Bush Wanted To Invade Iraq If Elected in 2000

Guerrilla News Network Exclusive: Bush Wanted To Invade Iraq If Elected in 2000
By Russ Baker

Two years before 9/11, candidate Bush was already talking privately about attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer
Houston: Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

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Please click the link to read the full article. The revelations just add to the accumulation of evidence that Bush planned to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and that he and his handlers continue to lie and to mislead the American public about his intentions.

As Oprah Slaps Bush / With 30 states poised to smack down women's rights again, the one true savior emerges

As Oprah Slaps Bush / With 30 states poised to smack down women's rights again, the one true savior emerges

As Oprah Slaps Bush
With 30 states poised to smack down women's rights again, the one true savior emerges
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 13, 2004

"So there she was, the nation's most powerful and popular public female, kicking butt on a recent installment of her insanely beloved TV show with the help of celeb guests (Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, P. Diddy, Christina Aguilera) and galvanizing stunned women across the nation to participate in this election, or else.

"There was Oprah, doing what she does so freakishly well, cheerleading and extolling and impressing upon, getting women up and getting them angry and demanding that they exercise their hard-won right to vote and demanding that they quit dissing their feminist ancestors, the ones who worked so damn hard for suffrage and for freedom of choice and for the right to tell powerful sexist Republican men where they can shove their repressive sexist antichoice bigotry.

"This was her fabulous, much-needed message: Take your rights for granted at your peril, ladies. Move, or else. Choose how you want the laws to treat and respect you and your body -- or someone else, someone who hasn't touched a vagina for 30 years and who thinks sex is only tolerable in the dark, fully clothed and with a respectable prostitute, will choose for you.

"Sound like a cliché? Same ol' quasi-feminist rally message? Not exactly. Not this time. Just imagine this:" ....

Click on the link to read more! Definitely worth the read, particularly if you're a woman!!! Our rights are at risk unless we vote!!!

A "Light-Bulb Moment": Coping with Death

I had one of those so-called "light-bulb moments" during our trip to NY and NJ a couple of weeks ago. It was during one of those long, silent spells during the drive where I just get lost in my thoughts. It seems I've been preoccupied with death a lot in the last couple of years. I suppose it's due to Mom's passing a couple of years ago. I think I've never allowed myself to fully grieve for her. I felt so much relief when she passed that the struggle with Alzheimer's and her failing health was over and that, with her passing, that she had been spared a much worse future.

But the light bulb was not about her. It was about coping with death and how it seems harder as I get older, not easier. I was thinking back to when her mother died and when I learned about her mother's passing. I was 23 and pregnant with Jennifer at the time. I don't recall being all that affected by it. Grandma seemed so old to me, anyway, and had been in a nursing home for a number of months. I wasn't with Mom enough to know how she really coped with it. I didn't see too much emotion on the outside, but then our family never displayed much emotion anyway.

But, looking back, I wasn't sensitive at all to my mother's needs at the time. If it's any excuse, I guess I was pretty much into dealing with my own life at the time. Warren was only a year old and had his own health problems, and I was very close to Jennifer's due date. And of course, I didn't drive at the time, either, so I couldn't just get up and go see Mom and see how she was doing or spend time with her. But I didn't call her or talk about it with her either. I should have tried. But death seemed so far away then, and also so much more inevitable. It seemed to me like Grandma was very old (86) and it was natural that she should die about then, and so that's just how it was. I accepted it and moved on.

I believe Jennifer was far more affected by my mother's passing than I was by my grandmother's. Of course, Jennifer was always much closer to my mom than I ever was to my grandmother. Jennifer and Warren were her first grandchildren, and there was about a ten year gap before more grandchildren were born. So Jennifer and Warren got a LOT more attention from their grandparents than I ever got from mine. Mom was the fifth of six children, and there were many, many grandchildren that had been born to my grandmother before I was born. Some were even adults by the time I was born. So maybe that gap helps explain the difference in how differently we were affected.

But I also felt, in this light-bulb moment, that the biggest part of the difference in my reactions is in the age difference -- in how I coped with, first, my grandmother's death, and later, my father's, and then my mother's. Either I've always been insensitive, or maybe it was the natural process of my growth, but it seems like now that I'm older, I have much more of a grasp of the full impact death and mortality. And so I was more strongly affected by this recent death than to the other, earlier ones.

In other words, by the time you reach my age (55), your experiences have brought you much closer to grasping, if not accepting, your own mortality. Although from a pretty young age, we all realize that we all will die, I don't think we REALLY believe it until our bodies have entered into that decline that begins in middle-age and progresses onward until death. And so, as we get older, when we hear of the death of a loved-one, we are more affected by it. Every passing is a reminder that our own passing is closing in on us, is a reminder that we have fewer and fewer days left to accomplish anything, to leave a mark on the world, to convey our love to our loved ones, to do whatever it is that we were put here to do. To give our lives some meaning.
And the light-bulb part of the moment was that it's probably too much to expect younger people to react to death in the same way as an older person would. Because until our own bodies begin to tell us that our days are numbered, we don't REALLY think of death except as something that, although it's a part of life, it always happens to someone else and doesn't touch us too closely.

And so, as we grow both in age and in maturity and experience, we are given, not easier and easier challenges to face, but more and more difficult ones - the most difficult one being facing our own death. We can't expect to "coast" as we get older. Despite our lifetime of experience, the challenges get harder and harder, not easier and easier. Light bulb goes on.