Left News and Views

Maybe signing statements – made infamous by President Bush – will finally come back to bite “The Decider” in the ass.

John W. Dean, the former counsel to President Nixon, is no stranger to signing statements. But, in FindLaw, he points out that “signing statements are to Bush and Cheney’s presidency what steroids were to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body building. Like Schwarzenegger with his steroids, Bush does not deny using his signing statements; does not like talking about using them; and believes that they add muscle.”

Bush has used his veto power only twice since taking office, most recently when he shot down the spending bill Congress passed that would impose timelines to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. Yet it is estimated that he has issued a record of more than 700 signing statements which, in simple terms, say, “This may be what Congress wants me to do, but this is what I am going to do.”

One of the most famous cases surrounded the ban on torture that John McCain helped push through Congress in January 2006. Bush signed the bill, and then eviscerated it with a signing statement.

“Rather than veto laws passed by Congress,” Dean writes, “Bush is using his signing statements to effectively nullify them as they relate to the executive branch. These statements, for him, function as directives to executive branch departments and agencies as to how they are to implement the relevant law.”

On Monday, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office issued a report on a limited examination of Bush’s signing statements in which it found that in six out of 19 cases it studied, the administration did not follow the law as written after President Bush expressed reservations about some legislative directives.

These signing statements are one more way Bush has blatantly flouted both the law and the will of the people. In a column written last January in Slate Magazine, Dahlia Lithwick, observed:

There are two ways President Bush likes to wage war on your civil liberties: He either asks you to surrender your rights directly—as he does when he strengthens and broadens provisions of the Patriot Act. Or he simply hoovers up new powers and hopes you won’t find out—as he did when he granted himself authority to order warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. The former category seems more benign, and it’s tempting to lump Bush’s affinity for “presidential signing statements” in that camp. It’s tempting to believe that with these statements he is merely asking that the courts take his legal views into account. But President Bush never asks anything of the courts; he doesn’t think he has to. His signing statements are not aimed at persuading the courts, but at reinforcing his claim that both courts and Congress are irrelevant.

In its report Monday, the GAO said the findings were alarming, since the administration apparently had not complied with the law in 30 percent of the cases scrutinized.

According to today’s Houston Chronicle, lawmakers say they plan to dig deeper into the Bush administration’s use of bill-signing statements as a way to circumvent congressional intent.

The Chronicle reported that Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and Rep. John Conyers Jr., who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who joined to seek the GAO study, said their next step would be to explore the statements more closely to determine the broad extent of their impact.

“Too often, the Bush administration does what it wants, no matter the law. It says what it wants, no matter the facts,” Byrd said in a Philadelphia Inquirer story on the study.

In their attempt to hijack the government for their own purposes, Bush and Cheney have found no law that they are not willing to circumvent. They have lied and hidden from view their machinations to undermine Congress and the courts, the other supposedly co-equal branches of government.

Now it is up to Congress to stand up to this demagogue and say “Enough!” Honest, he really doesn’t have any clothes.

“It is troubling that so many senior White House officials, including Karl Rove and his former deputy Sara Taylor, were engaging in an effort to avoid oversight and accountability by ignoring the laws meant to ensure a public record of official government business,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “This extensive end run around the laws leads one to wonder what these officials wanted to hide from the public and Congress.”

This statement by Leahy in a story in today’s Washington Post pretty much sums up the way the White House operated during the six years before the Democrats took over both houses of Congress last November and now the rats are scurrying to cover up all their abuses of power.

Leahy’s comment today were in response to new evidence by congressional investigators that high-ranking White House aides made extensive use of political e-mail accounts for official government business, despite rules requiring that they conduct such business through official communications channels.

One of the biggest offenders was Rove, and it is pretty clear that he used the political e-mail accounts to avoid disclosure of government business that would either be embarrassing or patently illegal.

In April, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported that two confidential sources in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) said the White House has lost over 5 million e-mails generated between March 2003 and October 2005.

According to the CREW report, the White House counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these e-mails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said, “It’s clear that the White House has been willfully violating the law, the only question now is to what extent? The ever changing excuses offered by the administration – that they didn’t want to violate the Hatch Act, that staff wasn’t clear on the law – are patently ridiculous. Very convenient that embarrassing – and potentially incriminating – e-mails have gone missing. It’s the Nixon White House all over again.”

