Commentary
The gang that couldn’t shoot straight
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Feb 27, 2006, 00:51

It’s not just Cheney, the Gang Vice-Capo, who can’t shoot straight, sweeping his rifle to the right and down, following a covey of quail, and shooting instead his “friend” Harry Whittington with a chest, neck and face full of birdshot.

How straight a shooter was Katherine Armstrong, hostess of the hunting event on her 50,000-acre Texas ranch, who swore the ritual was absolutely alcohol-free, solo Dr. Pepper, while Cheney later confessed he’d had “a beer” for lunch, just one, no more; right, Dick, the check is in the mail.

And how straight-shooting was the White House that tried to ignore the story until hours after it was broken by Ms. Armstrong to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times as opposed to, say, the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, or any other of America’s major papers? People might want to know if the VP was shooting people.

And how straight a shooter was Scott McClellan when he first told America that President Bush had been notified of the shooting an hour after it happened, at 8 PM that Sunday night, when in fact the event occurred at 5:30 PM that Sunday, according to Ms Armstrong.

But the white and darker lies, the obfuscation, the illegalities, Cheney not having an upland hunting stamp, violating the hunter’s code to hold fire in a situation like that, to avoid all alcohol while hunting, are the tip of the iceberg for The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

The title in fact is borrowed from Jimmy Breslin’s novel about a whacked and whacking Mafia family and their gang that are as stupid and incompetent as they are brutally violent. In the book and movie made from it with Robert DeNiro, it’s all darkly funny.

In real life, it’s not so funny. It’s a roaring pain in the head to know this gang sits at the helm of the not so free world, pointing missiles today at Iran, bunker busters yesterday at Iraq, and an Army at Afghanistan, managing to miss Osama bin Laden, the so-called 9/11 perp, but level what remained of the country.

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About Enron, #1 Bush Contributor

And speaking of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, these past weeks we’ve been introduced to the Enron trial and fellow Bush gang members, Kenny Boy Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who couldn’t be straight shooters about their earnings, on and off the books, including shell companies used for hiding monies or, when often empty, being declared as assets or liabilities for earnings or tax reasons, as the Cayman Island winds blew.

Their lack of straight-shooting practically bankrupted the state of California with energy price gouging in 2001. Then too, the Enron plunge to bankruptcy took with it, like the Titanic, thousands of innocents, employees, their retirement plans and jobs. This while Kenny and fellow sharks sold off huge amounts of private stock, hyping prices with inflated earnings reports to Wall Street, fully knowing the stock would tank. It would seem Bush’s largest campaign contributor was a paradigm of corporate crookedness.

Lastly, Enron’s White House meetings with Bush and Cheney in April 2001, discussing the California crisis, have still not been fully explained, in defiance of congressional demands for full disclosure. What are they hiding, still?

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About Iraq

Our Capo de Capos, President Bush, Vice-Capo Cheney, Consigliare Rove, Capo of State Rice, Capos Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Powell, and Solders and Button Men Feith, Libby, Armitage, et al, definitely could not, would not shoot straight about Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lies were pounded like drums that Saddam had tried to buy yellow-cake uranium from Niger; that Saddam was about to use these non-existent weapons, and that we must attack him alone, unilaterally, preemptively, immediately in order to survive.

In fact, how straight a shooter was Scooter Libby, who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA covert agent because her hubby, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, outed the yellow-cake uranium from Niger myth as a complete lie? Though now it seems the word to leak Plame’s identity came down from Libby’s Capo, Cheney.

And so, after dragging us into the war, and declaring it over on May 1, 2003, could they shoot straight about what it took to really win or bring about a durable peace?

No. Undermanned, under-planned, undermined by a rush to kill, maim and grasp Iraqi’s oil, we were brought to the present disaster, Iraq today: thousands of American soldiers killed, untold thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, killed, and the conflagration raging, even after a bogus election to simulate a virtual democracy, which is as stable as the levees of New Orleans, another disaster in which no one could shoot straight, talk straight, act straight, to prevent the destruction of a great American city and the copious loss of lives of its citizens, black and white.

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About New Orleans or 9/11

Speaking of New Orleans, let us go back to that other domestic disaster of 9/11. It’s amazing how no one could shoot straight that day, how hordes of American military fighters were not available to stop the airliner-missiles from smacking the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.

Yet now we can see clearly in DVDs like loosechange.com the Towers’ explosions occurring at their tops and moving downwards followed by massive explosions at the bases of Towers One and Two. The combinations of explosions brought each tower down in 10 seconds -- free fall at the speed of gravity.

That’s truth, not the myth that redundant steel-frame buildings “melted” from jet fuel fires, which burned away in minutes. The heat and time a melt would take was far beyond the half-an-hour and hour-and-a-half before the South then North Towers fell.

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About Tower 7

And we are told Tower 7 was “pulled” eight hours later; demolished at the behest of owner, WTC lessee Larry Silverstein. In fact, the-no-straight-shooter Silverstein neglected to mention it takes weeks, sometimes months, to set up a building that size for demolition. So Capo Larry, when are you going to take the billions you made on your Towers’ insurance, which benefits you ratcheted up only a month before 9/11, and when are you actually going to build something? C’mon, Larry, try to be a straight-shooter just once.

Couldn’t Shoot Straight about the Pentagon Hit

But perhaps that’s all history, like the missile that hit the Pentagon, not a 757, because no 757 fuselage was found, no 124-foot wide wings, 40-foot high tail, or massive engines found. Only an 18-foot wide entrance hole, and an eight-foot wide exit hole from ring C. Oh yes, and a rotor from an Allyson Turbofan jet engine, much smaller, used for the Global Hawk craft that carried the missile that exploded on impact right through three rings of the Pentagon. What’s more, actual video tapes recordings of the hit from a nearby gas station and hotel, were seized by the FBI and never shown. Shoot straight, guys. Show them.

