Parrying McClellan
Condoleeza Rice couldn't let Scott McClellan's new revelations about White House impeachable offenses pass without advancing a fresh lie of her own. She offers the whopper that Bush and Cheney were somehow deceived into thinking Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction—moreover, that ours was not the only government to be fooled. Like maybe Britain, too?
While the facts seem to slip from the grasp of members of Congress and many of our citizens, Rice must recall the revelations published in 2005 by the London Times. What was termed the Downing Street Memo detailed a meeting, with Prime Minister Tony Blair on hand, which recorded the fact that the Cheney/Bush team not only lied to the world about the WMDs but eight months before the invasion of Iraq had decided to attack and was "fixing the intelligence" to match this plan.
This country desperately needs a cleansing—nothing less than a Gandhian nonviolent march of millions to surround the White House, the non-functioning Capitol and the Supreme Court, invoking a citizens' arrest, prosecution and possible execution of this cabal of treasonous miscreants who have stolen our country. President Jefferson warned that sort of action would occasionally be necessary.
Carl Doerner
Conway
Their Beef: Beef
Early last week, more than a hundred thousand South Koreans demonstrated against newly elected president Lee Myung-bak, as his entire cabinet offered to resign. At the root of this massive protest was not a declaration of war against North Korea, a boycott of the Chinese summer Olympics, or even escalating oil prices. It was a treaty allowing U.S. beef imports [lifting restrictions imposed because of fears of mad cow disease].
Beef production accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than automobiles. Its insatiable demand for feed grains has raised world food prices to levels beyond the reach of the world's hungry and the relief agencies that support them. Creation of beef pastures is the key cause of worldwide deforestation, including the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. A beef-based diet requires more than 20 times as much land and water as a plant-based diet with equivalent amounts of calories and protein. Nutritionally, beef offers protein, iron, and some B vitamins, but no fiber, carbohydrates, nor most vitamins and minerals. But it is replete with saturated fat, cholesterol, pesticides and pathogens, including, occasionally, the prions of mad cow disease.
We should have a hundred thousand demonstrators marching on Washington to protest taxpayer subsidies to the U.S. beef industry. In the meantime, each one of us can demonstrate our own outrage with beef production on our next trip to the supermarket by selecting from the rich variety of soy- and plant-based meat alternatives in the frozen foods and produce sections.
Eli Ingleson
Easthampton
