Part Two: Who said what:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview with Salon's David Talbot:
"I believe that George W. Bush is stealing my country, that he is absolutely stealing the environment from our children, stealing the breath from my children's lungs and stealing the Bill of Rights, selling off the sacred places, and trashing all the things I value about America. Our reputation across the globe, the love and admiration that other peoples and nations once had for America, the safety of our nation, the security of our children, the economy, the ability of our children to educate themselves for the future -- it's all being liquidated by this president for his wealthy friends and contributors." (...read the full interview at Salon)

Gloria Steinhem: "To my knowledge, there has never been an administration more hostile to women's equality, to reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right... If Bush wins in 2004, abortion will be criminalized..." (...interview)

Al Franken interview with MSNBC:
"I believe people are really angry at this president because after 9/11 he had a unique opportunity. The world was behind us. He had a chance to lead us into a new American century in the spirit of mutual sacrifice and mutual cooperation. And he totally blew it."
What do you see as the biggest issue in the coming election?
I think the biggest issue will be what this guy didn't do after 9/11 in terms of being a uniter not a divider. Instead of uniting us, he divided us. This is the most secretive administration and the most radical in terms of being economically right wing and in terms ofÑwell, he just will give anything to his contributors. And I think it will be about that. I think it will be about integrity." (...read the interview)

Sen. John Kerry : "I believe President Bush has run the most arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological foreign policy in modern American history"

George Bush Sr.: "Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.... Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
-Time Magazine essay, 2 March, 1998. (full quote...)

Club for Growth, Right-wing front group ran this notoriuous ad in Iowa: "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs." (...ref)

Paul O'Neill described Bush in "The Price of Loyalty" as a "a blind man in a room full of deaf people". On the eve of the book's release, Mr O'Neill said he did not believe the White House would punish him "for telling the truth" and he was "too old and too rich" to be threatened. An investigation of O'neill was immediately announced by the Treasury Department. O'neill then told NBC's Today program he regretted the blind-deaf comment.

Tommy Franks, Commander of US forces for the Afghan and Iraq campaigns until last summer, and clearly one who might know about such things, told a magazine the constitution would be suspended and the military would take over if a WMD terror attack occurrs in america. Meanwhile the FBI admitted it is now surveilling and keeping files on antiwar and anti-globalisation protestors. (story...)

Sen Robert Byrd : "Our loved ones took an oath to defend this country and our Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. But there is a commitment our government makes to our troops in return: that it will not send our young men and women in uniform into reckless misadventures that put them at risk needlessly.
This is the part of the bargain that has been broken."

Jessica Lynch, in a Diane Sawyer interview:
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff... 'It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about... It's wrong."

LeMonde editorial: " There is not enough grammar in the entirety of the English language to describe the incredible international humiliation that has befallen the United States of America. That this humiliation was brought down upon the American people by the man supposedly in charge of the country is, in all honesty, no big surprise for those who have been watching this all unfold. The layers of crushing embarrassment have been building like river sediment for months upon months upon months."

New York City Council Officially Rejects Patriot Act:
"Resolved, That the Council of the City of New York opposes requests by federal authorities that, if granted, would cause agencies of the City of New York to exercise powers or cooperate in the exercise of powers in apparent violation of any city ordinance or the laws or Constitution of this State or the United States."
article (WP)... Council Resolution(pdf)

Andrew Sullivan, Right-wing pundit, on the Bush Meet The Press Interview:
"We have a few options here: The president doesn't know what he's talking about, or he's lying, or he trusts people telling him lies. But it is undeniable that this president is not on top of the most damaging part of his legacy--the catastrophe he is inflicting on our future fiscal health. ...if this is the level of coherence, grasp of reality, and honesty that is really at work in his understanding of domestic fiscal policy, then we are in even worse trouble than we thought. We have a captain on the fiscal Titanic who thinks he's in the Caribbean. ( ...article)

Gore Vidal interview, L.A.Weekly
"Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans? "
"I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process."
Read the interview, which ranges from the founding fathers to electronic voting machines.

Jeanine Garafolo
"They've destroyed our reputation around the world. We are rapidly becoming the target no-one has sympathy for, because of the bluster, the bullying. Think of them as a mafia, because that is how they act. It is not patriotic to obey a CRIMINAL. There is no such thing as a pro-war, pro-life, pro-death penalty, christian. They are not real christians. Liberalism is good. Everything good we have in this country is founded in liberalism."

Mel Gibson was interviewed by the Herald Sun in Australia, and the reporter asked the star if Protestants are denied eternal salvation. "There is no salvation for those outside the Church," Gibson replied. "I believe it."
He elaborated: "Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am. Honestly. She's, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's just not fair if she doesn't make it, she's better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it." (read article ...)

General (William) Boykin, recently named by Bush Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence: "George Bush was not elected by a majority of voters in the United States. He was appointed by God."

