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The Gospel According to the Loony Left

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Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times.

The military-industrial-neoconservative-Republican oligarchs who run the country have committed plenty of dark and nefarious deeds in the last few years since they stole the White House from Al Gore.

They demolished Iraq just so Halliburton could make jillions cleaning it up. They helped the likes of Enron and MCI and Martha Stewart to bilk millions of working-class Americans out of their meager savings and to transfer their jobs to call centers in India. They put the fix in at the Supreme Court, sending Antonin Scalia on duck hunting junkets in return for not sending Dick Cheney to the slammer, where he so richly belongs. They even staged the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to destroy our lawful constitutional order.

That’s about what you’d expect from the Bush dynasty. I mean, didn’t Dubya’s grandfather, Prescott, make his loot in shady deals with the Nazis? And didn’t Dubya’s father, George H.W. Bush, win the vice presidency by making a backroom deal with the Iranians to avoid releasing the U.S. hostages until after the 1980 election? And didn’t Dubya himself go AWOL in the National Guard and lie about it? Clearly, the Bush gang is capable of anything. But now they’ve finally gone too far -- in Haiti. They’ve kidnapped the lawfully elected leader of a sovereign nation. At gunpoint, no less. They’ve turned a peaceful, prosperous, progressive island like Haiti into a cesspool of violence and poverty. That’s a new low, even for “the most crooked ... lying group” that John Kerry has ever seen in power.

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I can’t quite figure out why they would go to all this trouble to subvert a small place like Haiti, but they must have their reasons. Maybe Jean-Bertrand Aristide dissed Bush’s old man and now it’s payback time. Or maybe Bush is so stupid he thinks Haiti has oil reserves that his Texas buddies can steal. Whatever.

I’m just grateful that not everyone in the nation has been lulled into complacency by the big corporate media while the junta in Washington goes around toppling another democratic government. There are still a few brave souls who are willing to face the fury of John Ashcroft’s storm troopers in order to poke holes in the administration’s ridiculous account of what recently transpired in Haiti.

Bush’s henchmen claim that Aristide wasn’t really a model democrat because he advocated violence against political opponents and fixed the last elections. They say he voluntarily left office, and that all the United States did was provide him with a ride out of the country, at his own request, before a mob could rip him to shreds. They even argue -- get this! -- that refusing to provide U.S. troops to keep Aristide in power isn’t the same thing as forcing him out of power. But you don’t believe that, do you? Why would the U.S. government tell the truth now? It never has before.

All of this raises grave, serious, really important questions that deserve to be answered. Jeff Sachs, the big-shot economist at Columbia University, wants to know: “What has been the CIA’s role among the anti-Aristide rebels? How much U.S. money went from U.S. institutions and government agencies to help foment this uprising?” Mind you, he’s not actually saying the CIA “bankrolled and arranged” this “coup.” He’s just asking a few questions.

And Kerry isn’t actually saying that Aristide was kidnapped. But he does have “a very close friend in Massachusetts who talked directly to people who have made that allegation.” With evidence like that, no wonder he thinks “it needs to be explored” some more.

But who could possibly get to the bottom of a conspiracy so immense? All of the top investigative reporters -- Gore Vidal, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky -- are busy on other projects. Luckily, the Congressional Black Caucus is ready to fill the void.

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I take real comfort from the words of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the Black Caucus: “We will not stand around and watch a democracy being taken apart by our own country.... We are not only the conscience of the Congress, we consider ourselves the conscience of the country, and we will get to the bottom of this.” What a relief to discover that a neofascist nation like the U.S. still has a conscience.

In the 1990s, the Black Consc ... er, Caucus, helped expose the CIA’s secret efforts to smuggle crack cocaine into our ghettos. In 2002, former Georgia representative and caucus member Cynthia McKinney revealed that Bush knew about 9/11 ahead of time but chose to “not to warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered.” Now the caucus is going to uncover the plot in Haiti. Rest assured: With these guys on the case, the truth will out.

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