United States' and is suitable for everyone on this list, and your kids. -Ed
From: Get Lit-Words Ignite
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2010 11:40 AM
Hello Everyone!
We at Get Lit are going to support the Actors' Gang THIS FRIDAY NIGHT.
They have an unbelievable show running called "Break the Whip," that is:
"Set in the Jamestown colony in Virginia, the first lasting English
settlement in North America, the narrative is told from the point of view of
what the play calls "the anonymous, the indentured and enslaved, the muted
voices, the vanquished."
LA Times
It is fantastic (I saw the previews) and I am going back with my children.
(It is suitable for adventurous children over say... 10) Some of the subject
matter might be difficult (for children) but it is also a history book come
to life and presents this material in a way they will never forget.
I strongly encourage all Get Lit Board Members, teachers, Get Lit Players
and volunteers to come as well. In addition to being an outstanding and
entertaining play, the Actors' Gang supports Get Lit by producing our
monthly shows and allowing us use of their beautiful space for Saturday
rehearsals. Please support their unparalleled generosity by coming to see
this play.
AND TEACHERS bring your students out for a theatrical/historical experience
they will never forget!!!!!
Oh! And lastly, one of our Get Lit teachers, Giselle Jones, is a lead in
this play. She's FANTASTIC!!
See you there!
Diane
Diane Luby Lane
Founder, Executive Director Get Lit-Words Ignite
www.getlit.org
310 962 6696
***
Exposing the Dirty Truth That Bush's New Memoir Tries to Cover Up
By Russ Baker
The Smirking Chimp: Nov 11 2010
In George W. Bush's book Decision Points, the former president tells a
story of his presidency based on his own say-so. In my book Family of
Secrets, based on five years of research, hundreds of interviews and
thousands of documents, I reveal a very different one.
BUSH: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pushed him to invade Iraq. He
portrays himself as a reluctant warrior who had qualms about resort to
force.
BAKER: Bush was already looking forward to invading Iraq years earlier.
Bush told his own contracted ghostwriter, back in 1999, when he was not yet
even the GOP nominee, that if elected president he would invade Iraq. The
reason? Score political points and secure high poll numbers. Bush confided
his belief that successful presidents needed to win a war, and he thought
Iraq would be an easy one.
BUSH: A religious conversion changed his life.
BAKER: In a way, yes; but not as Bush's account implies. Bush's
"conversion" came after a key Bush family political adviser warned that it
was impossible to win the presidency without embracing the sentiments of
America's huge bloc of fundamentalist Christians.
BUSH: He was mortified by the disaster that resulted from Hurricane Katrina
(and takes some responsibility for the slow response)
BAKER: The incompetence of the federal government was the result of willful
neglect of FEMA, the agency in charge of response. Bush and his team were
interested in weakening and defunding agencies like FEMA, and outsourcing
their functions and budgets to friends and supporters.
BUSH: His father did not have much influence with him, beyond being
generally supportive offstage.
BAKER: Father and son were joined in the family enterprise from the start.
Their respective ventures in the oil business were connected to covert
intelligence operations. Most of the key figures in bringing Bush to power
and keeping him there were associates of his father.
Those are just a few of the problems with the Bush narrative. But the
principal failing of Decision Points is that it skips over so much that is
crucial to understanding the man and his presidency. It is not accidental
that, like his father, George W. chose not to write a full-bore memoir that
would have brought this broader focus into play.
Here are a few examples of what Bush has chosen not to tell us:
-A Good Cleaning Saves a Presidency: Two generations of George Bushes,
working together, used a simple dental exam to cover up the son's
disappearance from the military during the Vietnam War. The trick has
successfully deflected inquiry for nearly four decades.