According to today’s Washington Post, a report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said the Republican National Committee told the congressional investigators that Rove alone sent or received more than 140,000 e-mails between 2002 and 2007.

Former Rove assistant Susan B. Ralston affirmed in a deposition released by the committee that her ex-boss used his political e-mail account “most of the time.”

The Post reported the committee learned that the White House aides used the RNC accounts to discuss official matters such as appointments and grant announcements. It also said at least 88 White House officials had RNC e-mail accounts, a figure above previous administration statements that only about 50 had such accounts.

According to the New York Times, congressional Democrats are investigating whether White House officials used their accounts to conduct overtly political and, perhaps, improper activities like planning which federal prosecutors to remove and preparing partisan briefings for federal employees.

Do ya think?

This video is 9 1/2 minutes long, but it may be the most important 9 1/2 minutes you will ever spend. Because, as the narrator notes, we only get to play this game once.

At a gathering after dinner with some good friends over the weekend – friends whose views are radically different from mine – the conversation turned to politics, something we generally try to avoid out of respect for one another. I wouldn’t be wrong, however, to say that they are avoiding it much more now that George Bush and his administration are being proven to be a bunch of bunglers.

As these are such good friends, we all put aside our political beliefs in favor of our common enjoyment of one another’s company. Perhaps this how Mary Matalin and James Carville do it.

When we do stray into the political arena, it never ceases to amaze me how supporters of Bush show that they are absolute masters of the circular argument. It makes me wonder if Fox Noise has a primer in the circular argument or if that network just dulls the senses to the point where otherwise very intelligent people don’t recognize the fallacy of this logic.

All circular arguments have this characteristic: the proposition to be proved is assumed at some point in the argument. For example: Everybody believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, so we were justified in our preemptive invasion to protect our country and our allies.

The fallacy of that argument, of course, is that everybody did not believe Iraq had WMD. I didn’t nor did countless others around the world. And, as it turns out, nor did our intelligence agencies. But that doesn’t stop supporters of Bush’s war from continuing to use this argument as a justification for the war.

And the real problem with the circular argument is that there is no way to use logic to refute the conclusion of the proponents since they don’t recognize the basic fallacies. Bush and company have become masters of the circular argument.

In commenting on the attempts by Congress to introduce a resolution of no confidence in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Bush said Monday: “This process has been drug out a long time, which says to me it’s political. There’s no wrongdoing. . . . And therefore, I ascribe this lengthy series of news stories and hearings as political.”

There are two examples of circular logic in this one statement. First of all, in saying “This process has been drug out a long time, which says to me it’s political,” Bush is implying that the Democratically controlled Congress is deliberately dragging out the investigations into Gonzalesgate for political reasons.

In reality, the tactics of the White House to withhold documents and block the testimony of key witnesses have been the underlying causes for the delay in concluding the investigations of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

The logical argument would be: “Our delaying tactics have caused this process to drag out for a long time, which would lead one to believe that we care more about politics than the rule of law.”

In the very next sentence, Bush continues to employ his circular logic. The “lengthy series of news stories and hearings” are political because “there’s no wrongdoing.” There are already instances of wrongdoing that the investigations have uncovered. The fact that the White House is blocking access to the documents is hampering the ability of the committees to determine how extensive it is.

The false premise that there is no wrongdoing can only lead to a false conclusion.

But, as I have said, there is no way to logically rebut a circular argument, so it works beautifully for Bush and his supporters.

The Tony award for the Best Revival of a Play last night was given to Journey’s End, which is described on the Tony awards web site as “R. C. Sheriff’s drama is set in the trenches at St. Quentin, France, during World War I. The play follows a group of British officers as they await their day of reckoning in a work inspired by a true story of friendship and survival.”

After receiving the award, one of the producers said, basically, he hoped the production would play a role in helping to bring an end to wars.

And, our greatest warmonger next to George W. Bush, Sen. Joe Lieberman, on Army Radio called on the White House for an immediate attack on Iran hours before Journey’s End was honored. Military action, Lieberman said in an earlier interview on Face the Nation, will accomplish two goals: The destruction of Iran’s nuclear plans and an end to terror attacks against US soldiers in Iraq.

