Comments on: Case-Study: Republicans Go Nuclear on Barack

by: Lori L

Sat, 24 May 2008 01:50:43 +0000

Every cloud has a silver lining….If he doesn’t know everything, then he’s not an elitist policy wonk. If he went to Rev. Wright’s church, then he’s not a secret Muslim. They are so busy whack-a-moling him that every new accusation contradicts the last one. But the bottom line will probably be the same: most people would rather see him in charge than another Republican. Case closed.

by: david cromwell

Thu, 22 May 2008 14:15:53 +0000

First they try religion, then they try elitism, now they try inexperience?
They’ll have to do better. Meanwhile, Bush tries “appeasement”, without even knowing what the word means. Then, we find out his grandfather helped finance Hitler in the 30’s. The Republican party is in real trouble and they haven’t got one single issue to run on.

by: Michael Shaw

Thu, 22 May 2008 01:14:04 +0000

Perhaps we should remind the electorate that president Bush once couldn’t find his way back to his own barracks for months and in war time! How about Dick Cheney forgetting to sign up during the Vietnam War? These right wingers will do anything and everything to stop this democratic juggernaut. I say we bring on the pressure and ask the republicans why they forget to finance our wounded or their families after they die or return crippled from Iraq and Afghanistan. Or how they forgot about the Bill of Rights while keeping “us” safe! Or how about how they forgot about the FISA laws and the Geneva Conventions? There are plenty of things they’ve forgotten about, though most of their forgetfulness is based in deceit rather than honesty.

by: Francis Scalzi

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:24:21 +0000

It take someone old enough, like me, to rememember the Hanford breeder reactor that produced so much plutonium for the cold war effort. It was as dangerous then and even now leaves the still smoldering problem of its nuclear waste. That’s way it was closed down years ago. The gradual clean up has been a major expense to the taxpayers of the US.
But to expect Obama to know much about it is not reasonable. It’s just another crude Republican Party dirty trick. Knowing Obama’s ability to counter gutter tactics, he may well eloquently blow the Washington Republican Party back down its filthy hole - - if he wants to bothers with such inept slime. Very few people outside of Washington State and younger than 60 likely know of the Hanford reactor; they’ll wonder what the commotion is all about - - and likely ignore it because of the source of the blather.
Hey, tell you what, let’s ask little ol’ dull-witted Dubya about Hanford before he has a chance to be briefed by his cohorts. He would very probably reply that he seems to remember that Hanford is a very nice little bookstore but that he has very little time to read because he’s so busy chasing those evil doers.

by: Anna Catherine

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:19:00 +0000

The Republicans have so little to work with. This is bound to get ugly. Their administration’s actions are indefensible.

by: Teddi Curtis

Wed, 21 May 2008 22:19:31 +0000

It’s not going to get any prettier in October.

by: Gail

Wed, 21 May 2008 21:38:25 +0000

So Obama wasn’t familiar with the Hanford site, but McCain didn’t know the difference between Iranian extremists and al Qaeda. He had to have his keeper Lieberman whisper in his ear, on national news to correct his mistake. There is no issue more important today than what is going on in Iraq and Iran. How scary is it to think we could have another president that doesn’t bother to read up on who’s who.

by: KJ

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:04:33 +0000

The only thing I knew about Hanford before reading this article was that it was closed. And I used to live in Washington and still have family that lives there. i imagine a lot of people have heard of Hanford only in passing.

by: Jimmie F. Smith

Wed, 21 May 2008 19:57:31 +0000

Could we expect any less from the Republican led media. I think not. Reminds me of the last two stolen elections.

by: Ed

Wed, 21 May 2008 19:53:18 +0000

There a swells of people in America who are not familiar with Hanford WA. I was aware of it long ago because while in the military I was stationed at Ft Lewis, WA.
At least Obama is not afraid to admit that he wasn’t aware of it. Goes to show he doesn’t pretend to be a “Know it all.”

How many republicans are aware of this or those that are won’t admit it: David Murfee Faulk was a translator in the Navy, working in Arabic and Iraqi dialect. In April 2004 he began working for the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Gordon outside Augusta, Georgia. (He now writes, under the name Murfee Faulk, for the Metro Spirit newspaper in Augusta, but he has never written about what he did for the NSA.)

Faulk says that in May 2004 he found an extremely large text file containing grid coordinates for alleged chemical weapons sites in Iraq. Faulk showed it to his supervisor, who was surprised. But he was not surprised that the file existed, only that it had not been deleted. The supervisor said he had believed all such files had been deleted, and that there had been a great many of them. In fact, according to this supervisor, U.S. Special Forces had gone to the locations and found nothing.

That’s what usually happens, Faulk’s supervisor told him, when you get something from the Israelis. “Four out of five times it’s complete and total bullshit.”

I asked veteran Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst Ray McGovern what he made of this, and he said that there is “no such thing as a ‘friendly’ intelligence service. Reporting from liaison services always needs to be taken with utmost reserve. That goes in spades for what comes from the Israelis, the more so since they have unique, yes unique, access to the White House and Pentagon, and are thus able to circumvent the intelligence bureaucracy set up to vet and evaluate raw intelligence and prevent unverified and/or tendentious ‘intelligence’ from reaching senior officials, lest they be misled.”

With regard to other pieces of Israeli “intelligence” on Iraq’s mythical weapons of “mass destruction,” McGovern said: “Yes, most of the Israeli ‘intelligence’ on things like chemical weapons in Iraq was of little or no value. Worse still, data like coordinates for suspected chemical weapons-related sites could not be dispassionately evaluated by objective intelligence analysts because the key function of imagery analysis was ceded by the CIA to the Pentagon in 1996. What sergeant was going to tell Rumsfeld that Israeli sources and the ‘intelligence’ from the Israelis or the likes of [Ahmed] Chalabi were certainly not worth what Rumsfeld was paying for. At the same time, if truth was not the objective, but rather reports alleging this or that WMD-related sites, well, the Israelis were performing a useful service for the likes of Doug Feith, who would bundle them up and give them to the ‘Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal’ for passing to the president. Woof! Proof!”

McGovern seemed to find it perfectly possible that “evidence” of the sort that Faulk stumbled upon was voluminous: “The neuralgic search for WMD pointed up the problem. US chief WMD-searcher, David Kay, has told lurid stories of being awakened in Iraq at all hours by people working in the office of the Vice President: ‘Hey we got new coordinates; check them out!’”

McGovern recalled one instance of someone speaking openly about the quality of Israeli “intelligence.” When John Negroponte was Director of National Intelligence, National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel asked him to explain why the Israelis have suggested a much shorter timeline for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. “I think that sometimes what the Israelis will do [is] give you the worst-case assessment,” Negroponte said.