-"A Higher Father": George W. Bush's claim that he didn't ask his father
for advice on Iraq but rather turned to a "higher father" for guidance was a
story most of the media found too good to check. Reporters also recited
faithfully the supposed generational schism between father and son that cast
George W. as a genuine rough-hewn Texan, unlike his father, whose political
career was hobbled and re-election bid foiled in part because he could never
shed his establishment trappings. In fact, George W. Bush and George H.W.
Bush were not just close—they were partners in complex political and
intelligence operations that are to this day completely unknown to the
public.
-Oil the Presidents Men: A close friend of George W. Bush helped provide
cover for W's disappearance from the Texas Air National Guard unit in which
both served. He then was rewarded with a lucrative assignment as middleman
between Saudi oil interests and the Bush family, that included financing of
the illegal Iran-Contra operation and an alliance with a clan called Bin
Laden.
-Land of Opportunity: One of the strangest companies ever to appear in the
oil business, tied to the CIA, foreign dictators, money launderers, and
illicit caches of gold, helped fund George W. Bush's rise to the presidency.
-The Loan (ar)Ranger— A group of individuals seeking favor with the
administration of Bush's father subsidized George W. Bush's stock holdings
in the Texas Rangers baseball team. They created a lucrative virtual no-show
job that associated him with a popular local sports franchise and also with
a business success. Later, Bush sold his Rangers stock at a big gain to a
man he enabled to profit off University of Texas pension funds—and who
ultimately put the Rangers into bankruptcy.
- Back in the Saddle, Temporarily: The Crawford ranch was a favored venue
for photo ops of a president supposedly more at home clearing brush than
behind a White House desk. Yet George W.—a product of Eastern establishment
pillars such as Philips Andover, Yale, and Harvard— bought the ranch shortly
before he ran for president, and rarely visits it now that he's back in
Texas.
-Making (Up) The Grade: Bush's future Education Secretary faked the Texas
school performance numbers that helped persuade voters that Bush was the man
to fix the nation's schools.
- An Eye for Talent: Bush touted his environmental convictions during his
presidential campaign. Then he turned the Environmental Protection Agency's
most polluted region over to a car dealer who had helped Bush earn a fortune
off the Texas Rangers baseball team.
- Lemons Into Lemonade: The Bush forces went into the 2004 campaign with a
major vulnerability – evidence that, after a plum position in the Texas Air
National Guard enabled him to avoid Vietnam, he disappeared from the final
third of his obligatory—if cushy—Guard stint. With Bush facing media
inquiries from an aggressive CBS News and a daunting threat from John Kerry,
a Democratic opponent with a bona fide war record in the jungles of
Indochina, the then-president's disinformation machine went into action. In
the end, John Kerry was politically wounded and CBS anchorman Dan Rather
professionally destroyed. News organizations abandoned intensive scrutiny of
Bush, and he squeaked through to another term.
-Keyboard Kops: George W. affected a Bubba persona that the media generally
bought, and that gained him slack for gaffes and incompetencies. But when it
came to strategy and tactics, he actually was sly like a fox. He once
confided to an adviser how naïve journalists are, and how easy to fool. His
example: hide tactical information "in plain sight" for reporters to "find"
and report as inside dope.
-A Bush In Your Future? Notwithstanding George W. Bush's purported Texas
isolation and his general silence since leaving Washington, the Bush family
enterprise remains as viable as ever. Members of their circle work in the
Obama administration, while his brother Jeb gears up for a possible national
campaign of his own—raising the prospect of a third Bush in the White House.
Meanwhile, through Decision Points, the upcoming George W. Bush presidential
library/democracy "think tank", and the active role of his lieutenant Karl
Rove in orchestrating a GOP comeback, they are already rewriting past
history—and defining history yet to come.
_______
About author Russ Baker is an investigative journalist and founder of the
nonprofit reporting web site whowhatwhy.com [1]. His book, "Family of
Secrets: the Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden
History of the Last Fifty Years [2]," is available in hardcover, paperback
and e-book. Gore Vidal calls it "one of the most important books of the past
ten years."
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