Every president elected from 1840 onward in the years ending in 0 either has been shot or has died in office. Indeed, this odd coincidence seemingly fulfills the folk myth of a remarkable Indian curse.

Legend has it that, after the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh sent Gen. William Henry Harrison a message. Delivered by released prisoners, the chief's words are supposed to have been a prophecy that history has labeled "Tecumseh's Curse": "Harrison will not win this year to be the great chief. But he may win next year. If he does ... he will not finish his term. He will die in office."
www.rense.com...

The Voice of the White House

In recent past issues, we have carried comments from a very well-informed source inside the White House. Some of these remarks, most especially one about Bush’s physical and mental problems, drew an enormous number of viewers and hundreds of inquiries, most especially from foreign press entities. Our source was the first to expose, and we were the first to make public, the accusations that the President of the United States was a man that suffered from serious psychological problems. He also revealed ongoing plans to attack Iran. Since our initial publication of his postings, there has been increasing interest in the subject and herewith, we present additional input from inside the White House. If you have a weak stomach, do not read the following material. Not being able to either confirm of deny any of this information, we present it without comment or endorsement.
tbrnews.org...

The Peter Principle and the Neocon Coup
By Robert Scheer
The Los Angeles Times

Tuesday 16 November 2004

The bloodletting has begun.

I'm not referring to the latest attempt to reconquer Iraq, but rather the wholesale political revenge campaign being waged by the hard-liners in the Bush administration against anybody and everybody inside the government who challenged the way the second Persian Gulf war in a decade was marketed and run.

Out: Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose political epitaph should now read, "You break it, you own it" for his prescient but unwanted warning to the president on the danger of imperial overreach in Iraq.

Out: Top CIA officials who dared challenge, behind the scenes, the White House's unprecedented exploitation of raw intelligence data in order to sell a war to a Congress and a public hungry for revenge after 9/11.

Out: Veteran CIA counterterrorism expert and Osama bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer, better known as the best-selling author "Anonymous," whose balanced and devastating critiques of the Iraq war, the CIA and the way President Bush is handling the war on terror have been a welcome counterpoint to the "it's true if we say it's true" idiocy of the White House PR machine.

Meanwhile, incompetence begat by ideological blindness has been rewarded. The neoconservatives who created the ongoing Iraq mess have more than survived the failure of their impossibly rosy scenarios for a peaceful and democratic Iraq under U.S. rule. In fact, despite calls for their resignations - from the former head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, among others - the neocon gang is thriving. They have not been held responsible for the "16 words" about yellowcake, the rise and fall of Ahmad Chalabi, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the post-invasion looting of Iraq's munitions stores and the disastrous elimination of the Iraqi armed forces.
www.truthout.org...