush, but the fact is that every instance of the above policy decisions have been negated by either the openness with which President Obama has committed his response, or the immediate negation of Bush's policies enacted by Executive Order.
Now the one point I want to make is that IF President Obama hasn't attacked these Executive Orders in toto it is because there are so many over the 8 years of the Bush administration that even the lawyers don't know what is effective and in effect or ineffective and yet in effect.
I'm not talking about the FBI Letters which allowed them secretly to invade an average American's life in their banking and other personal endeavors, nor the right to invade the American's home protest meetings by police authorized to incite violence.
I'm not talking about Bush policies to CAGE protest speakers, thus making them look like they were in jail, miles away from where a protest should really be held.
I'm not talking about the New York Republican Convention in 2003 where hundreds of Americans were held without charge for up to days in cages in parking garages.
I'm not talking about Republican passed laws which made it illegal to be a "subversive" in a place where the President was to speak, regardless of whether it was before or AFTER the event.
All I'm saying to Ross Douthout is show me the money. It all its aspects. Show me where the money went. Show me where the $19 Billion flown to Iraq on 123 pallets went. In testimony in Congress the people in charge said "The Iraqi don't give receipts but we know the money went to the right places."
Show me where the money went. Halliburton with contested services received $7 Billion in contracts, and their subsidiary, KBR provided Iraq troop drinking water in oil tainted tankers.
Show me where the money went. Custer and Battles, another Iraq contractor was tasked with providing trucks to support transport of necessary items, and they supplied trucks that didn't operate at all. And yet they got another contract.
Show me the money, mofo. And then tell me that President Obama has followed the policies of George W. Bush.
You have no legs to stand on.
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