Antiwar.com Blog

Are any of the candidates in tomorrow’s presidential primaries in Florida running advertisements criticizing the Iraq war?  Are any of the candidates making opposition to the Iraq war their premier issue?

Is the antiwar issue being raised in the media or in Q & A with candidates?

Has anybody seen polls on which candidates are favored by voters who opposed the war?

The Washington Post yesterday made the GOP race sound like a contest on who could be most bellicose on Iraq. Is that how the race looks on the ground in FLA?

I ran across this photo and was surprised at the caption. I may be naive but I was genuinely surprised at a medic leading an armed patrol in Baghdad.

U.S. Army Spc. Kris Hostetler, 21, from Nashville, Tenn., a medic with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment patrols in Arab Jabour during Operation Coliseum south of Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2008. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

A lesson in media bias — the headline of the CNN International story give us one narrative:

“Kremlin critic barred from election”

… And the body of the piece reports quite another:

“Russia’s Central Election Commission disqualified one of Kremlin’s critics from the country’s presidential election Sunday, claiming that the signatures collected for his nominating petitions were forged, the state news agency said Sunday. …

“Kasyanov’s spokeswoman confirmed to CNN that he had been barred from running in the elections, scheduled for March 2. He will not appeal the decision, a representative told Interfax.”

The headline tells us that Russia’s much-touted “backsliding” into totalitarianism is accelerating rather rapidly, while the facts, baldly stated, tell us that, for some reason, Kasyanov isn’t appealing the decision of the authorities to disqualify him, which leads us to wonder if the charges of forgery might be substantially true. Of course, forging signature on election petitions is quite illegal in the US, and would undoubtedly result in criminal charges. Perhaps that’s why Kasyanov isn’t making much of a fuss about the matter.

 

Following the GOP debate on Thursday night, Huckabee showed both his ignorance and his willingness to believe fairy tales, regardless of whether he heard them or made them up himself.

During the debate, the Huckster said that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (a meaningless term covering everything from WWI-era mustard gas to nukes) were like Easter eggs that we never found, “it doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

Questioned by Chris Matthews following the debate, Huckabee suggested that the WMD were moved to Jordan. When Matthews pointed out that Jordan is a close ally of the US, Huckabee started spinning his fairy tale. Instead of realizing his mistake (he probably meant Syria, not Jordan), he explained that these elusive little WMD could have ended up anywhere, and without the knowledge of the King of Jordan.

The idea that Saddam moved his weapons out of the country before his regime fell never made sense to me, unless you believe that he was so moral as to refuse to use the weapons to save himself and defend his rule.

Antiwar.com would like to make the casualty counter available to Facebook users. Do any of our readers know how to write a simple Facebook application that could grab the data available on a remote javascript file and display it on Facebook profiles? Please contact mike at antiwar (dot) com if you can help us out.

The intellectual bootlickers surrounding Bush have apparently persuaded him that he is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln.   Fox News recently had unprecedented access to Bush to produce a documentary to air on Sunday night: ““George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish.”  Fox reporter Bret Baier commented of his meetings with Bush: ”

We talked a lot about President Lincoln. And there’s going to be a lot of people out there who watch this hour and say, is he trying to equate himself with Lincoln?

I tell you what — he thinks about Lincoln and the tough times that he had during the Civil War. 600,000 dead. The country essentially hated him when he was leaving office.

Perhaps the cartoon history books Bush was given neglected to mention the fact that Lincoln was very popular in the North at the time he “left office” via John Wilkes Booth.   Lincoln was hated in the South, not surprisingly – given the Rules of Engagement that northern armies followed in the final years of the war.

Bush has followed in Lincoln’s footsteps when he gushes over freedom while trampling the Constitution.  That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth,” as I noted in Attention Deficit Democracy.

Bush struts when he promises to ”bring to justice” people on his target list.

Hopefully Americans will see George Bush brought to  justice for his crimes.  That would be a rebirth of the Rule of Law in this land.