Thursday, June 11, 2009

WHen Did our Government Become a COVER-nment

Thinking back to the the exposure of the White House coverup of the Watergate break in that led Nixon to resign or face impeachment, I'm forced to wonder now if it is possible to prosecute government officials like Bush, Cheney, Rumsefeld, and so on, who were not forced out of office or appointment (maybe Rumsfeld was at the lsat minute). Nixon went back to California and became a recluse. But Cheney is out there all over the place, with one of his daughters too,defending what he did and denying that it was illegal and calling for the release of CIA documents even though his was the most secretive administration ever. And now we have Senators Lieberman and Graham saying that their law making it illegal to release the still unreleased photos and video of crimes committed at Abu Gharib MUST BE PASSED or they will block ALL legislation even though they have acknowledged that the unreleased materials show even more serious acts of violence and torture than those we have seen and even though Obama has already said, wrongly, that he will not release them. Is this not an open cover up? Isn't it tantamount to legalizing obstruction of justice since Lierman and Graham acknowledge that the evidence shows that (war) crimes were committed?



Wednesday, June 3, 2009

“A Troubling Allegory: 1945”

Good evening, ladies and Gentlemen. Imagine, if you will, that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg succeeded in assassinating Hitler in 1944 and immediately negotiated Germany’s conditional surrender to the Allied Forces. It’s now 1945. Wounded war hero von Stauffenberg has just been elected Chancellor of Germany. The first one-eyed and one-armed man ever to be elected to office in Germany, Chancellor von Stauffenberg leads a liberal Democratic parliamentary majority coalition and promises an investigation into Nazi war crimes and the restoration of the rule of law. Nevertheless, some Nazis are elected and form a minority party. But the promised investigation of Germany’s recent past has been put on hold: no Nuremberg trials, “no criminalization of politics,” no punishment for mere policy differences the Nazis and with present liberal government, no banning of the Nazi party or destruction of Nazi insignias. Furthermore, no arrests of Nazi politicians have been made, and no deNazification program of the German population is in the works. The German economy is in shambles. The following is a speech given by a former Nazi leader at a press conference in 1946 held at an undisclosed bunker location, in response to the earlier release of footage of the death camps and the even further lowering of Germany’s standing in the eyes of the world. You have just entered . . . the Twilightenment Zone.

Good morning, everyone. Let me get right to it. Some say we tried to exterminate the Jews, that we deliberately set out to murder them, even creating so-called “death camps” to do it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is, we were attacked by Poland in 1939. And this attack happened only a few years after the Communists had burned the Riechstag. We responded in both cases by defending ourselves, eventually liberating the Poles. But Britain and France declared war on us. So then we had to invade France too and liberate it to protect ourselves. Luckily, we had built up our military in the previous six years, so the Rhineland, which France had stolen from us when forcing us to sign the illegal Treaty of Versailles, Austria and Czechoslovakia asked to be liberated and become part of a new, free Germany. So we made living room for them. And Italy supported us, of course, Japan too. We even reached an agreement with the Communist leader Stalin since all we wanted was peace in our time. Our soldiers honored their country with their service, many of them sacrificing their lives in the name of freedom. These brave men and women knew Germany had to be protected. The burning of the Reichstag had changed everything. So as our cities were being bombed by the Allied aggressors night after night, we knew we had to protect our civilian populations. And we were especially concerned for the safety of our minorities, the Jews first and foremost amongst them. Outside, foreign disruptors hoping to provoke war had already staged attacks on our Jews, just as the foreign Communists burned down the Reichstag, leading us to declare a state of emergency to preserve the Weimar Republic by destroying it. Am I the only one who remembers the burning of the Reichstag?

Since our Jewish populations already lived in ghettos--they preferred to live among themselves, as you know--we began building special new vacation settlements for them outfitted with the latest enhancements and hygienic facilities, located out in the countryside and out of harm’s way. We knew the Jews were in a rush get to Palestine. Zionism was all the rage, then, you know. So we used our own military transport cars, taking away valuable military assets from our war efforts, to move them to their brand new vacation settlements. After our porters took their luggage for them, they got enhanced showers, disinfectants, haircuts, and new clothes as soon as they arrived. They even got free dental work and universal health care at the local clinics where our leading medical doctors performed break through, cutting edge, life-saving experiments. The air was fresh, and they had full employment. We were fighting a war on two fronts at the same time, you may recall. Then the Communist leader of the U.S.S.R., Joseph Stalin, broke his pact with us, forcing us to invade Russia too—and still we saved as many Jews as we could. And let me tell you, the Jews really appreciated our help getting resettled. They got to work right away, helping us build their new settlements (which some call "death camps"), which were just going to be temporary, of course, and even helping us to run them. The Jews knew that war was hard work, but that work would make them free. Sure, some people (Jews included) died along the way. But they died of natural causes. It was wartime after all, and we couldn’t exactly use first class train coaches, which would have had limited seating availability. What we did for the Jews was entirely legal.

To my critics, let me say this. Yes, there were a few bad apples among the Nazi guards we left in the enhanced settlements to help the Jews keep order and to protect the Jews in case of attack by anti-Semitic Russians or, even worse, by those racist Americans with their Indian reservations, Japanese-American internment camps, and segregated South with signs saying “whites only” and “dogs and coloreds keep off the grass.” But these bad apples in the Nazis who were helping to keep everything in order inin our settlements have been prosecuted, convicted, and punished. And, yes, it’s true that my attaché Herr Oberleutnant Libby was convicted and yet never served time for his crime. But I personally saw to it that he was never pardoned. It’s time to move forward, while always remembering the Reichstag. Now is not the time for anger. As Chancellor Bush and Minister of Propaganda Condoleezza Rice have said repeatedly, Germany does not torture, much less exterminate. We saved the Jews. Any murders of Jewish populations occurred after our watch, committed by foreign agents. Now, the present administration has taken measures to release classified documents about our war efforts. The von Stauffenberg administration is keeping Germany less safe. Let me remind you that Stalin is still running the Soviet Union and still poses a grave danger to our homeland. Remember his gulags, his mass murders, the war crimes of his soldiers? Well, History will be our judge. Future generations of Germans will look back at the past few years, remember the burning of he Reichstag, and deeply appreciate that everything we did, we did for them. There was only one leader of Germany, and we know who he was. That’s something the present administration will just never understand. Thank you.

Fux News Reports: Headline: Extermination? Or Salvation?

Some say that former Nazi Minister Cheney was an exterminator, others a savior, a Moses, if you will, helping to lead the Chosen people to their homeland. You decide! We’ll provide full coverage and fair and balanced analysis, with Minority House WhipTom “the Hammer” Delay as our guest commentator.

Breaking News: Chancellor von Stauffenberg has decided not to release any more footage of the death camps, er, settlements, for fear of endangering the German troops. He is unable to close the enhanced settlements or transfer the remaining prisoners of war, whom he continues to hold indefinitely in prolonged but not permanent detention.