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archived: 31 Jul - 6 Aug, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: August 2, 2005 THE SILLY SEASON Late summer and the heavily travelled month of August are frequently called, “the silly season.” The silly season is a time of excess, and we know that nothing ever exceeds like excess. These days, we are experiencing an excess of catastrophe for neoconservativism. In the first week of March, George Bush hand picked John Bolton to become the next American Ambassador to the United Nations. Today, five months later, it is overwhelmingly clear that the Bolton nomination would fail to win the majority it needs for confirmation in the Senate. Why? Highly intelligent but a radical neoconservative ideologue, John Bolton is simply the wrong man for the job. John Bolton opposes: the United Nations; the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty; the International Criminal Court; the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and all US involvement in peace-keeping missions which is, of course, a core UN objective. From his political history, we know that John Bolton opposes the extension of voting rights to American citizens living in South Florida, because he led the political riot that took place in Miami-Dade County that precipitated a premature end to the 2000 Florida presidential recount. John Bolton supports: the War on Terror (even now that the terminology has become obsolete); the War in Iraq; US torture policies used at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; the continuing US occupation of Iraq and the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran in the near future. Bush’s nomination of John Bolton is being opposed by the Democratic members of the Senate, plus the following Republicans: George Voinovich, (R-Ohio), Chuck Hagel, (R-SD), John Thune (R-SD) and Colin Powell. The Bolton nomination has been a sordid political football for the past five months, and now, during the recess, Bush has used his extraordinary powers to confirm the deeply unpopular Bolton nomination. This is a shameful end to a political nightmare for the President, the Vice-President and John Bolton. Bolton is obviously on a personal and presidential mission to destroy the United Nations and to humiliate the United States as much as possible in the process. Bush wants Bolton in this crucial position very badly, because he and Cheney have ambitious plans to expand the war on terror and to introduce tactical nuclear weapons into modern warfare by exploding them against hard targets in Iran. Bolton is seen as just the man to defend such outrageous acts. The American Conservative magazine was founded by Pat Buchanan. In the current edition, we find a report under Deep Background that makes a stunning announcement. Vice President Cheney who directs global security policy for the Bush White House has ordered the Pentagon and the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to devise a plan for the aerial bombardment of Iran. Cheney’s aerial attack on Iran will launch immediately after any future act of terrorism inside the borders of the United States – whether Iran is involved or not – and it will include the tactical use of nuclear weapons. STRATCOM are under strict orders from the White House to design an aerial bombardment campaign against 450 strategic targets inside of the borders of Iran. The plan would sound fictional if it were not for the incredibly unpalatable record of this rogue administration. It gets worse. The Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald is now casting his net wider in the Bush White House in search of conspirators in the espionage investigation involving Valerie Plame, Karl Rove and a growing list of uncomfortable targets lurking about in the West Wing. According to a welter of new reports circulating widely on the internet, Vice President Cheney and his Chief-of-Staff, L. “Scooter” Libby, are now sweating bullets as they tremble and quake in the crosshairs of Fitzgerald’s intensifying probe. With Cheney’s finger twitching and itching as it rests uncomfortably on the nuclear trigger, we now leave the spectres swarming around the West Wing to cast our gaze a little farther to the South. Ructions are now taking place throughout the Republican universe. In the past week, the leading advocate of civil rights in the history of the Republican Party died in the midst of what seemed to be a swirling vortex of political scandal. Arthur Teele, Jr. was well known to many people in North Carolina as a champion of the civil rights of the Wilmington Ten. Teele was the scion of a prominent Florida family of middle class Afro-American Republicans who were holdovers from the Reconstruction Era. Unlike other middle class Afro-American Republicans including the family of Condoleezza Rice who did nothing to support either Dr. Martin Luther King or the civil rights movement, Arthur Teele devoted many years of pro bono work to furthering the cause of civil rights in America. Art Teele was a successful attorney with a highly distinguished record of military service in Vietnam. He rose through the ranks to become the top legal advisor (JAG) to Brigadier General Henry Emerson, the Commander of Fort Bragg. In private practise, Teele became the legal advisor to William France, the founder of NASCAR. Eventually, Art Teele went home to Florida to work for the rights of the Afro-American community in Miami-Dade. I met Art Teele when he served at Fort Bragg, when we were coordinating a meeting between General Henry Emerson and Attorney General Rufus Edmisten. Upon his discharge from the military, Art Teele visited our office in Raleigh on numerous occasions to discuss the legal complexities in the case of the Wilmington Ten. In 1996, I was in Miami, where I met with him about his campaign for Mayor of Miami. Over lunch, Art explained that he wanted to devote more time to public service because of his concerns about the deeply embedded culture of racism in local government, police, courts and criminal justice agencies. Arthur Teele had been the Under Secretary of Transportation serving with Elizabeth Dole during the Reagan administration. As an Afro-American politician, he appealed to both Democrats and Republicans alike. When Art was elected to the post of Commissioner of Miami-Dade, he wielded immense