Of course he didn’t mention that it could also lead to the complete collapse of America’s military. But more important, it would lead to so many more useless deaths of U.S. troops – something that never seems to matter to these masters of war. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace can’t even keep pace with how many Americans have died – pardon the pun.

An overview on Journey’s End, relates:

Against the background of life in the trenches of a group of officers behind British lines at St. Quentin, France, the characters live in a world of fear, disillusionment, precariousness, friendship, loyalty, naivety, guilt, and abandon. Captain Stanhope, (Colin Clive) company commander, long over the exuberance and assuredness of the early war days, has taken to whisky as a solitary refuge for the psychological strain he must endure with each new attack order given from headquarters. … Into this nightmare enters second Lieutenant Raleigh, (DM) a young, inexperienced officer, whose sister is Stanhope’s love-interest back home and who is as enthusiastic as his captain is bleak. Stanhope’s already vitiating psyche is further blighted by Raleigh’s presence as he feels the young officer must be judging him as an embittered, unreliable drunkard. After many clashes and the death of Osborne on another raid, Raleigh, himself, falls victim to the Hun and dies in Stanhope’s arms. Stanhope is left to his own inexorable fate.

If this sounds pretty much like what so many of our men and women are experiencing in Iraq, it’s because this is what those courageous souls sent into combat suffer in any war … while the ones who send them there sit safely at home.

Nicholas D. Kristof, in his column in the New York Times today, details some of the poems sent in for his annual Iraq poetry contest. A couple are worth repeating here.

Susan Donnelly, a published poet in Cambridge, MA, submitted IRAQ BURIAL:

These figures stand the way we
humans do always:
one covering his face,
another looking to heaven.
But it is the gesture of the third,
perhaps a brother,
who has placed his open palm,
protective, firm,
on the chest of a dead man
there you can go now
that makes me, miles away
and in the wrong country,
cover my face with my hands.

Then, Kristof writes, there’s the winner by a fourth grader, Raphael Sosa, from the South Bronx. His teacher, Frank McMillan, of PS 70, asked his students to write poems for the contest:

I feel sad.
my friends are angry;
I’m scared.
how did my father die?
who killed him?
my father has died
the tv tells me we won
but my father died.
my father is dead.

It’s time to pit the writers against the warmongers.

Americans over the last six years have basically turned a blind eye while the Republican Congress and Bush Administration have systematically trampled on some of the most basic rights of a free nation – the right to privacy, the right to free speech and the most basic right of all, that of habeas corpus.

Fortunately, with the overwhelming victory of the Democratic Party last November, we are beginning to slowly see some sanity creeping back into the halls of Congress.

The Republican-controlled Congress under Bush’s directon has demonstrated a willingness to rush to pass legislation to satisfy the fringe groups that still support Bush regardless of the negative impact their many acts have had on the lives and privacy of American citizens. As we approach new Congressional and Presidential elections in 2008, it is worth relating some of the major abuses this quiescence has caused.

These hypocrites in Congress hit a high mark in their pursuit of the radical right agenda in the Terri Schiavo case. In the likely event there are those who don’t remember the flight from reality our Republican friends took, it is worth some brief background from Wikipedia:

The legislative, executive, and judicial branches, of both the United States federal government and the State of Florida, were involved in the case of Terri Schiavo. In November 1998 Michael Schiavo, husband of Terri Schiavo, first sought permission to remove his wife’s feeding tube. Schiavo had suffered brain damage in February of 1990, and in February of 2000 had been ruled by a Florida circuit court to be in a persistent vegetative state. Her feeding tube was removed first on April 26, 2001, but was reinserted two days later on an appeal by her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler.

On October 10, 2003, the final remaining appeal filed by the Schindlers was dismissed. Five days later, on October 15, Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed for the second time. On October 21, the Florida Legislature, in emergency session, passed “Terri’s Law.” This gave Florida Governor Jeb Bush the authority to intervene in the case. Gov. Bush immediately ordered the feeding tube reinserted.

