| Al Jazeera, Oct 24, 2008 | |||||||
The former press secretary to George Bush has announced he is backing Barack Obama in the race to replace his ex-boss as US president. Scott McClellan said on Thursday that he had decided to back the Democrat because he wanted to support the candidate with the best chance of changing the way Washington – the political heart of the US – works and gets things done. His announcement is yet another blow to the campaign of John McCain, the Republican contender, who is struggling to erode Obama’s opinion poll lead. McClellan is the second former Bush administration figure this week to publicly support Obama after Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state under Bush, threw his weight behind the Illinois senator. McClellan disclosed his decision during the recording of a television show to be shown on CNN, the US broadcaster, this weekend. He had ruffled the feathers of his former colleagues with the publication of What Happened, a book that was critical of Bush and exposed some of the inner workings of the administration. Candidates spar The news came after the US presidential candidates attacked each other once again on economic issues as they continued to campaign across key battleground states.
McCain told voters in Florida that Obama’s plan to raise taxes on small businesses making more than $250,000 would “kill jobs” and “comes at the worst possible time for America”.The McCain campaign also released a new advertisement using “Joe the Plumber”, the Ohio plumber who questioned Obama over his tax plans earlier this month. Trailing in opinion polls both nationally and in many key states, McCain is facing a difficult path to victory and finds himself racing to defend states that have voted Republican in recent elections. ‘International crisis’ However, Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan, who has been following the McCain campaign, said the message based around “Joe the Plumber” was resonating, at least among his supporters, who cheered every time the name was mentioned. The Arizona senator’s latest campaign advertisement features a number of Americans all saying “I am Joe the Plumber too”. “Senator Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of pie than he is in growing the pie,” McCain told a cheering crowd at an Ormond Beach timber yard. “He’s more concerned about using taxes to spread the wealth than creating a tax plan that creates jobs and grows our economy,” he said. McCain also again used an assertion by Joe Biden, Obama’s running-mate that, like John F Kennedy, Obama would be tested with an international crisis within six months of taking office. “Senator Obama tried to explain away this by saying his running mate sometimes engages in ‘rhetorical flourishes’. Really? Really?” he said. Bush link Obama says his tax plan would give a tax cut to 95 per cent of Americans.
The Illinois senator gave his last campaign speech in Indiana on Thursday before leaving the campaign for two days to go to Hawaii to be with his gravely ill grandmother.Obama said the US could not afford a president McCain who “thinks the economic policies of George W Bush are just right for America”. “He made kind of a strange argument that the best way to stop companies from shipping jobs overseas is to give more tax cuts to companies that are shipping jobs overseas,” Obama said of his opponent. “More tax cuts for job outsourcers. That’s what Senator McCain proposed as his answer to outsourcing.” With less than two weeks before the election, Obama leads McCain 52 per cent to 40 per cent among likely voters in the latest three-day tracking poll by Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby. However, an Associated Press poll released on Wednesday put the gap between the two at just one per cent with Obama on 44 per cent and McCain 43. |
Posts Tagged ‘Scott McClellan’
Inside the Bush White House’s Nonstop Propaganda War
July 15, 2008RINF.COM, Monday, July 14th, 2008
By Mark Dery
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan exposes the culture of deception that sold an unnecessary war to the public
Scott McClellan is having a “Matrix” moment — the moment when you wake up, with a jolt, from the reassuring fictions of the media dreamworld to the face-slapping reality of unspun fact. Remember that scene in “The Matrix” where Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion — the computer-generated simulation humanity experiences as everyday reality — to reveal the movie’s post-apocalyptic world for the irradiated slag heap it really is? Like that. “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” he tells Keanu Reeves, a riff on the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s pronouncement, in his book Simulations, that we live in a “desert of the real” — an ever-more-virtual reality where firsthand experience and empirical truth are being displaced by media fictions. He offers an example tailor-made for the Bush presidency: “Propaganda and advertising fuse in the same marketing and merchandising of objects and ideologies.”
