Folks,

Are you tired of being lied to and manipulated yet?

Well here’s one way you can respond. Tell Congress you expect them to hold Bush accountable. They probably won’t, but you never know, if the pressure gets great enough, they’ll crack.

–C

Dear MoveOn member,

During the buildup to war, President Bush said the United States “must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud…. We have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring.” 1

On the eve of sending troops into battle, Bush asserted that “intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” 2

Now David Kay, the CIA’s chief weapons inspector, has testified before Congress that these weapons do not exist.

In an attempt to evade responsibility for the misleading statements that pushed the nation into war, Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and delay any political damage until 2005, after the upcoming election. 3

But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. 4 And now that reality is setting in, the President wants to pin the blame on someone else. We can’t let him.

Congress has the power to censure the President — to formally reprimand him for betraying the nation’s trust. If ever there was a time for this, it’s now. Join our call on Congress to censure President Bush at:

   http://www.moveon.org/censure/

It’s clear that we’ve been misled:

• David Kay said last week, “I’m personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction,” and “We don’t find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on.” 5 Kay said these things shortly after resigning from his post as Bush’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

• Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union address, said, “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” 6 Yet Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was sent to Niger in February 2002 to determine whether Iraq was trying to purchase uranium materials there, concluded that “intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” 7

• A CIA report in February 2003 said: “We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since [1998] to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.” 8
  

It’s also clear that the misleading was deliberate:

• The respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently found that the administration “systematically misrepresented the threat” from Iraq. 9

• The basis for President Bush’s African uranium claim was known at the time to be forged and not credible.10 “Top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush’s January address to the nation,” according to the Washington Post.11

• Secretary of State Colin Powell became alarmed at the level of intelligence distortion. When he read the first draft of his speech to the UN — prepared for Powell by Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff — he was so upset that he lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, “I’m not reading this. This is bullsh–.”12
  

Our democracy only works when we know the truth. We now know President Bush and his administration deliberately misled Congress and the American people. Censure is the least we should expect in response.

The independent inquiry will need a year or more to come to a conclusion, according to the Bush administration. It took less time than that for the country to go to war. We don’t need more investigation, we need accountability, and we need it now.

Join our call on Congress to censure President Bush at:

   http://www.moveon.org/censure/

We’ll be holding a press conference in Washington on Thursday, announcing our campaign for Censure. If you sign on now, we can count your signature at the press conference. Please sign on right away.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

- Adam, Carrie, Eli, James, Joan, Laura, Noah, Peter, Wes, and Zack
  The MoveOn.org Team
  Tuesday, February 3, 2004

Footnotes:

1. Washington Post, January 28, 2004

2. Official White House transcript, March 17, 2003

3. Washington Post, February 2, 2004

4. An excellent, comprehensive rundown on the Bush administration’s deliberate distortion of intelligence is available from the Center for American Progress

5. New York Times, January 26, 2004

6. Official White House transcript, January 28, 2003

7. Joseph Wilson Op-Ed, New York Times, July 6, 2003

    Note: Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, had her CIA cover blown, possibly by the White House, in apparent retaliation for Wilson’s contradicting the White House’s line on WMDs.

8. MSNBC News, Oct. 24, 2003

9. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, “WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications”, January, 2004

10. New York Times, July 8, 2003

11. Washington Post News Service, July 23, 2003

12. US News & World Report, June 9, 2003

     Note: This article with the Powell quote is available for purchase from the US News & World Report archives for $2.95.

Folks,

The message to the American people from the Bush administration is as clear as if Jack Nicholson delivered the line himself: you can’t handle the truth.

Over and over, on the most important questions we have faced, this administration has spoken with a forked tongue: it says it has the truth, speaks the truth, and wants the truth; then it
does all it can to prevent us from finding out the truth.

Consider some of the most salient examples:
(more…)

Folks,

This letter from LA County Democratic Party Chair Eric C. Bauman is worth reading. All other issues aside, I think most of us recognize that we absolutely must win the coming presidential election. The GOP has a serious and detailed ground game plotted out. We have our work cut out for us. Let’s not forget, when the time comes, to put aside our differences and pull together like we never have before. Eyes on the prize, eyes on the prize.

–CKEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE!
By Eric C. Bauman – Chair, LA County Democratic Party

The game has begun, in earnest. You can tell because Democrats are attacking Democrats: on the stump, in the media, in paid advertising, and below the radar in creative and sneaky ways.

This Democrat accuses that Democrat of being a Republican. That Democrat accuses this Democrat of being too far left. Another Democrat attacks all the other Democrats as being Bush-lite. Yet another portrays the whole bunch as unelectable. One Democrat even accuses the rest of being too much like Democrats.

This should come as no surprise to any of us, with so much at stake for each campaign and so little time remaining to grab the brass ring. There are only a limited number of ways to sway the electorate to vote for any one candidate. And frankly, there are few serious differences between the ever-shrinking field of Democratic hopefuls. Thus attacking one’s opponents becomes an ever more important tactic.

I am not particularly troubled by candidates engaging in spirited campaigning. That’s what campaigns are about – defining one’s own candidacy in the most positive light while simultaneously attempting to redefine other candidates in a negative light.

Simply put, the standard campaign philosophy goes something like this: “Vote for me, I’m the best, the brightest, the most electable, and the other guys all are louses and phonies”.

Personally, I favor candidates who inspire and offer hope over candidates who continuously attack, but despite the oft-repeated mantra that voters reject negative campaigning, the truth is negative campaigning works. That’s why you see it happen in nearly every campaign. If attacking opponents didn’t have the desired effect, campaign strategists would drop the tactic like a hot potato. Election after election proves it works, so they keep doing it.

