Hypocrisy
hypocrisy:
- The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
- An act or instance of such falseness.
Veteran journalist Seymore Hersh reports that President Bush is considering a program of nuclear strikes against Iran. His aim: to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The President claims that Hersh’s assertions are, “wild speculation.”
Seymour Hersh is a Pulizer Prize-winning journalist who has spent his 47 year career exposing government coverups. His record shows that he is not prone to “wild speculation”. He is, however, prone to angering the government by exposing things they’d rather keep secret- including the recent Abu Gharib torture scandal.
I know who I trust the most.
Some administration officials claim that the plan is just part of “normal contingency planning.” This argument shows that the administration assumes that we’re all too stupid or disinterested to actually read and understand the meaning of Hersh’s article.
For those of you who do not subscribe to the New Yorker, here’s Hersh himself, speaking to Wolf Blizer:
There’s been a lot of planning going on. It’s more than planning, it’s operational planning. It’s beyond contingency planning. There’s serious, specific plans. Nobody’s made a decision yet. There hasn’t been a warning order or an execute order. But the planning’s gotten much more intense and much more focused.
…
When the JCS, the Joint Chiefs, and the planners wanted to walk back that option, what happened is about three or four weeks ago, the White House, people in the White House, in the Oval Office, the vice president’s office, said, no, let’s keep it in the plan.
In typical Bush fashion, the President publicly claims to be interested in diplomacy, but secretly- and against the strenuously worded advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff- he continues to plan nuclear strikes against Iran.
There is so much about this that I could rant about:
That the president is planning to launch yet another war- we’re in a record setting budget deficit paying for his current wars, and we don’t have enough troops to support Iraq, let along Iran.
That the experts admit that they have no more confidence in our intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program than they do in the intelligence that got us into Iraq in search of Weapons of Mass Destructions that didn’t exist.
That all experts agree that Iran is at least 10 years from achieving a single nuclear weapon. Is he rushing simply because he only has two years left in office?
The most galling thing in all of this is the complete hypocricy of this policy.
Nuclear weapons are bad- aggressive nations like Iran should not have them. So let’s use nukes ourselves to launch our second war of choice.
If we want to be the ‘good guys’ we have to act like the good guys.
If nukes are bad, we can’t use them.
If torture is bad, we can’t use it.
If spying on your own people and taking awy their civil rights is bad, then we can’t do that either.
What part of “good” don’t you understand, Mr. President?