political power that he always used to benefit the people who had elected him, the predominantly Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean voters of the Overtown, Liberty City, Little Haiti and Homestead districts of Miami. As a civil rights advocate and a lifelong Republican Art Teele made a huge impact on national politics, and he made a deep impression on the Republican Party. Among many paramount achievements, he single-handedly convinced the Pentagon to move the US Southern Command headquarters to Miami. In the wake of Hurricane Andrew and against strong opposition from the local construction industry that was dominated by wealthy Republicans, Teele championed and won stronger building codes. Art Teele brought the Summit Conference of the Americas to Miami. Against immense local opposition he moved the Miami Arena to the bayfront, and he expanded the Port of Miami. Facing virtually insurmountable opposition from the Republicans in the business community, Art Teele demanded and won the environmental protection of the Everglades. He was the most contrary and downright Un-Republican Republican in America, and his liberal social and environmental agenda did not go unnoticed in the hallowed Republican halls of Tallahassee. Along the way, Art Teele attracted the ire and the animus of many powerful Republicans especially in South Florida. Unable to outmanoeuvre him politically, his enemies placed him under investigation by state, local and federal authorities. He and his wife were secretly followed by Miami police. When he confronted plainclothes police officers and challenged them about the intrusiveness and inappropriateness of their Gestapo-like investigations, he was arrested and charged with making a threat. Earlier this year, he was given two years probation for this spurious charge, and his enemies widened their investigations centring on his political power and influence. Governor Jeb Bush even got into the act by removing Art prematurely from his office of Commissioner of Miami-Dade. That blunder will cost Jeb Bush much needed political support in South Florida in any future election. Two weeks ago, these politically inspired investigations returned 26 indictments against Art Teele. The crux of the federal case was a meagre $59,000 in fees he had earned as counsel to a company that had done business with Miami-Dade. Surprisingly for a man charged with political corruption, Art Teele was literally bankrupt. He owed debts totalling $1.7 million, while he had assets of less than $500,000. To date there has been no accounting for the massive costs of the investigations launched by his political opponents, but knowledgeable estimates suggest that they will have cost taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. For what? Last week, his Republican enemies in the Miami Police Department covertly released a file of totally unsubstantiated and libellous reports on Art Teele. While most were innocuous, the only embarrassing report was from a convicted felon still serving his sentence behind bars. This convict who is fervently hoping for a deal for early parole claimed to be a homosexual prostitute who said Teele had been a client. From this and other equally feckless information in them, it became immediately obvious that the police intelligence on Art Teele is not worth the paper it was written on, but that did not stop a police-friendly scandal sheet, The Miami New Times, from publishing it. This sort of collaboration between the tabloid press and the police is essentially unjust, for it led to the publication of libel in the runup to Teele’s trial on the shaky string of fraud charges. This outrageous ploy was a desperate move to sully the reputation of a hugely popular and highly charismatic politician. The day after the libels were published, when he was facing insurmountable pressure from the federal government and the Miami Police Department as well as technical bankruptcy and public humiliation via court-ordained character assassination, Arthur Teele entered the lobby of the Miami Herald, one of the finest newspapers in America, and he committed suicide. Tapes and papers concerning his defence were found on his person, but these crucial documents were swiftly confiscated by federal investigators who said they were needed for their investigations – even though the subject was now dead. The papers of Art Teele have not seen the light of day since, and if the truth be told, we may never see them in the unexpurgated form that he would have wished. Many Miamians believe that Art Teele sacrificed himself in the lobby of the Miami Herald to call attention to the blatant injustice of his public persecution by Governor Jeb Bush, the police, the court and criminal justice officials. Art Teele was the victim of a political witch-hunt just as surely as Dr. Martin Luther King was the victim of a culture of racism when he was assassinated in 1968. Art Teele was lynched by public humiliation, political persecution and police libel. John Bolton, grossly unfit to serve, is now officially US Ambassador to the United Nations. Patrick Fitzgerald is now investigating the West Wing and its premiere occupants for the crime of espionage. The most credible proponent of civil rights in the history of the Republican Party, Art Teele, was hounded to death by agents of the Republican right. This very instant, Dick Cheney’s finger is itching to pull the nuclear trigger to explode the investigations ensnaring him and his coterie of Praetorian guards. It’s the silly season. The silliest season, perhaps, since the August assassination of a Balkan prince launched WWI, or the August invasion of Poland launched WWII, or those two days in August, 1945 when hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians living quietly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized by atomic bombs. ‘Silly’ is not really the word.
Cheney orders
Pentagon to plan to nuke Iran
Arthur Teele dared to
dream big __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC, European Business News, NPR and many European television broadcasts examining American politics and culture. In addition to his column for The Political Junkies, he is a regular contributor to the Moving Planet weblog. See: www.planetarymovement.org and http://planetmove.blogspot.com/
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
