British lawmaker George Galloway passionately denied allegations that he profited from the United Nations' oil-for-food program in Iraq, blasting Sen. Norm Coleman Tuesday as a "lickspittle" of President Bush and telling a congressional panel that the charges against him were "the mother of all smokescreens."
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader," Galloway began his impassioned denial of the allegations levied against him by the Minnesota Republican. "I was an opponent of (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein when British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas."
Lickspittle. Well, that pretty well sums up Norm Coleman.
Oh, and what about that picture of ummm....Rummy shaking 'Suh-damns' hand? IOKIYAR. All the time.
posted by Jo Fish on 05.18.05 at 12:05 AM
Comments:
Ooooh, I saw Coleman on Bloggermann tonight -- it was a good day for Republican smackdown. Between that and Olbermann calling for McClellan to resign and showing clips of Jeff Gannon when talking about Scottie's credibililty -- well, we just don't get days like this very often.
Galloway surely has big balls while Coleman's lamp has no wick.
posted by: Shag from Brookline on 05.18.05 at 06:09 AM [permalink]
You're defending the wrong guy. Galloway is up to his eyeballs in complicity with Saddam, way before these oil-for-food allegations. That's why he was kicked out of the Labour Party (not because he was critical of Tony Blair; other Labour members have also been critical but they're still members of the Party).
I love, however, how the Loony Left's irrational hatred of Bush leads them to take all sorts of untenable positions.
PS. Photo of Rummy with Saddam? How 'bout all them photos of FDR with Stalin and practically giving away stuff that didn't belong to him (Eastern Europe) to Stalin? How 'bout Churchill saying, "I'd stike an alliance with the devil himself if it meant defeating Hitler"?
In the world of reality, sometimes you have to strike an alliance with a bad guy to be able to fight a badder guy--Iran, in this case.
posted by: gene on 05.18.05 at 12:56 PM [permalink]
Well, if you were being honest gene, you'd have to point out what an abyssmal failure that deal with Hussein turned out to be.
You have anything other than assertions that Galkloway refuted yesterday to offer, gene? Because that's pretty poor work if that's the best you can do.
Oh, one other thing, Gene. You actually see no difference between Roosevelt at Yalta with Stalin and Rumsfeld in Baghdad with Hussein? Those are equivalent to you? And that doesn't strike you as a little, well, not to be insulting or anything, but...koo-koo? Because it sure strikes me as koo-koo. There is, at the very least, an enormous difference in scale. There is likewise, an enormous difference in necessity.
Republicans are busy unlearning history and rewriting it to suit themselves. Gave away Eastern Europe? Stalin already had Eastern Europe, gene you fuckwit.
posted by: merlallen on 05.19.05 at 04:57 PM [permalink]
Ha ha ha! I love lefties whose brain cells are so atrophied they can resort only to calling names. So, merlallen, Stalin's armies may have physically been situated in Eastern Europe, but those regions were not his to keep. Our armies were physically situated in Western Europe, but we did not consider it ours to keep.
But at Yalta FDR pressured Churchill into basically agreeing that all of Eastern Europe could become part of the Soviet sphere of influence. We could have just as easily pressured Stalin to withdraw his armies once the war was over and encourage the freedom of those countries.
Talk about rewriting history!
posted by: gene on 05.19.05 at 06:01 PM [permalink]
Churchill was big with halliburton at the time.
I've got pics of Richard Halliburton flying Iraq's first king over the land of Iraq after WW1 when the empire was snatched from the Turkish Ottomans.
He is showing Prince Ghazi, later the first King of Iraq, the topography of the surface strata for oil prospecting. He has two RAF fighter planes as escorts. He stopped in Iran on the same Journey and did likewise there. British petroleum split half of Kuwait's oil in return for protecting them from iraq after ceding this land away after the second world war, and the US Government supplied funds for railway construction to Kirkuk from Turkey in the same time fram with an agreed lease of either side of the oil fields there for so doing.
The Oil empire had its paws in this plan for nearly one hundred years.
When I get an upgrade to my scanner that works with this new model I'll send Jo a copy of it.
There are other clues he leaves in this journey that sum up the entire insider trading of the war/oil movement and the current market and war in Iraq.
Will put them in one article and submit soon...
As for Stalin, without his help Normandy would have never happened. The Eastern front drained Germany's war machine dry.
Stalin's job before that?
He was an oil field boss south of Stalingrad(Kiev). See the Oil money told Roosevelt who and wat to do in his day also. They hated when he started Social Security then and have tried to kill it ever since.
Meanwhile our taxes pay for Oil wells here(one oil baron claimed an 800 grand plus loss the same year he had four wells each get beteen 1.2-3.9million dollars in money).
One Oil mogul paid a grand total of .4 taxable total of earning of 10.8million(the same).
The Tepot Dome Scandal involved Cheney's sister state of montana, where the same Texas oil interests tapped the Naval reserve for extraordinary profits.
That was under President Harding, the payoffs ramped up the great Depression.
Anyways oil money has had its hands in the jar for ages. the difference between people in office is some of them hedge oil into agreeable terms, others(Bush) give away the entire farm and let oil wolves guard the henhouse.
Nowhere more so than with Social Security and this current robber baron White House attempt to dismantle everything in government.
posted by: Mr.Murder on 05.21.05 at 11:51 PM [permalink]
Well, I guess Gene has nothing to offer on Galloway other than to say "Him bad man." Galloway dealt very sharply with the accusations and there has been no effective direct refutation of Galloway's defense.
COleman's committee, on the other hand, seems to have stricken Galloway's remarks from the record. Funny, that.
I understand that the reason Galloway's opening statement was not included on the Coleman committee web site is that the statements there were submitted ahead of time in writing. The GPO will be publishing Galloway's remarks in the record of the hearing.
I think it's worth pointing out that many of the documents that supposedly showed Galloway's "complicity" with Saddam Hussein were taken to court and proven to be forgeries. Galloway has won five (or six?) libel cases involving those documents and other accusations.
False documents seem to be stock and trade for the Neocons. (Yellowcake, anyone?)
Occasionally, you will hear someone with a complete un-grasp of the facts say something like "Well, libel laws are different in the UK."
Like how? Seems to me that if one casts aspersions about someone else and these aspersions are demonstrably false, provable so in a court of law, well, crossing the Atlantic doesn't change a goddamn thing.
Methinks objections to Galloway have a certain "It's only a fleshwound- come back here and I will bite your ankles!" quality to them.