What does trouble me, however, is when grassroots activists absorb the negative campaigning and it becomes personal. “If you don’t support my candidate you’re not a real Democrat,” or “If you don’t support so-and-so I’ll make sure you never work in this town again,” or, my personal favorite, “If you don’t support candidate X, you will never get invited to the inaugural or the White House.” I’m sure you’ve heard similar lines and get the point.

Let’s remember that we are only in the first half of the game. Choosing our nominee only gets us to half time. The real battle begins after the nomination is affirmed, not before.

While some of you may believe that Howard Dean is the most inspirational, or John Kerry is the most experienced, or Wes Clark would be most competitive, or John Edwards is the most eloquent, at the end of the day, only one of these people can be our nominee.

Regardless of who is ultimately triumphant, we will need the energy, ideas, resources and commitment of every one of us if we are to have a strong showing in the second half of the game. As we learned in 2000, if our game is not in top form, if we are not united, if we are trapped with negative ideation and baggage from the primary season, we will fail.

Each and every one of us may believe that George W. Bush is the worst president in the past hundred years. We may believe that he has taken our nation on a radical course, led us into an unjustified quagmire of a war, undermined our relationships worldwide, eroded the rights – and paychecks – of every working man and woman in America, busted the federal budget, been divisive and anything but compassionate and tried to destroy the Bill of Rights and our environment, but those feelings alone will not return the White House to our Party.

The Republicans have amassed more money in preparation for this election than was spent in total during the last two presidential campaigns. Bush alone has raised in excess of $150 million for his “primary campaign,” and there is no end in sight to his fundraising.

By the way, Bush’s $150 million exceeds the combined total of all of the Democratic candidates. Moreover, he doesn’t need to spend one dime on the primary. He is free to husband his resources to take aim at the Democratic nominee – who most certainly will be near broke – once the primary season has ended.

The GOP campaign plan may be the most sophisticated in US history. They are building a national campaign that is “drilled-down” to the precinct level, in every state that matters to them. Their money is allowing them to take full advantage of every technologic advance available.

They not only are using the Internet, but they have built sophisticated “intranets,” that allow their campaign workers access to confidential materials, lists, voter-profiles and field plans via computer. They have purchased thousands of hand-held devices to allow their field staff to communicate directly from the field – no need to waste time returning from field activities to the office to transmit data about who has, and has not, voted.

As the LA Times revealed, the Republicans have already rented vans for their GOTV operation, hired hundreds of staffers and identified their voters on a mass scale. They have even produced dozens of TV ads, months before they will ever be aired.

We Democrats will not be financially competitive. We will not have access to the millions of soft-money dollars that we have traditionally used to fund our GOTV efforts. The unions and trial lawyers will not be able to fill our campaign coffers, thanks to the phony, one-sided reforms of McCain-Feingold. We will not have the level of technologic sophistication that the Bush minions have.

However, being out-spent has never stopped us before. We have always had a better ground operation and our volunteers have traditionally been more loyal and committed than the Republicans. Nevertheless, this is no ordinary election year. Bush is a “war-hero” to the Republican base. Despite having irritated fiscal conservatives with the massive deficit he has created and annoyed the social-conservatives with his refusal to take a clear position in favor of the proposed Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage, he has given them an incredible sense of empowerment.

And that takes me back to where I started this.

As I said earlier, it comes as no surprise that the Democratic Presidential candidates are attacking each other and seeking to undermine the candidacies of their competitors. That is politics. Hopefully, our nominee will recover from the attacks and be stronger for them. And hopefully, we will not have provided too much red-meat for Karl Rove to use against our nominee, and Bush has plenty of his own weak spots.

I worry more about the impact on our grassroots activists and loyalists, who will be more essential to victory than ever. I pray that the deep emotion many Democrats feel toward their chosen candidate and the antipathy many feel toward their opponents will not cause them to reject our nominee, regardless of who that may be.

The outcome of the fall campaign will do more to shape the next decades of our lives and the lives of our children than any other, perhaps in the entire history of this great nation.

Think back just three years: Bill Clinton was president, our nation was moving forward in a positive direction; the economy was strong, unemployment was low, first-time home ownership was soaring; the federal budget was not only balanced, but there were surpluses farther than the eye could see; we were investing federal dollars to ensure children had healthcare and schools had textbooks; and, we were using the prestige of our nation and our military to spread peace throughout the world.

In just a few short years, all of that has changed. If Bush gets four more years, things will deteriorate even more.

If those who suffer from so-called irrational exuberance give up if their candidate is not the nominee, we will all lose. If they give only half-heartedly to the campaign against Bush, we will be unable to compete with the Republican juggernaut.

As Howard Dean has said many times, this campaign is about more than any one man, it is about taking our nation back. If we are to succeed, each and every one of us must commit ourselves fully to the effort. No excuses, no hurt feelings, no animosity. Each one of us must remember what the end game is and what we must do to win. Our very lives may depend on it.

I implore each of you to keep your eyes on the prize!

Eric C. Bauman

Folks,

Here’s an interesting tidbit from an oil and gas consultant named Roger Herrera, who works with an outfit called Arctic Power, “a coalition of Alaskan industry groups that is seeking to open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas development…Arctic Power is primarily underwritten by the state of Alaska with some funding from the oil industry.” [Source]

I thought this was interesting because this oil and gas industry expert confirms the peak oil phenomenon and that it will will likely occur within the next decade. He also confirms the other key phenomena we need to be concerned with over the near term: the increasing energy demand worldwide, especially China; the futility of the plan to switch to a hydrogen and fuel cell based economy; the impending switch to other hydrocarbon based fuels; and that conservation will have to be driven by the public, because industry won’t do it.

Very interesting reading.
Oil prices likely to remain at current levels through ’04

–C

Petroleum News
North America’s Source for Oil and Gas NewsFebruary 2004