Last week George W. Bush headlined a motivational speaker seminar that also featured Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell, and Terry Bradshaw:

The all-day event next week will be held at the Fort Worth Convention Center Arena. Tickets are apparently $19. That’s not per person — that’s per office.

The Get Motivated seminar is, according to its website, “world famous for its energizing, action-packed, star-studded, fun-filled, spectacular stage show. CNN, 60 Minutes, USA Today, TIME, PEOPLE, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal all rave about it! This motivational mega-show packs more inspirational firepower than a stick of dynamite!”

TPM: Bush Headlining ‘Motivational Mega Show’ With ‘Inspirational Firepower’

(via Disinfo)

See: The cult of positive thinking

and: Deathklok: Briefcase Full of Guts

Read Part 1 of The US as Police State.

In part 1, I took a very brief look at the history of the United States from 1787 to around 1980 and found a history of government repression of citizens at varying levels of government: restrictions on voting, vote fraud, and slavery. Not to mention the genocide of the Native Americans at the hands of the US military.

So now I turn my attention to Ronald Reagan and the point where the “War on Drugs” actually became a war, and not mere prohibition. The drug war is meant to stamp out the “drug problem” in America. A problem that the government helped engineer in t he first place. As detailed in Gary Webb’s series of “Dark Alliance” articles for the San Jose Mercury News, and later a book by the same name, the C.I.A, with the explicit knowledge of the Reagan administration, supported Nicaraguan contras in their sale of cocaine to drug dealers in Los Angles starting around 1981. For more information, see Webb’s 1998 article for the Orange County Weekly, The Crack-Up.”

Read the rest of this entry »

I originally posted this at Klintron’s Brain but I’m posting it here to get more feedback/correction/additions. I’m working on an expanded version that goes back to Carter and is more comprehensive.

One of the arguments I frequently hear when debating whether Democrats are actually any better than Republicans, or whether Bush is really in worse than Clinton, is that Clinton waged many wars of his own. I decided to do a little digging to find out whose wars were most fatal, and based on what I’ve found: George W. Bush’s wars are by far more fatal, but my data on Clinton’s wars is incomplete. I’ve posted my findings below. Please let me know if you have additional information or corrections to this data.

It’s always terrible to make these things into a numbers game, but I still hope this is useful in evaluating the scale of warfare under Clinton as opposed to Bush.

US military deaths under Clinton and Bush:

While calculating civilian deaths is very difficult, getting numbers for US soldiers killed is easier. However, these numbers are total active duty deaths, including deaths from illness, so they might not be a good reflection of combat related deaths.

Clinton: 7500 (total military active duty military deaths from 1993-2000)

Bush: 8792 (total military active duty deaths from 2001-2006)

Source: Department of Defense report (PDF). Note: This doesn’t include this year or next year. Bush isn’t done yet.

Civilian deaths under Clinton:

Because there were several different small military actions ordered by Clinton, tallying everything is rather difficult. If I’ve forgotten anything here, or if you have sources with different numbers, let me know.

Battle of Mogadishu: “More than one thousand.”. I could only find info for this one particular battle, I don’t know how many more died during the Somalia missions.

Operation Uphold Democracy – I can’t find any statistics for this one. The Department of Defense only indicated 4 “non-hostile” deaths of a US military personnel in this operation, so it’s not completely inconceivable that no civilians were killed. (As always, more information is welcomed).

Operation Desert Strike – ???

Operation Desert Fox – 600-2000.

Note: My understanding is that there was ongoing bombing in Iraq throughout Clinton’s presidency, mostly over “no fly zones.” I don’t have any information on how many civilians deaths may have occurred and that’s where the numbers comparison really falls apart. Depending on how fatal these raids were, they may tip the scales towards Clinton being the more lethal president.

Update: Iraq claimed that 323 civilians were killed in between Desert Fox and February 2001. They also say the bombing was escalated during this time period. So 162 deaths per year from the no-fly bombing is would be a high estimate of total civilian casualties during these campaigns.

1998 missile strike against Afghanistan – 21.

1998 missile strike against Sudan – Unknown (So far as I can tell, Sudan never reported a number).

Kosovo War – Yugoslavia claimed that NATO attacks caused between 1,200 and 5,700 civilian casualties. NATO acknowledged killing at most 1,500 civilians. Human Rights Watch counted a minimum of 488 civilian deaths.

So here are some approximations:

Somalia: 1500
Haiti: 10
Iraq (Desert Fox): 2000
Iraq (Ongoing bombing): 1296
Afghanistan: 21
Sudan: 50
Yugoslavia: 5700

Total: 10,577

Civilian deaths under George W. Bush:

Afghanistan: 7,300-14,000.

Iraq: 74,689 – 81,394.

Total: 81,989 – 95,394

It would certainly take a lot of civilians deaths under Clinton’s bombing campaigns in Iraq to come close to Bush’s numbers.

From the Digital Falcon:

David: Why do you think politics on this planet is such a huge mess, and human beings are so violent towards one another?

Bob: Because most people have never heard of maybe logic and live in an either/or world, which applied to ethics and social policy becomes a good/evil world. Human vanity then determines that all the damned eejit always put themselves in the good position and anybody who disagrees in the evil. Look at any literary/politics journal–any journal of the nonscientific “intelligentsia”–and you’ll see that they all sound as medieval as George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden. Violence comes of self-righteousness and self-righteousness comes of right/wrong logic, without maybes.

Link (via LVX23).

Thompson proves he’s still the hardest writer out there:

This year’s first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS.

[...]

Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.

Things haven’t changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

[...]

The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change.

[...]

Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart — which is more than even the president’s friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.

From the story: “CNN spiked Connie Chung’s widely-publicized “expose” on Yale University’s Order of Skull & Bones, chapter 322, which counts among its membership President George W. Bush and his father and grandfather before him, and influential aide and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and Connie Chung ain’t talking.”
Link (via New World Disorder).

Counter-culture legend Robert Anton Wilson’s new book, TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution will be released sometime soon. From the blurb: “Will the ‘war on terrorism’ put the last nail in the coffin of YOUR rights? Would Hannibal Lecter make a better president than George W. Bush?”
Link (via the Barbelith Underground).