Justin you are so on.
I know there will be Vista Ultimate parties from 10PM to 1AM at Best Buys,
and other stores like Comp USA--but the essential ingredient for me is
finding out if they will have open bars with the music. I want you to go to
one near you and also I have a side bet which would involve the loser going
to all the stores in your town and buying up every single left over edition
of Vista? Are you game? LOL
Invitation to the Vista Launch Celebrations
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/w...tation-to-our-valuable-windows-community.aspx
CH
What's the sound of one congressman clapping?
Check out the Louis Libby Trial. It beats mud wrestling and Amature night
at a stripper joint.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR2007012400944.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012107B.shtml
Lying Like It's 2003
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 21 January 2007
Those who forget history may be doomed to repeat it, but who could
imagine we'd already be in danger of replaying that rotten year 2003?
Scooter Libby, the mastermind behind the White House's bogus scenarios
for ginning up the war in Iraq, is back at Washington's center stage,
proudly defending the indefensible in a perjury trial. Ahmad Chalabi, the
peddler of flawed prewar intelligence hyped by Mr. Libby, is back in clover
in Baghdad, where he purports to lead the government's Shiite-Baathist
reconciliation efforts in between visits to his pal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in
Iran.
Last but never least is Mr. Libby's former boss and Mr. Chalabi's former
patron, Dick Cheney, who is back on Sunday-morning television floating
fictions about Iraq and accusing administration critics of aiding Al Qaeda.
When the vice president went on a tear like this in 2003, hawking Iraq's
nonexistent W.M.D. and nonexistent connections to Mohamed Atta, he set the
stage for a war that now kills Iraqi civilians in rising numbers
(34,000-plus last year) that are heading into the genocidal realms of
Saddam. Mr. Cheney's latest sales pitch is for a new plan for "victory"
promising an even bigger bloodbath.
Mr. Cheney was honest, at least, when he said that the White House's
Iraq policy would remain "full speed ahead!" no matter what happened on Nov.
7. Now it is our patriotic duty - politicians, the press and the public
alike - to apply the brakes. Our failure to check the administration when it
rushed into Iraq in 2003 will look even more shameful to history if we roll
over again for a reboot in 2007. For all the belated Washington scrutiny of
the war since the election, and for all the heralded (if so far symbolic)
Congressional efforts to challenge it, too much lip service is still being
paid to the deceptive P.R. strategies used by the administration to sell its
reckless policies. This time we must do what too few did the first time:
call the White House on its lies. Lies should not be confused with
euphemisms like "incompetence" and "denial."
Mr. Cheney's performance last week on "Fox News Sunday" illustrates the
problem; his lying is nowhere near its last throes. Asked by Chris Wallace
about the White House's decision to overrule commanders who recommended
against a troop escalation, the vice president said, "I don't think we've
overruled the commanders." He claimed we've made "enormous progress" in
Iraq. He said the administration is not "embattled." (Well, maybe that one
is denial.)
This White House gang is so practiced in lying with a straight face that
it never thinks twice about recycling its greatest hits. Hours after Mr.
Cheney's Fox interview, President Bush was on "60 Minutes," claiming that
before the war "everybody was wrong on weapons of mass destruction" and that
"the minute we found out" the W.M.D. didn't exist he "was the first to say
so." Everybody, of course, was not wrong on W.M.D., starting with the United
Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq. Nor was Mr. Bush the first to come
clean once the truth became apparent after the invasion. On May 29, 2003 -
two days after a secret Defense Intelligence Agency-sponsored mission found
no biological weapons in trailers captured by American forces - Mr. Bush
declared: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological
laboratories."
But that's all W.M.D under the bridge. The most important lies to watch
for now are the new ones being reiterated daily by the administration's top
brass, from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney on down. You know fiasco awaits America
when everyone in the White House is reading in unison from the same
fictional script, as they did back in the day when "mushroom clouds" and
"uranium from Africa" were the daily drumbeat.
The latest lies are custom-made to prop up the new "way forward" that is
anything but. Among the emerging examples is a rewriting of the history of
Iraq's sectarian violence. The fictional version was initially laid out by
Mr. Bush in his Jan. 10 prime-time speech and has since been repeated on
television by both Mr. Cheney and the national security adviser, Stephen
Hadley, last Sunday and by Mr. Bush again on PBS's "NewsHour" on Tuesday. It
goes like this: sectarian violence didn't start spiraling out of control
until the summer of 2006, after Sunni terrorists bombed the Golden Mosque in
Samarra and forced the Shiites to take revenge.