On May 19, 2004, Florida Judge W. Douglas Baird overturned the law saying that it “summarily deprived Florida citizens of their right to privacy.” Bush appealed the ruling to the Florida Supreme Court, and was supported by Schiavo’s parents. The Schindlers obtained the legal services of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), and on June 14, the Schindlers asked the appeals court for the right to participate in the “Terri’s Law” case. Michael Schiavo opposed the Governor’s intervention, and was represented, in part, by the ACLU.

After considering the Governor’s reply, the Florida Supreme Court, on September 23, 2004, reached a unanimous decision, ruling that the legislative and executive branches of government unconstitutionally intervened in a judicial matter (against the separation of powers under the United States Constitution) and that Terri’s Law was unconstitutionally retroactive legislation. The Schindlers immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On January 24, 2005, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

One would think that would have put an end to it. As if Terri’s families and Terri herself hadn’t suffered enough, the Congressional Republicans almost literally came riding in on their white horses. On March 21, in an extraordinary Sunday session, Congress passed the a law known as the “Palm Sunday Compromise,” a term coined by then-House Majority Leader (and now disgraced) Tom DeLay which reflected the combustible mixture of religion and politics that characterized the Schiavo case and the Republican Congress.

Quoting again from Wikipedia:

On March 19, congressional leaders announced that they were drafting a bill which would transfer the case from state court to federal court. In the very early hours of March 21, Congress approved emergency legislation. Despite an absence of a quorum, the Senate approved the bill (S. 686 CPS) by voice vote on Palm Sunday, March 20. The bill passed unanimously, 3-0, with 97 of 100 Senators not present. Those present were the bill’s sponsor, Bill Frist (R-TN), and the two cosponsors, Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Mel Martinez (R-FL). The bill was received in the House of Representatives at 9:02 p.m., and deliberation continued during the unusual Sunday session. When it came to a vote, the motion was passed 203-58 (156 Republicans and 47 Democrats in favor, 5 Republicans and 53 Democrats against), with 174 Representatives (74 Republicans and 100 Democrats) not present on the floor at the time of the vote. The vote concluded at 12:41 a.m. EST; President Bush returned from vacation at his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas to Washington, D.C. and signed the bill at 1:11 a.m. when it became Public Law 109-3.

In practice, the act was completely ineffective. Like in state court, the parents’ federal appeals were denied, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to grant certiorari, effectively bringing an end to the prolonged litigation.

Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader at the time and a heart surgeon, had the audacity to “diagnose” Terri’s condition based on a viewing of video tape supplied by her parents.

In a speech during that extraordinary Easter weekend session, Frist said he had reviewed videotapes of Schiavo and noted that her brother “said that she responds to her parents and to him. That is not somebody in persistent vegetative state. . . . There just seems to be insufficient information to conclude that Terri Schiavo is [in a] persistent vegetative state.”

“I question it based on a review of the video footage, which I spent an hour or so looking at … in my office here in the Capitol,” Frist said in the speech.

Frist, probably seeing the writing on the wall, didn’t run for reelection in 2006. Santorum lost his reelection bid in 2006. Martinez will be in office until at least January 2011. Bush will be history in less than 20 months. And hopefully one of the darkest periods in American history – ranking right up there with putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II and destroying the lives of thousands of innocent citizens during the McCarthy era – will come to an end.

In his first inaugural speech, President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned Americans that the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Franklin’s message was that we needed to throw off our fears and work together to move the nation forward and out of the Great Depression.

George Bush and Karl Rove must have gotten their history lessons screwed up – that’s not hard to imagine – and decided that a President needs to give people something to fear to make them follow misguided policies. We know how well that worked at getting us into Iraq: Remember the “mushroom-shaped cloud” warnings?

What really sticks in my craw is how our mainstream media, having recognized how they were duped by pre-Iraq-war propaganda, are still lapping up the Administration’s preposterous claims of terror plots without question. Each seems to coincide with a spate of news that is critical of Bush and Company and ultimately work wonderfully to change the focus of attention.

Take for example the latest “terror plot” to blow up jet fuel tanks, which in turn were to blast through the pipelines leading to JFK Airport killing thousands of people along the way. The major news outlets are still breathlessly reporting new details in the “plot.”

