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stories... issues... bushreport... comedy... site map... contact... Jackson Thoreau is the pen name of a Washington, D.C.-area journalist/writer. He can be contacted at jacksonthor@gmail.com. Physician who told off Cheney lost his home in Katrina, arrested by Cheney's goons By Kevin J. Shay Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since he was the one who told Dick Cheney to "go fuck yourself" on Thursday, that's the least we can do. Marble is a complex guy, to say the least. Some of the lyrics he writes can be considered harsh by some – personally what I've heard is very much on target - but he has a softer side as an organizer of breast cancer fund-raisers, not to mention an ER doctor. When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life. That led to his confrontation with the man who best represents the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in U.S. history on Thursday. As Marble explains, he was driving to his destroyed house Thursday in Gulfport, Ms., when military police refused to allow him to cross a barricade that was about 200 feet from his home. They forced him to drive an extra 20 minutes and spend even more on gasoline. "Thanks to Dubya Gump and Mr. Cheney, gas is really expensive and extremely hard to get anywhere Katrina has destroyed," Marble wrote. "So needless to say, I was extremely aggravated that they wouldn't let me pass." Suddenly a long line of dark cars pulled up, and they honked at Marble to back up to let them through the barricade that supposedly no one could drive through. That only made Marble madder so he did what most of us would do – or at least consider doing. "I waved a middle finger at the caravan," Marble wrote. After driving the extra 20 minutes and filming video of destruction along the way, he made it to his home. Marble overheard a neighbor say that Cheney was down the street talking to people. That's when he got the idea to go meet Dr. Evil himself. "I am no fan of Mr. Cheney because of several reasons," Marble explains. "For those who don't know Mr. Cheney is infamous for telling Senator [Pat] Leahy 'go fu** yourself' on the Senate floor. Also, I am not happy about the fact that thousands have died due to the slow action of FEMA, not to even mention the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time i.e. Iraq. " So Marble asked a couple police officers if he and a friend could walk down to Cheney. They told him Cheney was "looking forward to talk to the locals." "So we grabbed my Canon digital rebel and my Sony videocamera and started walking down the street," Marble wrote. "And then right in front of the destroyed tennis court I used to play on Dick Cheney was giving a pep rally, talking to the press. The secret service guys patted us down and waved the wands over us, and then let us pass." As he stood about 10 feet away from Cheney and his friend and some camera operators from CNN and other media filmed the scene, Marble suddenly yelled, 'Go fu** yourself', Mr. Cheney! "Go fu** yourself', you a**hole!'" "I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr. Cheney's infamous words back at him," Marble wrote. "At that moment, I noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their faces, like they were about to tackle me so I calmly walked away back to my former house." His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to his former house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble's home, two police waving M-16's showed up and said they were looking for someone who fit my description who had cursed at Cheney. "I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so they put me in handcuffs and 'detained' me for about 20 minutes or so," Marble wrote. "My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I was free to go." Marble and his family have been in the media spotlight before, including his wife, Lisa, and baby, Sofia Grace, who was born shortly after the storm, on CNN. Marble has also been interviewed in the Biloxi Sun Herald about his concert fund-raisers and musical success — one of his bands, dR. O, has had at least 20 No. 1 songs on the MP3.com charts — and art magazines. "The truth is even with all our losses, we are still luckier than many people down here because at least we didn't die," Marble wrote. "But I thought I could try to raise some awareness to the bad policies of the Dubya Gump administration and also possibly raise some money to replace the many things we lost, and so I decided I would auction the videotape my friend shot of the event. I will also grant an interview to the winner if so desired. --posted September 12, 2005 So go to eBay at http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7712048060&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&rd=1 and place a bid for this important video to help Marble raise some needed funds. I have done so and was at least at one time the high bidder. Marble also has an Internet site with photographs of the some damage in his town at www.HurricaneKatrinaSucked.com. A photo of him is at http://www.theharbinger.org/xix/000919/smith.html and you can also email Marble at clone9@yahoo.com.
