Ma Nishtana

GW Bush palling around

The first line of The Four Questions song from the Passover Seder asks "Ma Nishtana?" Or, "What has changed?" The term is often used sarcastically to refer to something that someone thinks is new, but is actually not.

So, I ask, in a more contemporary English translation, "This is different how?"

“There’s nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages, contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America. 

That's Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, via Digby, on the Twenty-Eight Pages the Dubya administration removed from the 9-11 Report.

Here's Josh Roggin at the Daily Beast with the answer to the question of why on earth doesn't Dick Cheney talk about who's backing the bad guys de jour:

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.

Ma Nishtana?

Meanwhile, occasionally, someone from the elite actually stands up and tells us what all this palling around with fascists has gotten us.

"I can only plead with you to examine the current political and cultural works of my country [the U.S.]. We are in the hands of a terrible counterrevolution and a great reaction, a second Civil War sponsored by the same people that lost the first Civil War," the director said.

"And it has created a good president who is a prisoner of the White House who can do little beyond the ceremonial," McTiernan continued. "It has made, despite of what you may see on screens, a prison country, and I've had the pleasure of seeing what most people in our class are never allowed to see. I've seen the engine of the beast, it has given us a country with more prisoners than North Korea per capita, more policemen per capita than Germany in 1938. They have suspended trial by jury in most of America."

Now there's a guy I hope keeps talking.