According to a story in today’s Newsday, “When U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf described the alleged terror plot to blow up Kennedy Airport as ‘one of the most chilling plots imaginable,’ which might have caused ‘unthinkable’ devastation, one law enforcement official said he cringed.”

I cringed as well, saying to Chris, how often do they think they can dish this stuff out and still find believers, especially when the credibility of this Administration is at zero? I waited for the reports debunking this latest “terrorist” attack. But the major media just lapped it up. And, of course, we have heard very little about how poorly the so-called surge in Iraq is going.

Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, reported that the law enforcement official in question knew the plot was never operational, the public had never been at risk, and the notion of blowing up the airport, let alone the borough of Queens, by exploding a fuel tank was in all likelihood a technical impossibility.

And now, Newsday reports, with a portrait emerging of alleged mastermind Russell Defreitas as hapless and episodically homeless, and of co-conspirator Abdel Nur as a drug addict, Mauskopf’s initial characterizations seem more questionable — some go so far as to say hyped.

“I think her comments were over the top,” said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. “It was a totally overstated characterization that doesn’t comport with the facts.”

Like, no duh!

This is so typical of this administration, one that has no conscience whatsoever. My niece lives in Queens and I am sure my brother isn’t taking this report lightly. He has the intelligence to see the report for what it is, but what of the thousands of others who live there who haven’t kept up on this Administration’s reckless ploys.

At the beginning of May, six foreign-born Muslims were accused of planning to assault the Fort Dix Army base and, according to the government, slaughter scores of United States soldiers with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

These six were so sophisticated that they took films of them practicing with their assault weapons to Circuit City to have them transferred to a DVD. “Hapless” is a kind term for them. But, they were the perfect fall guys for another “foiled terrorist attack.” Not one major media outlet asked the question concerning how they expected to launch an attack on an Army base filled soldiers with weapons. Allāhu Akbar.

In August of last year, the media reported that a plot hatched in England to simultaneously blow up as many as 10 U.S.-bound passenger jets with liquid explosives hidden in carry-on luggage was foiled with the arrest of 24 suspects. Tough new security measures snarled air traffic through the day and filled departure lounges in Britain and the United States with crowds of frustrated travelers.

Only later did we learn that British Authorities weren’t ready to make the arrests but did so because of pressure from the Bush Administration worried about how bleak the November elections were looking. Subsequently, charges against all but a handful were dropped and little is known of the fate of those still in custody.

In June of last year, the major media heralded the arrest of seven men during an FBI raid on a warehouse on the outskirts of Miami and accused them of being a home-grown terrorist cell plotting to blow up the Sears Tower and the FBI building in Miami.

Shall we say “hapless” again? No weapons were found, nor were there any actual links to outside terrorist groups. If anything, it appears these yahoos were dreaming up ridiculous schemes on their computers with little or no thought to actually carrying them out.

Whatever happened to catching the bad guys with the goods? I guess it is a lot easier to scare the shit out of people.

Oh yeah. The courts have ruled that if George Bush can say shit, so can I – even if I happen to be on television.

Last week’s Time magazine had a feature called One Day in Iraq that examined the lives of six American service members killed on a day in April, one of whom was Jesse De La Torre of Aurora, IL.

“Our lives will never be the same,” his father, Aureliano De La Torre, whose grief is colored by the anger he feels over losing a son to a war he does not support, was quoted in the story. “Now that my son is gone, there is a vacancy in Iraq. Maybe the President would like to send one of his daughters over there to continue to fight in Jesse’s place.”

Over the past three days, 14 more “vacancies” were created. Maybe we could send Bush’s kids along with Cheney’s and any kin of Donald Rumsfeld.

As of yesterday, 3,495 American men and women have died in Iraq. And what have they died for? There are very few left who can truly answer that question. And, it takes nothing away from the courage and dedication of these fallen troops to say that their lives were wasted.

The slaughter is increasing because of the so-called surge, another in a whole string of botched, mission-less strategies that have been hatched by the bumbling idiots in the Bush Administration. I suggest that Bush and Company knew this surge wouldn’t work; they just wanted to gain another three months regardless of how many lives it cost. Evidence of this is that they are now discussing a so-called Plan B to roll out when Americans learn how badly the surge has gone in September.

