If your bios setup boot order is correctly configured, a Vista DVD/or if you
have one a CD should trigger "Press any key."
I don't think there is a link to control the different behaviors because
there aren't supposed to be "different behaviors."
Most Vista I've seen is on a DVD although I think MSFT made some specific
spanned CDs available possibly through Technet or MSDN.
CH
The Iraq fiasco of killing and money hemorrhage will be showcased this week,
and Apathetic Americans will sleep as the media puppets are spun, Congress
puts their tail between their legs and remains cowed by lying Bush, troops
run out in April 2008, and the only thing that will stop the death and money
hemorrhaging is a DRAFT.
As the Iraqis Stand Down, We'll Stand Up
By FRANK RICH
Published: NYT September 9, 2007
IT will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again
synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an
attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus instead
on another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without notice: Sept. 8,
2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for
the administration's latest scam.
That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its
fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse - Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice - were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk
shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article
amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had
sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. "We don't want the
smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condoleezza Rice on CNN,
introducing a sales pitch concocted by a White House speechwriter.
What followed was an epic propaganda onslaught of distorted intelligence,
fake news, credulous and erroneous reporting by bona fide journalists,
presidential playacting and Congressional fecklessness. Much of it had been
plotted that summer of 2002 by the then-secret White House Iraq Group
(WHIG), a small task force of administration brass charged with the Iraq con
job.
Today the spirit of WHIG lives. In the stay-the-surge propaganda offensive
that crests with this week's Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus
and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself in almost every
particular. Even the specter of imminent "nuclear holocaust" has been
rebooted in President Bush's arsenal of rhetorical scare tactics.
The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information "war room" conceived in the last
throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer. White
House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in
newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked
intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good
cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's
pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before
setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once
again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.
As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are
paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend's precisely timed
"surprise" presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success "on the
ground here in Anbar" (as he put it) without ever leaving a heavily
fortified American base.
A more elaborate example of administration Disneyland can be found in those
bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other dignitaries whenever
the cameras roll. Last week The Washington Post discovered that at least one
of them, the Dora market, is a Potemkin village, open only a few hours a day
and produced by $2,500 grants (a k a bribes) bestowed on the shopkeepers.
"This is General Petraeus's baby," Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell told The Post.
"Personally, I think it's a false impression." Another U.S. officer said
that even shops that "sell dust" or merely "intend to sell goods" are
included in the Pentagon's count of the market's reopened businesses.
One Baghdad visitor left unimpressed was Representative Jan Schakowsky, a
Democrat from Chicago, who dined with her delegation in Mr. Crocker's Green
Zone residence last month while General Petraeus delivered his spiel. "He's
spending an awful lot of time wining and dining members of Congress," she
told me last week. Though the menu included that native specialty lobster
tortellini, the real bill of fare, Ms. Schakowsky said, was a rigid set of
talking points: "Anbar," "bottom up," "decrease in violence" and "success."
In this new White House narrative, victory has been downsized to a
successful antiterrorist alliance between Sunni tribal leaders and the
American military in Anbar, a single province containing less than 5 percent
of Iraq's population. In truth, the surge had little to do with this
development, which was already being trumpeted by Mr. Bush in his January
prime-time speech announcing the surge.
Even if you believe that it's a good idea to bond with former Saddamists who
may have American blood on their hands, the chances of this "bottom up"
model replicating itself are slim. Anbar's population is almost exclusively
Sunni. Much of the rest of Iraq is consumed by the Sunni-Shiite and
Shiite-Shiite civil wars that are M.I.A. in White House talking points.
The "decrease in violence" fable is even more insidious. Though both General
Petraeus and a White House fact sheet have recently boasted of a 75 percent
decline in sectarian attacks, this number turns out to be as cooked as those
tallies of Saddam's weapons sites once peddled by WHIG. As The Washington
Post reported on Thursday, it excludes Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni
violence. The Government Accountability Office, which rejected that fuzzy
math, found overall violence unchanged using the methodology practiced by
the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
No doubt General Petraeus, like Dick Cheney before him, will say that his
own data is "pretty well confirmed" by classified intelligence that can't be
divulged without endangering national security. Meanwhile, the White House
will ruthlessly undermine any reality-based information that contradicts its
propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate W.M.D. findings of the United
Nations weapon experts Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei before the war.
General Petraeus intervened to soften last month's harsh National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Last week the administration and its
ideological surrogates were tireless in trashing the nonpartisan G.A.O.
report card that found the Iraqi government flunking most of its benchmarks.
Those benchmarks, the war's dead- enders now say, are obsolete anyway. But
what about the president's own benchmarks? Remember "as the Iraqis stand up,
we'll stand down"? General Petraeus was once in charge of the Iraqi Army's
training and proclaimed it "on track and increasing in capacity" three years
ago. On Thursday, an independent commission convened by the Republican John
Warner and populated by retired military officers and police chiefs reported
that Iraqi forces can take charge no sooner than 12 to 18 months from now,
and that the corrupt Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt from scratch. Let
us not forget, either, Mr. Bush's former top-down benchmarks for measuring
success: "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself."
On that scorecard, he's batting 0 for 3.
What's surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even
after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its
fictions can still infiltrate the real news. After Michael O'Hanlon and
Kenneth Pollack, two Brookings Institution scholars, wrote a New York Times
Op-Ed article in July spreading glad tidings of falling civilian fatality
rates, they were widely damned for trying to pass themselves off as tough
war critics (both had supported the war and the surge) and for not
mentioning that their fact-finding visit to Iraq was largely dictated by a
Department of Defense itinerary.
But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent
observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in these pages,
identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon junketeers. Unlike
Armstrong Williams, the talking head and columnist who clandestinely
received big government bucks to "regularly comment" on No Child Left
Behind, they received no cash. But why pay for what you can get free? Two
weeks ago Mr. O'Hanlon popped up on The Washington Post op-ed page, again
pushing rosy Iraq scenarios, including an upbeat prognosis for economic
reconstruction, even though the G.A.O. found that little of the $10 billion
earmarked for reconstruction is likely to be spent.
Anchoring the "CBS Evening News" from Iraq last week, Katie Couric seemed to
be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr.
O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a
bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of
American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's
bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls
"Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in
Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5
percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The
Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars
and Stripes.
Next to such "real" news from CBS, the "fake" news at the network's
corporate sibling Comedy Central was, not for the first time, more
trustworthy. Rob Riggle, a "Daily Show" correspondent who also serves in the
Marine Reserve, invited American troops in Iraq to speak candidly about the
Iraqi Parliament's vacation.
When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred, the
White House's propaganda mission has once more been accomplished. No wonder
President Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the economic summit
after last weekend's photo op in Iraq, he reportedly told Australia's deputy
prime minister that "we're kicking ass." This war has now gone on so long
that perhaps he has forgotten the price our troops paid the last time he
taunted our adversaries to bring it on, some four years and 3,500 American
military fatalities ago.
http://screwsubwalls.blogspot.com/search?q=maureen+dowd
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Old School Inanity
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: NYT September 9, 2007
WASHINGTON
Dying for a daddy, the Republicans turn their hungry eyes to Fred.
Fred Thompson acts tough on screen. And like Ronald Reagan, he has a
distinctively masculine timbre and an extremely involved wife.
In his announcement video, Mr. Thompson stood in front of a desk in what
looked like, duh, a law office, rumbling reassuringly that in this
"dangerous time" he would deal with "the safety and security of the American
people."
As Michelle Cottle wrote in The New Republic, far more than puffy-coiffed
Mitt and even more than tough guys Rudy and McCain, the burly, 6-foot-5,
65-year-old Mr. Thompson exudes "old-school masculinity."
"In Thompson's presence (live or on-screen)," she wrote, "one is viscerally,
intimately reassured that he can handle any crisis that arises, be it a
renegade Russian sub or a botched rape case." But she wondered, was he
really "enough of a man for this fight," or just someone who meandered
through life, creating the illusion of a masculine mystique?
Newsweek reported that some close to the Tennessean "question whether moving
into the White House is truly Thompson's life ambition - or more the dream
of his second wife, Jeri, a former G.O.P. operative who is his unofficial
campaign manager and top adviser."
It took only two days of campaigning to answer the masculine mystique
question. Fred gave an interview to CNN's John King as his bus rolled
through Iowa.
"To what degree should the American people hold the president of the United
States responsible for the fact that bin Laden is still at large six years
later?" Mr. King asked.
"I think bin Laden is more of a symbolism than he is anything else," Mr.
Thompson drawled. "Bin Laden being in the mountains of Afghanistan or - or
Pakistan is not as important as the fact that there's probably Al Qaeda
operatives inside the United States of America."
Usually, you can only get that kind of exquisitely inane logic from the
president. Who does Fred think is sending operatives or inspiring them to
come?
Fred is not Ronnie; he's warmed-over W. President Reagan always knew who the
foe was.
Fred followed W.'s nutty lead of marginalizing Osama on a day when TV showed
another creepy, fruitcake manifesto by the terrorist, who was wearing what
seemed to be a fake beard left over from Woody Allen's "Bananas" and
bloviating on everything from the subprime mortgage crisis to the "woes" of
global warming to a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory to the wisdom of
Noam Chomsky to the unwisdom of Richard Perle to the heartwarming news that
Muslims have lived with Jews and not "incinerated them" to the need to
"continue to escalate the killing and fighting" against American kids in
Iraq.
Can we please get someone in charge who will stop whining that Osama is
hiding in "harsh terrain," hunt him down and blast him forward to the Stone
Age?
Fred must have missed the news of the administration's intelligence estimate
in July deeming Al Qaeda rejuvenated and "a persistent and evolving
terrorist threat" to Americans.
Pressed by Mr. King on the fact that the Bush hawks went after Saddam
instead of Osama, Fred continued to sputter: "You - you're - you're not
served up these issues one at a time. They - they come when they come, and
you have to - you have to deal with them."
Democrats pounced. John Edwards issued a statement saying, "That bin Laden
is still at large is Bush's starkest failure." John McCain and Rudy Giuliani
also stressed the need to take out Osama.
Fred quickly caved on the matter of men in caves. At a rally later in the
day he manned up. "Apparently Osama bin Laden has crawled out of his cave
long enough to send another video and he is getting a lot of attention," he
said, "and ought to be caught and killed."
He continued to insist that killing bin Laden would not end the terrorist
threat, without realizing that this is true now because, by not catching bin
Laden, W. allowed him to explode into an inspirational force for jihadists.
Republicans are especially eager for a papa after their disappointing
experiences with Junior. After going through so many shattering disasters,
W. seems more the inexperienced kid than ever.
In Australia, the president called Australian soldiers in Iraq "Austrian
troops," and got into a weird to-and-fro on TV with the South Korean
president.
W. cooperated with Ropert Draper, the author of a new biography of him, yet
the portrait was not flattering. Like a frat president sitting around with
the brothers trying to figure out whether to party with Tri-Delts or Thetas,
W. asked his advisers for a show of hands last year to see if Rummy should
stay on. And W. is obsessed with getting the Secret Service to arrange his
biking trails.
"What kind of male," one of his advisers wondered aloud, "obsesses over his
bike riding time, other than Lance Armstrong or a 12-year-old boy?"