Richard Dawkins:
"Dear Mr Bush (I'd say President Bush if you had actually been elected), I've been asked to give advice to you on touching down in Britain. It is this. Go home. You aren't wanted here. You aren't wanted anywhere else either, but you may have been misunderinformed that Britain was the one place where you would be welcomified. Wrong." (Read letter to Bush on his state visit to Britain)

Ulooj
BAGHDAD, Iraq - College students whisper the word when they spot U.S. troops in Baghdad streets. Vandals scrawl the word across military vehicles. Sneering taxi drivers mutter it when convoys block their cabs. "Ulooj", they say, and while some use it with disdain and others more lightheartedly, it's unmistakably not a nice reference - though what precisely the ancient term from Arabic literature means depends on whom you ask. Among the translations offered: pigs of the desert, foreign infidels, little donkeys, medieval crusaders, bloodsuckers and horned creatures. (...story)

Geneva Overholser, a highly respected journalist and former ombudsman of the Washington Post, has resigned from the board of the National Press Foundation in protest. The reason: The foundation is honoring Fox News anchor Brit Hume at its annual dinner in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 19. Insisting that Hume should not be rewarded for ''ideologically connected journalism,'' Overholser wrote in an email to her colleagues on the board: ".. I can applaud Fox for all sorts of things, but being deceptively ideologically aligned -- being hypocritical about it -- far from contributing to such discussions, makes them impossible to have. (Fox News president Roger) Ailes has constructed the perfect trap: you question him, and the finger of accusation comes back at the questioner. One can marvel at his cleverness. But one should not confer journalistic laurels upon it.''

Mad cow disease has been "indigenous in North America" for ten years and could "spread all over the place," experts tell a subcommittee appointed by USDA Secretary Ann Veneman, who says she does not "anticipate that we have a significant issue in this country."
A new strain is discovered in Italy (...story)
Buzzflash interview with David "Blinded by the Right" Brock- on Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and Judge Silbermann, Paula Jones, etc...

As predicted:
Terrorism's new Mecca; Religious terrorists are now mobilizing in Iraq, finding recruits among Muslims who feel humiliated by their U.S. occupiers, says security specialist Jessica Stern, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs John F. Kennedy School of Government (...story)

Al Gore : "He betrayed this country!... He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place....It is not a minor matter to take the loyalty and deep patriotic feelings of the American people and trifle with them," he declared, adding with a shout: "The truth shall rise again." (...story) / (...audio mp3)

Ambassador Joe Wilson:
"We went to war under false pretenses, and that is becoming abundantly clear to the American people," he told students during a foreign-policy forum at the University of Washington. "I don't care who you vote for, but get out there and caucus. Don't leave it to the neo-conservatives and evangelical Christians." (...story)

John Kerry Interview with William Rivers Pitt

Pat Robertson: "If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that's the answer. You've got to blow that thing up." - Oct 2003 (...ref)

Richard Perle: "There's a theory that everyone's entitled to dissent."

George Soros Interview with Josh Marshall
"Look, open society is always endangered. But the dangers are different in character. So, it was endangered by Nazism, it was by fascism, it was endangered by Communism. And now it is endangered in a very unusual, in a very unexpected way, from a very unexpected quarter, which is the United States....I'm not calling Bush a Nazi. I want to make it very, very explicit that I'm not. .. It's a different threat. And it's actually a very strange, unexpected [threat]. .. ..something is going on in the way of managing the interpretation of reality that is actually successful and poses a danger to open society. And it has been spearheaded by the conservative movement. But, it's not confined to the conservative movement. In other words, it's a cultural phenomenon." (...read interview at TPM)


"You turned up on the FBI no-fly list . We have called the San Francisco police..." (...read what happens!)

Dick Cheney : "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" he added. "It's a nice way to operate, actually." (USA Today, January 19)

General Tommy Franks, Commander of US forces for the Afghan and Iraq campaigns until last summer, and clearly one who might know about such things, told a magazine the constitution would be suspended and the military would take over if a WMD terror attack occurrs in america. (...story)

Pentagon eager to wash hands of Iraq mess it created "Iraq is now a contaminated environment and Rumsfeld and his people want out," said one senior administration official. "They can't wait for July 1 when the CPA (Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority) turns into the U.S. Embassy and the whole mess they have made becomes Colin Powell's." (...story)

Rockers Unite to Oust Bush:
Bruce springsteen told a crowd of 50,000 New Yorkers on October 4th to "shout a little louder if you want the president impeached." Two weeks later, John Mellencamp posted an open letter to America on his Web site, declaring, "We have been lied to and terrorized by our own government, and it is time to take action." (...story)

William Greider has written a new book, "The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy". "My subject is American capitalism and how it collides destructively with society and with our deepest human values and aspirations." Read his 'letter to kindred spirits' re his new book here.

"America increasingly polarized", say the mainstream media. What they don't want to say is that the 'right' has been pulling hard, and the 'left' has finally begun to resist. Here's an example of the right-wing view of the world: "Some political scientists are concerned that anti-Bush politicization of the war on terror seems to be based on a deliberate plan to damage the war effort in ways similar to the cultural fragging that dashed the will of U.S. leaders to win the war in Vietnam, making it impossible to wage a coherent long-term effort against terrorists and their sponsors and repeating the Vietnik days of rage with more bombing and terrorism in American streets. Observers are starting to notice that many of those spreading false accusations against Bush began their activist careers in the pro-Hanoi movement of the 1960s..." -J.Michael Waller, Insight Magazine (...article)

For the record:

JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam before assassination- John Kenneth Galbraith (...article)