This, in a word, is life inside the Bush administration’s Ministry of Truth, as described by McClellan in What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. In his frag ‘em-and-run memoir, the former White House press secretary — whose Secret Service code name, I kid you not, was “Matrix” — recounts how he and the rest of Team Dubya got caught up in the “permanent campaign,” a nonstop propaganda war whose tactical weapons were “the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin,” and whose goal was to stage-manage the media narrative and thus public opinion.
Now that McClellan has broken free from what he calls the “Washington bubble,” he can see the “massive marketing campaign” (his words, my italics) to sell the war in Iraq for the steaming heap of dookie it was: a PR operation characterized by a, er, “lack of candor and honesty,” as the author so masterfully understates it, having just told us that the administration dropped the trap on chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey for telling the Wall Street Journal that Bush’s war would likely cost between $100 billion and $200 billion — a fatal misspeak at a moment when “talking about the projected cost of a potential war wasn’t part of the script.” Neither was talking about “possible unpleasant consequences” (the choice of adjective is sheer virtuosity, like a grace note in a Paganini caprice); “casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions,” and other buzz-killers might jeopardize what advertisers call the “supportive atmosphere” that puts consumers in that impulse-buying mood — in this instance, buying the dubious case for war from a president who famously prefers faith to facts, a president who listens to his gut. Unfortunately, the trustworthy gurglings of the Bush gut were indistinguishable, in this case, from the offstage urgings of the neocons Colin Powell derided as “fucking crazies.”
Peace and Justice Post 
You Cannot Pardon a Crime You Authorized
November 28, 2008RINF.COM, Nov 28, 2008
Statement from the Steering Committee for the Prosecution for War Crimes of President Bush and His Subordinates
Never before has a president pardoned himself or his subordinates for crimes he authorized. The closest thing to this in U.S. history thus far has been Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence. Bush is widely expected to follow that commutation with a pardon. Not only did Libby work for the White House, but he was convicted of obstruction of justice in an investigation that was headed to the president. Evidence introduced in the trial, including a hand-written note by the vice president, implicated Bush, and former press secretary Scott McClellan has since testified that Bush authorized the exposure of an undercover agent, that being the crime that was under investigation.
There are widespread concerns that Bush might pardon other subordinates for various other crimes that he authorized, potentially including torture, warrantless spying, a variety of war crimes, taking the nation to war on fraudulent evidence, and the abuses of the politicized Justice Department. Voices in the media advising Bush to issue such pardons include: Stuart Taylor Jr. (Newsweek 7/12/08) and Alan Dershowitz (Wall St Journal 9/12/08), while many additional voices have urged Obama to commit to not prosecuting.
The idea that the pardon power constitutionally includes such pardons ignores a thousand year tradition in which no man can sit in judgment of himself, and the fact that James Madison and George Mason argued that the reason we needed the impeachment power was that a president might some day try to pardon someone for a crime that he himself was involved in. The problem is not preemptive pardons of people not yet tried and convicted. The problem is not blanket pardons of unnamed masses of people. Both of those types of pardons have been issued in the past and have their appropriate place. The problem is the complete elimination of any semblance of the rule of law if Bush pardons his subordinates for crimes he instructed or authorized them to commit.
If Bush attempts this, here are possible responses:
1. Immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney and various pardonees, even if they are out of office. (Here are arguments for the permissibility of such impeachments: http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/37834 )
2. Overturning of the pardons by the new president or by Congress, as Bush’s lawyers told him he could do to Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, which was a far more minor abuse of the pardon power.
3. Legislation banning self-pardons and pardons of crimes authorized by the president.
4. A Constitutional Amendment banning self-pardons and pardons of crimes authorized by the president.
5. Refusal by the courts to honor the supposed pardons.
6. Prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and their subordinates for their crimes.
With thanks to all who have aided over the past millennia in the establishment of the rule of law.
***
Lawrence Velvel, Dean of Massachusetts Law School, chairs the Steering Committee whose members include Ben Davis, Marjorie Cohn, Chris Pyle, Elaine Scarry, Peter Weiss, David Swanson, Kristina Borjesson, Colleen Costello, Valeria Gheorghiu, and Andy Worthington.
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Tags:President Bush, presidentail pardon, prosection of war criminals, Scooter Libby, Scott McClellan, war crimes
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