In reality, it appears that we shouldn’t even have to wait until September. According to a story in today’s New York Times, three months after the start of the so-called Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation.

According to the Times story, the American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

It goes on, when planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior American military officer, so the emphasis could shift into restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed.

“We were way too optimistic,” said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for establishing basic security in most neighborhoods, the same month that Bush administration officials have said they plan to review the progress of the plan.

Is this latest “way too optimistic” reminiscent of it’s going to be a cakewalk; we’ll be welcomed with open arms; we’re making remarkable progress; the insurgency is in its last throes, etc.

In reality, “way too optimistic” is a euphemism for Bush’s refusal to consider all reports that don’t agree with his rosy view of the war. And, because of his blind stubbornness, we are nearing 3,500 dead. If there is any justice in this world, someday he will be held accountable.

Joe Lieberman is such a sad, useless little man.

I remarked when he ran for vice president in 2000 that he obviously wasn’t willing to stake anything on winning the race when he didn’t resign from his Senate seat. What he has demonstrated since is that he doesn’t really care about what he can accomplish in office; all he cares about is staying in office.

When the Democrats in Connecticut showed their disgust with his pandering to President Bush by rejecting him in the Democratic primary, instead of retiring with a little dignity, he ran as an independent. He is still today deluding himself that he won as an independent because of his popularity.

In October, a story in the New Haven Independent observed: ”U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman said at a New Haven campaign stop Tuesday that he does, after all, want to see the Democrats retake control of the U.S. House of Representatives — then was joined by a Republican congressman who praised him as a ‘national treasure’ and called Lieberman’s reelection more important than his own.”

If you don’t think Rove and his gang of thugs didn’t have anything to do with Lieberman’s election, I’ve got a bridge in New York I can sell you cheap. The Republicans have learned to accept defeat in Connecticut, so in this contest they settled for a Republican in Democratic clothing running as an independent.

In a blog following Lieberman’s election, one of his constituents wrote: “Poor Joe, he has become a back bencher and meaningless. Nothing could be worse except trying to find a job hehad any actual qualities for. So he may have gotten lucky, has 6 more years before retirement, and the poor people of Connecticut get a yesterday’s meals on wheels delivered to their door.”

Lieberman’s claims that we are winning in Iraq are laughable. And this week he demonstrated that his supposed support for our troops is nonexistent.

Lieberman was in Iraq this week and on Wednesday, Spc. David Williams, 22, of Boston, awaited the Senator’s visit after being chosen to join the Joltin’ Joe for lunch at a U.S. field base in Baghdad.

According to the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Williams had a number of questions, but the one that most his fellow troopers wanted him to ask was: “When are we going to get out of here?”

According to McClatchy, Spc. Will Hedin, 21, of Chester, CT., knew what he would like to say: “We’re not making any progress,” Hedin said, as he recalled a comrade who was shot by a sniper last week. “It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at.”

A Zogby International poll last year found an overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately, so Williams, Hedin and their comrades are among a vast majority.

Back to Williams, awaiting the arrival of GI Joe Lieberman. According to McClatchy, Lieberman walked in, wearing a pair of sunglasses newly purchased from an Iraqi market that the military had taken him to in southeast Baghdad. He’d been equipped with a helmet and flak vest when he toured the market, which he described as bustling.

McClatchy reports:

Earlier, Lieberman had met briefly with Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi police at a Joint Security Station; there are 31 throughout the city now. The senator, who’s steadfastly supported the Iraq war along with the current surge of more than 28,000 additional American troops, said things were better.

“I think it’s important we don’t lose our will,” he said. “To pull out would be a disaster.”

The soldiers smiled and greeted him, stood with him for pictures and sat down to a lunch of roast beef and turkey sandwiches. It was unclear if they ever asked their questions.

As Lieberman walked out, he said that congressionally mandated withdrawal would be a “victory for al-Qaida and a victory for Iran.”

“They’re not Pollyannaish about this,” he said referring to the young soldiers he ate lunch with. “They know it’s not going to be solved in a day or a month.”

It isn’t clear whether Williams mentioned the last line on his note card, the one that had a star next to it.

“We don’t feel like we’re making any progress,” it said.

Lieberman returned home and stuck his head in the sand to be closer to Bush.