Bob Herbert Has Good Things to Say About Pres. Obama

The NY Times Opinion Pages this week has an Op-Ed writer that is worth taking a look.

The always worth reading Bob Herbert is very good Friday with an article titled "Miracles Take Time". In this piece Mr. Herbert points out that Pres. Obama is getting blamed for this economic disaster unfairly by the right wingers and others for not fixing the Stock Market, even though he has only been president for 6 weeks.

Barack Obama has only been president for six weeks, but there is a surprising amount of ire, anger, even outrage that he hasn’t yet solved the problems of the U.S. economy, that he hasn’t saved us from the increasingly tragic devastation wrought by the clownish ideas of right-wing conservatives and the many long years of radical Republican misrule.

He goes on to point out 4.4 million jobs have been lost since this recession started in December, 2007 and instead of people offering help to fix that, they take to the floor of the senate this week to deride him over of all things earmarks.

Freaking out over earmarks is like watching a neighborhood that is being consumed by flames and complaining that there is crabgrass on some of the lawns.

However maybe the most important paragraph to me is this one, which to me points out one of the best arguments for President Obama's bold agenda.

In the midst of the craziness, conservatives are busy trying to blame this epic economic catastrophe — a conflagration of their own making — on the new president. Forget Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and George Herbert Hoover Bush and the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich and all the rest. The right-wingers would have you believe this is Obama’s downturn.

As I said it is a great opinion piece. Bob Herbert is one of my favorites at the Times, and he didn't disappoint yesterday. He goes on to point out how the right are trying to paint the president with the Socialist meme, as a communist, and every other radical thing they can find.

He even brings up the Alan Keyes birth certificate lawsuit and how crazy that is. The article is worth taking a minute to read. It is very well written and very good. He ends it with this thought.

What I know is that the renegade clowns who ruined this economy, the Republican right in alliance with big business and a fair number of feckless Democrats — all working in opposition to the interests of working families — have no credible basis for waging war against serious efforts to get us out of their mess.

Maybe the markets are down because demand has dried up, because many of the nation’s biggest firms have imploded and because Americans are losing their jobs and their homes by the millions. Maybe a dose of reality is in order, as opposed to the childish desire for yet another stock market bubble.

Maybe the nuns in grammar school were right when they counseled that patience is a virtue. The man has been president for six weeks.

We are a nation we once condemed

How have we as a people let ourselves become a nation that once we condemned? In WWII, and in Vietnam we condemned the torture of prisoners. John McCain, as one of the most well known POW's has spoken out against his treatment by his captors as terrible. Some of the worst pain anyone could endure. Withholding medical treatment, inflicting pain in various ways, even the water boarding we hear so much about. All of these are forms of torture.

During WWII the German's did this in the POW camps, they used the Jewish people as test subjects in the camps before they put them to death. Sometimes death was a blessing, harsh as that sounds. The Japanese, were terrible in the treatment of prisoners. Even though this isn't really discussed. Some books on the war do talk about it.

But, now, we are guilty of these same types of things. At first, when the word of Abu Ghraib came out, it was said that it was just a few of the lower ranks who were involved in it. You remember, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick,Pfc. Lynndie England, Spc. Sabrina Harman,Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr.,Spc. Jeremy Sivits, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, Spc. Armin J. Cruz Jr., and Spc. Roman Krol. These are the ones who were court-martialed and convicted of crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison. As of today the only one still in prison is Charles Graner, Jr. He is in solitary at Leavenworth Prison, Kansas.

All the others have either served the time they were given or had their time commuted. No officers were ever convicted of a crime or ever even tried for any crimes. The doctrine of command responsibility, according to Paragraph 501 of Army Field Manual 27-10, holds that a commander is legally responsible not only for orders handed down but "if he has actual knowledge, or should have knowledge ... that troops or other persons subject to his control are about to commit or have committed a war crime and he fails to take the necessary and reasonable steps to insure compliance with the law of war or to punish violators thereof."

While no officers have been court-martialed, the Army says it has taken nonjudicial action against some officers for crimes at Abu Ghraib. Beyond the nine convictions detailed below, Army public affairs officer Maj. Wayne Marotto told Salon by e-mail that three soldiers and one officer received nonjudicial punishments, and four soldiers and eight officers received official reprimands. In addition, "a number of officers were suspended or relieved of their duties," according to Marotto. He declined to provide further details about these personnel, citing the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits the Army from "publicly releasing certain items of information" about individuals regarding nonjudicial actions taken against them.

There are two publicly known cases of military leaders from Abu Ghraib receiving nonjudicial punishment. According to a May 5, 2005, Army press release, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, was relieved of command, was demoted to colonel and received a letter of reprimand. And on May 13, 2005, the Department of Defense announced that Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, was relieved of command, received a letter of reprimand and was fined $8,000. (One day earlier, the Washington Post reported the reprimand of Pappas, citing an unnamed Army official.)

While all of this is telling, even more so is the fact that above the military orders were the orders that the military were following. Those orders came from somewhere. At the same time they were doing the "interrogations" at Abu Ghraib others were being done by "OGU" or as they have now been identified CIA were doing their own interrogations and using some of the same if not worse tactics as seen by the photos which were released when we were introduced to "Lynndie and Charles" the couple who took the pictures of the naked prisoners. The orders for all these interrogations came from the same person. From the top. Of course there is speculation there as to who is the top. Is it Bush or is it Cheney?? But that is where it starts, then Rumsfeld, down from there. So, why aren't they answering for these crimes? Will they have to answer for them? That's the question that remains to be answered some day.

The 2nd email from my friend.

Well, I told you I would talk about the 2nd email. It was something that really wasn't discussed alot this election cycle. There was an ad or two run I think, but mostly in the border states and in Florida, but not here in the midwest. However this has been a HUGE issue the last few years. I think the war in Iraq and then the economy just trumped everything else this time.

The issue I am talking about of course is illegal immigrants. Or as they are called in this email illegal aliens. I have not verified any of these web sites or figures it states in here. I didn't take the time nor the trouble. It really wasn't worth it to me. I know a lot of money is spent, I know it is a serious problem. According to this, it causes massive cuts for US Seniors...costs more per years than the Iraq war. So, I decided to check the first URL given to verify this statement. It says, 11 Billion to 22 Billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year. That's what the email says. However the web site says "Each year, state governments spend an estimated $11 billion to $22 billion to provide welfare to immigrants." So right there in the first statement is a misrepresentation of the facts. And the deceptions just go on from there it looks like. It has several more links on 5 pages, most of them are not clickable so I have to type them in. They are all old links dated from around 2004 and 2005 mostly.

Are you seeing a pattern here?? I sent her an email back and asked her why she sent this to me. This was reflecting rather badly on her president wasn't it?? This was all on his watch. Nothing I found was later than 2006. So I wasn't sure what the motive was behind it, but I found it rather odd. Like I said it was him, John McCain and I think Ted Kennedy was in on it trying to get the immigration reform passed. But John McCain was the biggest one for a long time. Then he stopped, even said he wouldn't sign his own bill. George Bush was very hard on getting something done, but he and the others in the republican party dropped the ball on this one. So, another strange email from my friend.

I think if this was what I wanted to send in an email, and I know it was just a forward from someone else, I would have gotten some newer links and some newer data to cite. Using data from 2 to 4 and 5 years ago just doesn't make a lot of sense if you are trying to blame something on the incoming administration or congress.

Like I said earlier....I am amazed....once again...lol