Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

With the United States considered the most dangerous nation in the world now by 37 percent of the Europeans, witnessing the rush into the Iraq War and the subsequent death, destruction, and debt that Bush's Republican Administration has chalked up, Bush of all people on the planet is in no position to say that looking at someone gives him a bad visceral feeling.  

Syndicated columnist Helen Thomas, writing for the Hearst Syndicate, explained:

"Bush is learning there are limits to presidential power.  Since 9/11 terrorist attacks, the president has used his commander-in-chief hat to explain his imperial reach beyond what the U.S. Constitution has prescribed.  

"He has wiretapped Americans without court permission, he has grabbed Iraqis and Afghans in their own countries and shipped them off to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where some have been held in limbo for more than four years."

The Boston Globe in a story about Bush's overreach told of signing statements when he put his signature on 750 new laws.  Those statements amount to assertions that he can ignore those laws if they fail to agree with his personal interpretation of them.

To fully understand how this works after he signed the bill banning torture, Bush conveniently signed a statement that essentially says that he could bypass the ban.  This is "doublespeak."  And this is Bush the name caller, defining which nations represent the Axis of Evil.

What must have stung this Republican Administration the hardest was the Supreme Court's decision that the Geneva Convention on humane treatment of prisoners applies and is also enforceable in federal courts.  How this decision must have crushed the religious right, which has run roughshod over human rights, all the while with their flags waving as they declare their allegiance to Christianity.

Bruce Cummings Meredith, professor of history at the University of Chicago, and Jung En-Woo, political science professor at the University of Michigan, writing in The New York Times on July 7, provided an in depth explanation for why those missiles were fired by North Korea and why the date selected for this startling event was July 4.  

As Cummings and En-Woo explained, "It seemed like apt payback for the timing of the Pentagon's warfare exercises in the Pacific, which the North Koreans have taken as an insult and which they have been hyperventilating about for weeks.  The scope of the exercises certainly annoyed the North Koreans, eight nations, 19,000 American troops."

Was it a coincidence that these maneuvers started on June 25, the 56th anniversary of the day the Korean War began?  (The Pentagon claims that the correct date for the beginning of the Korean War was actually June 26.)

It appears that North Korea was fighting symbolism with symbolism.  Could it be that all of this is a deliberate attempt by the U.S. to put the North Koreans on the road to war?  

There is one thought that cannot be ignored.  If goading North Korea's admittedly offbeat dictator leader to do rocket tests, that might trigger the U.S. war machine into high gear.  

Any hesitation in the past to go forward with the Star Wars project Reagan was so fond of might now disappear, with the horrifying realistic threat that North Korean missiles might possess the thrust power to attack the west coast of the United States.

Every time North Korea asks for direct meetings with U.S. diplomats a high and mighty Bush rejects all such overtures.  With the Bush Administration's track record of launching preventive war in Iraq, it has propelled the U.S. war machine into possibly perpetual motion status.

A Seattle Times editorial on Thursday, July 5, under the headline of OPEN DIRECT TALKS WITH NORTH KOREA, advanced this position:

"The United States has everything to gain by agreeing to direct talks with North Korea after its highly calculated fit of missile brinkmanship.

"If the goal is to get Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program, then use the leverage of one on one negotiations to open a dialogue.  Bluster and intimidation have not worked.  The U.S. must opt for serious sustained diplomacy."