But as Mark Seibel of McClatchy Newspapers noted last week, "the
president's account understates by at least 15 months when Shiite death
squads began targeting Sunni politicians and clerics." They were visible in
embryo long before that; The Times, among others, reported as far back as
September 2003 that Shiite militias were becoming more radical, dangerous
and anti-American. The reasons Mr. Bush pretends that Shiite killing started
only last year are obvious enough. He wants to duck culpability for failing
to recognize the sectarian violence from the outset - much as he failed to
recognize the Sunni insurgency before it - and to underplay the
intractability of the civil war to which he will now sacrifice fresh
American flesh.
An equally big lie is the administration's constant claim that it is on
the same page as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as we go full speed ahead.
Only last month Mr. Maliki told The Wall Street Journal that he wished he
"could be done with" his role as Iraq's leader "before the end of this
term." Now we are asked to believe not merely that he is a strongman capable
of vanquishing the death squads of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr,
his political ally, but also that he can be trusted to produce the troops he
failed to supply in last year's failed Baghdad crackdown. Yet as recently as
November, there still wasn't a single Iraqi battalion capable of fighting on
its own.
Hardly a day passes without Mr. Maliki mocking the White House's
professed faith in him. In the past week or so alone, he has presided over a
second botched hanging (despite delaying it for more than two weeks to put
in place new guidelines), charged Condi Rice with giving a "morale boost to
the terrorists" because she criticized him, and overruled American
objections to appoint an obscure commander from deep in Shiite territory to
run the Baghdad "surge." His government doesn't even try to hide its greater
allegiance to Iran. Mr. Maliki's foreign minister has asked for the release
of the five Iranians detained in an American raid on an Iranian office in
northern Iraq this month and, on Monday, called for setting up more Iranian
"consulates" in Iraq.
The president's pretense that Mr. Maliki and his inept, ill-equipped,
militia-infiltrated security forces can advance American interests in this
war is Neville Chamberlain-like in its naiveté and disingenuousness. An
American military official in Baghdad read the writing on the wall to The
Times last week: "We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government
that is actually part of the problem. We are being played like a pawn."
That's why the most destructive lie of all may be the White House's constant
refrain that its doomed strategy is the only one anyone has proposed.
Administration critics, Mr. Cheney said last Sunday, "have absolutely
nothing to offer in its place," as if the Iraq Study Group, John Murtha and
Joseph Biden-Leslie Gelb plans, among others, didn't predate the White
House's own.
In reality we're learning piece by piece that it is the White House that
has no plan. Ms. Rice has now downsized the surge/escalation into an
"augmentation," inadvertently divulging how the Pentagon is improvising,
juggling small deployments in fits and starts. No one can plausibly explain
how a parallel chain of command sending American and Iraqi troops into urban
street combat side by side will work with Iraqis in the lead (it will report
to a "committee" led by Mr. Maliki!). Or how $1 billion in new American
reconstruction spending will accomplish what the $30 billion thrown down the
drain in previous reconstruction spending did not.
All of this replays 2003, when the White House refused to consider any
plan, including existing ones in the Pentagon and State Department
bureaucracies, for coping with a broken post-Saddam Iraq. Then, as at every
stage of the war since, the only administration plan was for a propaganda
campaign to bamboozle American voters into believing "victory" was just
around the corner.
The next push on the "way forward" propaganda campaign arrives Tuesday
night, with the State of the Union address. The good news is that the
Democrats have chosen Jim Webb, the new Virginia senator, to give their
official response. Mr. Webb, a Reagan administration Navy secretary and the
father of a son serving in Iraq, has already provoked a testy exchange about
the war with the president at a White House reception for freshmen in
Congress. He's the kind of guy likely to keep a scorecard of the lies on
Tuesday night. But whether he does or not, it's incumbent on all those
talking heads who fell for "shock and awe" and "Mission Accomplished" in
2003 to not let history repeat itself in 2007. Facing the truth is the only
way forward in Iraq.