George "Cannot Tell A Truth" Bush By Kevin J. Shay I recently celebrated my 45th birthday on the same day that John F. Kennedy presumably would have turned 87 had an assassins or assassins bullets not tragically ended his life way too soon at age 46. My family left our toy-littered, roach-infested, two-bedroom, $1,000-a-month castle hey, we do have a scenic view from our balcony of some pine trees that block the parking lot - in the Washington, D.C., area to spend my birthday at Berkeley Springs, W.V. Its a relaxing, artsy spa town not unlike Hot Springs, Ark., where George Washington and others visited more than 200 years before. Despite my attempts to clear my mind of things political for a day, it did not work. There were actually fewer pro-Bush stickers and other material displayed in this small West Virginia town than I expected. Some vehicles even bore Kerry stickers. But when we came upon a small natural spring hole designated as Washingtons 18th century bathtub, I had to remark to my son, "This was where a much better president than our current one went to take a bath a long time ago. A loooonnnnggg time ago." "Whats a president?" he asked, in the automatic questioning mode of an inquisitive four-year-old. I thought for a moment. "Its someone who leads the country and lives in that big White House we saw in Washington." He stared at the spring, obviously with other things on his mind than presidents. "Can I take a bath here, too?" As my son and his younger sister played in an adjacent larger spring, I couldnt help but compare the "cannot-tell-a-lie" reputation of the countrys first president to the "cannot-tell-a-true-statement" philosophy of the current one. And Im not alone in believing that Bush is the biggest liar who has occupied the White House, if not all-time, then in modern times. Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who was once a junior economics staffer in the Reagan administration, is among the leading voices detailing the daily lies of the Bush administration. Here is one excerpt from a 2002 Krugman column: "The Bush administration lies a lot.He is as slippery and evasive as any politician in memory..The recent spate of articles about administration dishonesty mainly reflects the campaign to sell war with Iraq. But the habit itself goes all the way back to the 2000 campaign, and is manifest on a wide range of issues. High points would include the plan for partial privatization of Social Security, with its 2-1=4 arithmetic; the claim that a tax cut that delivers 40 percent or more of its benefits to the richest 1 percent was aimed at the middle class; the claim that there were 60 lines of stem cells available for research; the promise to include limits on carbon dioxide in an environmental plan." Krugman also noted that "Bush ran as a moderate, a uniter, not a divider. The Economist endorsed him back in 2000 because it saw him as the candidate better able to transcend partisanship; now the magazine describes him as the partisan-in-chief." A 2003 Washington Monthly survey of conservative and progressive pundits and journalists concluded that Bush is a bigger liar than Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton. Among Bushs lies they chose was announcing the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in May 2003, saying his tax cuts would give middle-class Americans more than $1,000 each when the super wealthys cuts were factored in to that equation and average payers barely got $200, saying hed "been to war" when he used his family connections to get into the National Guard during the Vietnam War and went AWOL during more than a year, and promising to expand AmeriCorps in his 2002 State of the Union speech before cutting that programs budget. The Washington Post's political beat reporter Dana Milbank, who takes on Democratic politicians as voraciously as Republicans, wrote that Bushs "rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy." To show you how vindictive and petty the Bush clan is, Milbank became the target of a White House smear campaign for that relatively light criticism. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal reported that "senior [Bush] officials have referred repeatedly to intelligence..that remains largely unverified." Even Paul Sperry, Washington bureau chief for the more conservative WorldNetDaily.com, wrote in 2003 that Bush lied about the threat of Iraq before that invasion. Politicians, including former Nixon aide John Dean and Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada who has supported Bush on many issues, have publicly called him a "liar." In Reids case, he made the statement in 2002 after Bush approved Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the site for long-term disposal of tons of radioactive nuclear waste. During the 2000 campaign, Bush, who shows little evidence of having even a superficial interest in science, had said he would base such a decision on "sound science, not politics." Other individuals and groups from celebrated writer E.L. Doctorow and The Nations David Corn to Bushlies.net and MoveOn.org have documented many more lies. The lies of Bush Jr. are so numerous they not only fill countless articles and columns, but several books. I contributed to one, Big Bush Lies, a 270-pp. collection of essays from academics, legal experts, financial leaders, activists, and journalists. Published by RiverWood Books of Ashland, Ore., and edited by BushWatch.com founder Jerry "Politex" Barrett, Big Bush Lies is the most recent of such