OP:Furthermore, Prince Bandar hints that the Saudi regime will tinker with oil prices to boost the American economy before the 2004 elections.
I think the reason that this isn’t a big issue is that a lot of people already believe that OPEC attempts to use oil prices to produce economic impacts that will result in politically favorable outcomes for its countries. And everyone already knows that the Saudi regime, which has a long history of friendship with the Bushes, probably wants Bush to win.
Now, if Bush were somehow doing an explicit deal with the Saudis—“we’ll increase your aid package or whatever if you’ll promise to give us a pre-election economic boost from oil prices”—and there was documented evidence of it, I think a lot more people would be indignant.
(Btw, I don’t think it’s possible to generate outrage by asking where it is. I think outrage is produced by the statement of outrageous facts in a calm and honest way.)
I also think that a lot of people in the US are currently so desperate for an economic boost, particularly if it involves lowered oil prices, that they wouldn’t really care if it was engineered as part of a pro-Bush election strategy.
If Bush were able to orchestrate a lowering of gas prices through behind the scenes work with the Saudis, that would be one way he could actually secure my vote.
Outrage, no. Surprised if he pulls off something so positive? Maybe.
It’s been a while since I was re-briefed on the procedures for handling classified documents, but my understanding is that if the status of a document changes (especially one that’s labelled “NO FOREIGN” in big letters on the cover), it has to be sent to a security office to have its classification updated first.
Having someone simply say, “It’s okay, I trust you” to unauthorized personnel and letting them flip through classified materials would get said someone tossed into handcuffs faster than you could say “security breach”… at least for us law-abiding folks.
Thanks. I’ll keep you on my Christmas card lis this year.
Is this the same Y% who were fawning over “Bush at War” last year?
Yeah, I know, but it makes for a catchier title. If I wanted mere ranting, I’d have posted this in the Pit. As it is, I am curious as to what folks think about the lack of any sort of backlash on this issue.
Let me suggest that those who are capable of outrage have pretty well had their capacity for outrage used up. As far a political kiss and tell books we have had Secretary O’Niel’s book, John Dean’s book, Richard Clarke’s book, and Woodward’s books. They all paint the same picture of an administration intent on getting into a war with Iraq by hook or by crook, an administration that was not about to listen to anything it did not want to hear and an administration that had an agenda (no progressive taxes) that it wasn’t going to abandon no matter what came. When you start off with an election as strange as anything since Garfield and Tilden, decided by the Secretary of State of a state in which the prevailing candidate’s brother is the governor and by the Supreme Court on a party line 5-4 vote, followed by the catastrophe of 9/11/01, followed by a pall-mall gallop into a war the excuses for which were shaky to begin with and which have proven to be fundamentally false, compounded by a domestic economy going south and the only remedy being that old snake oil nostrum of cutting taxes on the investing class, the sense of out rage converts into a slow burning determination to get these people out of office before they take us all into some idiocy that cannon be fixed.
That’s correct for us underlings, but we’re talking about King Dick and Prince George here. In an administration that claims the right to throw American citizens in jail forever, without charge or trial, simply by declaring them “enemy combatants”, I suspect there is precious little regard for the ins and outs of classified document handling. Why monkey around with classification regulations when you can simply declare that they don’t apply?
In fact, recently the administration declassified documents for the express purpose of discrediting a political opponent:
Maybe this isn’t the best place to ask this, but why should we believe a goddamn thing Woodward writes, one way or the other, when some people say Cheney did something, and other people say he didn’t. There’s no evidence either way, just hearsay. I’m tired of this purported “fly-on-the-wall” journalism, which is nothing more than hearsay masquerading as factual information. “Sources close to the Pentagon confirm…” “A senior Bush advisor claimed…” “An intelligence official close to George Tenet denied…” I say bollocks to the lot of it. Name some fucking names, cough up some concrete evidence, give us something other than this hearsay bullshit, or stop pretending to be journalists.
And even if they did do something wrong, trying to get this administration to turn over any documents would be like fighting a raging banshee. They would claim some variation of “executive privilege” and say “so sue us (we own most of the Supreme Court anyway)”.
