On FOX No Lie is Too Big to Tell

On one day FOX allows Yoo to make excuses for his participation in war crimes, the excerpts from the FOX news contributor Karl Rove's as yet unpublished book states that Dubya made the right decision to launch the Iraq war in 2003 and another FOX news contributor Palin does stand up comedy.

Yoo and Cheney this week admitted the White House dictated to Yoo's OLC branch of the US Justice Department specifically what they wanted the memos for enhanced interrogation to say. Cheney's interpretation of unitary executive theory doesn't correspond to the 1973 War Powers Act. When he had his intellectually incurious puppet Dubya commit war crimes Cheney's only rationale is that 1973 War Powers Act had never been signed off on by a president. "The War Powers Act is still in force out there today, that requires him to grant certain notifications to the Congress and give them the authority to supercede those by vote if they want to when it comes to committing troops," Cheney said. "No president has ever signed off on the proposition that the War Powers Act is constitutional. I would argue that it is, in fact, a violation of the Constitution; that it's an infringement on the president's authority as the commander in chief. It's never been resolved, but I think it's a very good example of a way in which Congress has tried to limit the president's authority and, frankly, can't."

All of these crimes flow from the fact that Cheney thinks that his disagreeing with the 1973 War Powers Act made it appropriate for him to commit war crimes which ignores the reality that even in times of war the president can't do whatever he wants. It is as if though Cheney thinks that just because he says a lie frequently enough he can convince enough people that it isn't a lie anymore.

So, they realized they were committing war crimes and got Yoo to write memos that agreed with the White House's thinking.

The March 2nd, 2010 article "Fox News allows John Yoo to make excuses for torture" at

http://rawstory.com/2010/03/fox-news-john-yoo-excuses-torture/

denigrates FOX for allowing Yoo a platform to subject all of its red state, Tea Party viewers to GOP propaganda then states "One of the first items Yoo tackled: why simulated drowning is not torture.

"Waterboarding is not something that was cooked up in Cheney's office or something like that," he said. "Waterboarding is something that we had a lot of information on. Twenty thousand American soldiers and officers had undergone it and did not suffer any lasting pain, harm or suffering. So, when we looked at the statute that congress wrote and we looked at that evidence, we in the Justice Department and a lot of other lawyers too said that we don't think it amounts to torture because we would not be doing it to our own soldiers otherwise."

Yoo engaged in misinforming us as the article, regarding waterboarding, states "The United States prosecuted Japanese soldiers for doing it during World War II. It is a violation of domestic and international law that was carried out on a very mistaken legal premise that permitted the Bush administration nearly unchecked power to detain and abuse prisoners as it saw fit."

It flows from the top as the article states "After President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees, three men in particular were waterboarded over 260 times."

Yoo is following the Cheney gambit of attacking Obama as being a weak, pre-9/11 thinker as the article states "During his Fox News appearance, he also suggested that without the military tribunal system and the so-called "enhanced interrogations," the United States would be unable to obtain intelligence from prisoners."

The article "Palin: I joined Fox News to promote fairness, balance" at

http://rawstory.com/2010/03/palin-leno-stand-up-comedy/

states "Gov. Sarah Palin appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno Tuesday, delivering a round of stand-up comedy while praising the Tea Party and Fox News Channel....
Leno asked Palin what she thinks about joining the media by becoming a Fox News analyst. Palin told Leno that she's there to build trust in the media. "I think that the mainstream media is quite broken and I think that there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there. That's why I joined Fox." Leno laughed."

Palin is working with publisher HarperCollins to write a second book. She also is meeting with top TV executives about shooting a Planet Earth-style docudrama about Alaska. Who would be interested? Doesn't all of this entertainment industry involvement reduce her credibility as a politician? Even Schwarzenegger had to give up making movies to become a serious politician.

Is she a FOX News contributor, GOP propagandist, author, prospective GOP presidential candidate or stand-up comedienne? If she is a GOP propagandist and prospective GOP presidential candidate then how can she be a FOX News contributor? When the GOP extremists listen to her on FOX News or as a stand-up comedienne or author doesn't she have to mention that her views are skewed because she supports conservative policies?

The questions that surrounds Palin's role applies to Rove.

The article "Karl Rove Memoir 'Courage and Consequence': Iraq War Was Good Idea But Failure To Find WMD's Hurt White House Credibility" at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/03/karl-rove-memoir-courage-_n_483616.html

engages in Orwellian revision of history as the article states "Rove says Bush did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons....
In "Courage and Consequence," Rove argues that history will look favorably on Bush's two-term presidency, particularly his decision to invade Iraq. He calls the 2003 invasion the most consequential act of the Bush presidency and a justifiable response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, even though al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, not Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, were responsible."

He also blamed the aftermath of Katrina on Democrats. What does Rove think? We all know that the GOP convinced the majority of the country that Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks and that Hussein was an imminent threat to the US. This is too recent for such a blatant lie to sway anyone other than the most apathetic, which is the problem. Rove knows 80% of the US population know the facts, but he is only interested in spreading propaganda to the Tea Partiers. Those are the truly disinterested people who rather than engage in meaningful discussions at the town hall meetings yelled inanities. That is why they related so well to the "intellectually incurious" Dubya.

To have so much right-wing extremist hypocrisy is alarming. Yoo can spew GOP propaganda as well as Rove and Palin. FOX will make him a regular.