Monday, May 29, 2006

Corruption, corruption, corruption and the Nigerian bribery scandals, Cheney, Jefferson, KOS and the neo-con Dems

Time to take the gloves are off with the agitprop purveyors at Daily Kos (in addition to that other phony "liberal" web site, some of the content of which could be called DUng). Yesterday, Daily Kos, which likes to regularly steal content from WMR and post it and then proceed to expound on it while trashing the original provider, did it again. Since the proprietor of that web site has made a sport out of his web site being used for ad hominem attacks on this editor and WMR's backers and sources, its time for a close "Inside the Beltway" examination of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the much-ballyhooed "progressive" Democratic activist. "Kos," as he calls himself, grew up in El Salvador but moved with his family to Chicago to avoid the El Salvadoran civil war. Kos joined the U.S. Army in 1989 and was posted in Germany but avoided the first Gulf War. But while Mr. Kos was in the Army where he was presumably a valuable Spanish-speaking asset, on Dec. 17, 1989, the United States illegally invaded Panama, the final in a series of bloody Reagan-Bush Central American military operations that included Special Forces missions in Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Kos' boyhood homeland, El Salvador. In those days, Spanish-speaking Army personnel were in high demand in Panama and surrounding support base countries.

Mr. Kos later joined the Howard Dean campaign, helping to set up Dean's presidential campaign web site with Joe Trippi and managing to amass some $50 million in contributions, mostly from small donors contributing $100 or less via the Internet. But after Dean's campaign imploded after the Iowa caucuses (because some campaign staffer allowed Fox News to provide pool coverage of the Dean rally with a fateful noise-canceling microphone), no one could account for much of the $50 million. Where did it go? Joe Trippi, Kos, and a few others were the major point men in the Dean campaign and should know where the money went. Was $50 million spent on Vermont Teddy Bears and maple syrup confectionaries for well-heeled contributors? No one to this day can account for much of that money. And now there's some $35 million largely unaccounted for from the coffers of the Democratic National Committee where Gov. Dean now reigns as chairman. More sticky fingers at work?

Where did all the money go? Do they know?

But Kos and his merry band of holier-than-thou confabulators now act as a Ministry of Truth for the Democratic Party and progressive movement. In fact, they are pathetic censors and narrow agenda propagandists. Unlike Daily Kos, WMR neither has the desire nor the resources to become a blog and a platform from which cowardly anonymous posters can launch venal and uninformed attacks. As for yesterday's posting on Daily Kos, WMR will put its African political knowledge base against that of Daily Kos any day of the week. How many books on Africa has Kos or his sycophantic followers written? Contrary to what Kos' disinformation specialists claim, the search and seizure carried out by the FBI of Nigerian Vice President (and 2007 presidential candidate) Atiku Abubakar's Potomac, Maryland home involved long standing illegal money flows between Nigeria and top Republicans (and a few Democrats). The raid of Abubakar's Potomac home, the first known FBI search of the home of a high-ranking foreign official, seized documents related to the Jefferson bribery case but also petrodollar bribes paid to other top U.S. government officials by Nigerian officials. With Dick Cheney enmeshed in a criminal case involving previous bribes paid by Halliburton to Nigerian officials and Nigerian officials being used as conduits between Nigerian oil wealth and right-wing U.S. politicians and causes, it is understandable why the FBI would be ordered to conduct a clean sweep of any incriminating Nigerian documents, even if such seizures violated the separation of powers clause in the U.S. Constitution and international agreements on diplomatic immunity to which the U.S. is a signatory.

Mr. Kos seems to think its perfectly legitimate and professional to allow his web site to be used to question the veracity of an on-line editor who has just released a new book and who, in part, depends on book sales to earn a living and be able to subsist in cost-of-living soaring Washington, DC. For a guy who claims to have a law degree, he must've cut all his tort classes. But Mr. Kos has also recently released a book. If you still think he has a shred of credibility, go buy it and read it. This editor, for one, will not be "crashing any gates" or be in line for one of Kos' book signings any time soon.

May 29, 2006 -- As a follow-on to the previous article, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that there is a cell of neo-conservatives in the Democratic Party, which is beginning to go vocal as it looks more likely that the Democrats will take one or both houses of Congress in November. The article concentrates on neo-con ramblings from Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic, who is hyping an activist and militarist foreign policy plank for the Democrats. Will Marshall of the Democratic Leadership Council-affiliated and mis-named Progressive Policy Institute is also hawking a similar treatise in which Joe Lieberman and Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa are highly praised. Add these manifestos to the recent announcement by Robert Kagan of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) that he is aligning with the Democrats, and we can all see that some of these chameleons are planning on jumping ship from the GOP to the Democrats, with the idea that MoveOn.org and other real progressives will be marginalized in the 110th Congress.

It is time to once again reach back into WMR's archives and see how Democratic neo-cons used the former Yugoslavia as a testing ground for future battlefields like Iraq. Montenegro has just become the world's newest independent nation. However, in the late 90s, its political future was largely crafted by the neo-cons in the Democratic Party, some of the very same people who are now rearing their heads to seize control once more with a lady named Hillary lurking in the background.

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