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About Flight 93

You’ve probably heard it all, including the chestnut from that loosechange.com DVD that Flight F 93 did not crash or get blown up over or in the fields of southern Pennsylvania (even as I thought originally) but landed in a Cleveland airport and its passengers were evacuated to a nearby NASA center. So it goes, truth is stranger than fiction.

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About Superhighways From Mexico To US

Also, let me give you major pieces of new news about The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight and what they’re up to. Two NAFTA Corridors Will Be Off-shoring Transportation Jobs to Mexico. This startling info comes from a story by straight-shooter Richard Vogel in the Monthly Review. You have to read this linked tale. Basically, the plan is to build two NAFTA Superhighways with side-by-side rail lines, converging and crossing the international border at Laredo/Nuevo Laredo:

Although I-5 and I-15 originating in Tijuana and serving the western states, I-19 connecting Nogales and Tucson, and I-10 that serves Ciudad Juárez/El Paso and provides an essential east-west link in the system, are all important NAFTA highways --the two priority segments of the NAFTA corridor system in the United States are the I-35 Corridor and the proposed I-69 Corridor both of which will originate in Laredo and carry NAFTA freight all the way to the American Midwest. When the I-35 Corridor is completed it will extend 1,600 miles north to the U.S./Canada border. Along the route it will serve San Antonio, Austin, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas City, Des Moines, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Duluth. The proposed I-69 Corridor will also originate in Laredo but will head northeast, serving Houston, Texarkana, Memphis, Evansville, Indianapolis, and Lansing to the U.S./Canada border at Port Huron, a total of approximately 2,100 miles. Promoters of the NAFTA corridors tout the system as the largest engineering project ever undertaken in U.S. history. What they fail to publicize, however, are the economic costs of the system and how the massive project will alter the landscape and environment of America forever. These undeclared consequences, however, will be calamitous . . . [Be patient, read on]

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About Land Consumption

The NAFTA corridors will be up to 1,200 feet wide with separate lanes for passenger vehicles (three in each direction) sandwiched between truck lanes (two in each direction). The corridors will also contain six rail lines (three in each direction): two tracks for high-speed passenger rail, two for commuter rail, and two for freight. The third component of the corridor will be a 200-foot-wide utility zone. To accommodate the railways and underground utilities, the corridors will run at grade level and will require extensive bridging at crossovers and intersections. The current estimate is that a typical corridor section will require 146 acres of right-of-way per mile, making the anticipated land consumption for the NAFTA corridors 584,000 acres in Texas alone (For a detailed critique of the Trans Texas Corridor Plan see corridorwatch.org). Total land consumption in the United States for the NAFTA corridors could exceed 1 million acres. Since the corridors are going to be routed through rural areas, this means they will consume a total area of agricultural land and open spaces almost as large as the land area of the state of Vermont.

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About Outsourcing Transportation Jobs

Also, the two superhighways and rail system are designed to break the back of organized labor in the containerization and trucking industries located in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The idea is to get Mexican drivers, loaders, et al, at the lowest prices in high unemployment areas of Mexico to take the “off-shored” jobs of Americans, delivering the China-and-other-bottom-cost-nations’ goods to Wal-Mart, Costco and others’ distribution centers in America. So goods would come from the container ports in Mexico to retail outlets across the US.

Not only is the real estate it takes to build these two passages enormous, so too is the enormity of pollution, noise, and general damage to the American as well as Mexican environments. Both cultures will be screwed but the Corporatos will profit. Have you heard any straight talk about this from the Capo de Capos or the Gang? Nada, senores, signoras et senoritas.

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About Dubai Managing American Ports

Big capital and the Big Gang are already working on offering up six major US ports to a Dubai management firm with at least two ties to the White House where the City Never Sleeps, Citi-Bank’s old theme line.

Reported by Michael McAuliffe in the good old New York Daily News on February 21, the White House links are one to “Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World -- giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

“Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for Bush's cabinet.

“The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration . . .

"The more you look at this deal, the more the deal is called into question," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who said the deal was rubber-stamped in advance -- even before DP World formally agreed to buy London's P&O port company.

Besides operations in New York and Jersey, Dubai would also run port facilities in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Baltimore and Miami . . ."

Okay, so there’s no straight-shooting there. They’re outsourcing management of five American major ports? Why? Aren’t we smart enough to do it ourselves?

Couldn’t Shoot Straight About DU Killing US Soldiers

And here’s a biggy, folks, that The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight, extending back to Don GHW Bush and fellow mobsters couldn’t be straight about . . . From the Free Market News and Rense comes a major bomb about the use of depleted uranium and its effects on our soldiers in the first Gulf War: DU Scandal Explodes - Horrendous US Casualties. Here’s just a shocking snippet from it:

But due to the use of depleted uranium in the battlefield, 56 percent of the 580,400 solders that served in the first Gulf War were on Permanent Medical Disability by 2000. 11,000 Gulf War veterans are already dead. Now 518,739 Gulf War Veterans, almost all of them, are currently on medical disability.

And on and on it goes. I guess they figure, what you don’t know won’t hurt you. And what they make up will be good for you. That’s the ethic in a handful of words. From the Gang That Just Couldn’t, Wouldn’t, Never Ever, Shoot Straight. All the more reason for you to get it straight and shoot straight, from here and at every other site still telling the truth, before they start to disappear, like certain reporters, thanks to certain people. Consider my advice, as Don Corleone would say, “An offer you can’t refuse.”