books, reaching bookstores in June 2004. I believe its also the most complete and meticulously documented collection, covering Iraq, foreign policy, national security, the environment, healthcare, religion, education, women and minority policies, drunk driving, the National Guard, and other topics in separate chapters. But then, I have to admit to being a bit biased at least I admit it, unlike Bush & Co. The book covers not just the aforementioned lies, but ones many people seem to forget, ones that occurred before he took the White House amid lies that he actually won that election and he and Dick Cheney actually lived in different states. The lie that Bush won in 2000 has been covered in many places; for the latter more obscure lie, on Election Day 2000, Cheney still owned his home in the exclusive Dallas suburb of Highland Park, had a Texas drivers license, listed himself as a Texas resident on income-tax returns, and worked most recently as CEO of oil company Halliburtons Dallas office. Cheney got around the Constitutions 12th Amendment, which states that the president and vice president have to reside from different states or forfeit that states electoral votes, merely by switching his voter registration to Wyoming, where he once lived, in July 2000. He continued to live in the Dallas area; I observed television news reports recording Cheney coming out of his Texas home several times after Nov. 7, 2000. Furthermore, Cheney did not sell his $2.2 million, 4,700-square-foot home until Nov. 30, 2000, well after the election, to Dianne T. Cash, a wealthy Republican Party and high society donor, Dallas County records showed. Cash owned another $2.4 million, 6,400-square-foot home in Highland Park at the same time. From Sept. 2000 until Jan. 2001, Cash gave a whopping $204,433 to national Republican organizations, in addition to buying Cheneys house, according to federal records. Another lie told by Bush that you probably havent heard showed that his falsehood record extended beyond his years in the White House. Several family members of African American James Byrd, who was murdered in 1998 by three white men who chained him to a truck and dragged him to death in Jasper, Tx., said Bush lied when he told Salon.com that he called family members to offer condolences as Texas governor. Family members said none of them received a phone call from Bush, that Bush declined to attend Byrd's funeral, and he only met with one family member after much public pressure. Such deceit goes beyond a few simple misstatements or stretching the truth done by most politicians. With Bush and other administration officials, lying has become a long-documented pattern, a policy as sure as tax cuts for the rich, blood for oil, and world domination. Conservatives like to harp on Clintons "Big Lie" that he had sex with a woman who was not his wife; beyond the fact that Republicans, including many of the same ones who condemned Clinton like impeachment committee members Henry Hyde and Bob Barr, have lied about extramarital affairs, Clintons lie killed no one. The lies that Bush and others told to con us into invading Iraq have resulted in thousands of deaths and probably permanent damage to the countrys international reputation. Bush continues to lie to this day about the threat that Iraq posed before our invasion, despite evidence to the contrary from the CIA and other sources that Hussein was contained and did not have weapons of mass destruction, as the U.S., Israel, and many other countries have. Americans today are bigger targets for the growing number of terrorists because of the lies of Bush & Co. We are not safer because of those lies. If Clinton got impeached by the Republican-controlled U.S. House over a lie that killed no one, Bush should get banished from the country for life for his lies. But that wont happen because Republican hypocrites control Congress. Such is among the many problems when Americans allow one party to dominate our political functions. Im old enough to clearly remember the lies of Reagan and Bush Sr., many of which were more "honest" lies if there is such a thing - than the present filth emanating from the White House. Reagan Iran-Contra player Oliver North was honest enough to admit he lied to Congress during that scandal. Todays Bush administration not only refuses to admit its lies but spins them around as a positive course for our nation and world. John Dean, White House counsel under Nixon, wrote in 2003 that Bushs lies "are almost never justifiable.They are typically of the most serious kind lies that misinform the public in such a way as to disrupt the proper functioning of the democratic process." I lived through Nixon and Reagan and Bush Sr., and Im sure Ill live through Bush Jr., even if he steals another election. But I refuse to observe the lies told by Bush and not raise my voice against them. I refuse to go along with this policy. I will risk being branded unpatriotic and worse by Bush-supporting liars and hypocrites. The future of my kids playing in the tub where the president who reportedly could not tell a lie bathed depends on it. --posted 06.10.04 Kevin J. Shay is a Washington, D.C.-area journalist/writer. The latest book to which he contributed, Big Bush Lies, is available from RiverWood Books of Ashland, Ore., at http://www.riverwoodbooks.com/books/Big-Bush-Lies.html.
BushAdmin Lies about Iraq's WMD: in Their Own Words By Jackson Thoreau
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
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