November 7, 2005
What's the Matter with Kansas? The People Who Vote for Pat Roberts, Who Betrays the National Security of the United States of America
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
The Bush Administration has conducted
a lot of wars, not just the one against Iraq.
One of its major wars has been internal. It has been a war against
the CIA. Because the CIA wouldn't agree to validate the shaky,
likely untrue claims about Saddam's "imminent" threat to America
and non-existent ties to 9/11, the Bush Administration went around
the CIA to create a propaganda campaign -- based on lies -- to
lead the country into war.
In addition, the Busheviks took several extraordinary moves to
try and emasculate the CIA. One of these was the highly unusual
repeat presence of Dick Cheney
at CIA headquarters to put pressure on the agency to produce pro-war findings
of fact. The second was the creation of a "back-channel" war room that produced
much of the faulty rationale for the war. That was located in the Pentagon
-- and involved Rumsfeld and shadowy figures like Douglas Feith. You also had
fanatical ideologues like John Bolton stirring up dust about Saddam's nuclear
and biological warfare capabilities.
The CIA, in fact, tried to curtail the Bushevik Neo-Con onslaught of misinformation
at nearly every turn. In fact, the CIA warned the National Security Council
not to include the infamous 16 word phony pronouncement about Iraq and Niger "yellow
cake" in a speech prior to the State of the Union, and the White House complied.
But Condoleezza Rice claims that when the State of the Union speech came up
a few months later, her staff had forgotten that the statement was untrue and
that's how it got in Bush's speech.
So, it was no surprise that Rove and Cheney had Congressional investigations
of what wrong with the false intelligence on Iraq blame the CIA! In fact, Tenet
played the fall guy and got a medal of honor from Bush for being such a good
sport. It may also explain why the Busheviks went after Valerie Plame. They
viewed the CIA as the enemy, however much the White House's war on our own
intelligence agency endangered our national security.
That is a cursory overview that leads us up to the question Thomas Frank posed
in his incisive book, "What's the Matter with Kansas." Frank argues that because
the Democrats have been so afraid to challenge the Republican's skilled use
of class warfare to divide Americans and attract middle and low income whites
to the GOP on "values" issues while picking their pockets, the Dems have abandoned
a natural constituency of their party.
We agree with Frank's brilliant, trenchant analysis. But we also contend that
the people of Kansas who vote are adults -- and they have put this country
in jeopardy by electing the likes of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts as their
U.S. Senators. We won't discuss the ideologically over-the-top Brownback for
the moment -- because his sins are not relevant to this commentary -- but it
is Roberts (Bush's "Boy Toy") who has helped put America at risk.
Pat Roberts is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee -- and he has done everything the White House has asked him to do to suppress the truth about the role of Dick Cheney, the Rumsfeld group, and Rove in fixing information about Iraq to sell the war.
Roberts toed the party line and blamed the faulty
intelligence on the CIA, thus allowing Bush another PR stunt to claim
that he will overhaul the "faulty" intelligence
community.
Then Roberts claimed he would issue a second part to his report after the
2004 holidays, one that would deal with the White House role. But, of course,
being
Bush's "boy toy," Roberts never issued the report. He never even began a
second round of "investigations."
So Pat Roberts is an accomplice to the betrayal of the United States, to
more than 2000 dead Americans and thousands wounded in Iraq, to the outing
of a
CIA operative, to the weakening ability of the CIA, and to the deteriorating
national security of the United States.
People apparently love the "nice white Christian man" named Pat Roberts as
one of their Republican senators in Kansas. But for those of us who know that
he is sitting on the truth, we know what's the matter with Kansas.
They elect people who betray America and our national safety -- and, therefore,
endanger us all. That's what is the matter with Kansas.
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS