Outside the Spectrum

   The callousness of the DeLay types never ceases to amaze me. Just yesterday (?) he was caught saying that the newly-indicted Duke Cunningham is a “hero.” (here) Yeah. This is your Republican Party House Majority Leader, ladies and gentleman. I’m glad you shitheads voted this clown into office.

   My man Driftglass maintains that the moderate Republican slaves who vote these dicks into office deliberately vote for crooked people. From my experience they are simply ignorant.

   The headlines in the news today are that Chimp W. Bush has decided to throw a bone to his conservative base and get tough on immigration. To me, this is a little creepy. I’ve been listening to Talking Points for months saying that the Preznit has to get tough on immigration. That and taxes are the only things Talking Points will criticize Drinky on. Realizing his approval ratings are in the shitter, Chimp did what he has been resisting for 5 years (something he said he never does): he went to the polls and advocated an issue simply because his base wanted it.

   I’m waiting for this to blow over. Drinky won’t cut spending because his fat Republican Congresspigs won’t stop feeding at the trough. Immigration is the bone left for Drinky to throw to the dogs.

   Sen. Lieberman has been consistently pissing me off for years. No Democrat makes such an effort to be friendly with people he shouldn’t really be friendly with. He’s on good terms with smear merchant Rush Limbaugh. Joe gets along great with Sean Hannity, the Goebbels of our time. Now he’s advocating the “stay there as long as need be” strategy for Iraq. Sure, Joe. Not too long ago Joe decided that, as a Democratic Senator from Conneticut, it would be a good idea to carry water for the President. Speaking of WMDs: "The whole world felt Saddam Hussein had those weapons," Lieberman said, "and Saddam gave us reason to make us think he had them." (here)

   Get the fuck out of the Democratic Party, Joe. Honestly. NO NATION thought Saddam had WMDs. Jesus Fucking Christ, if I hear these lies one more time I’m going to explode. Let’s go through a little run through of our sources, shall we?

(Putin) Russia: "Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress." 1

France: "According to secret agents at the DGSE, Saddam's Iraq does not represent any kind of nuclear threat at this time…It [the French assessment] contradicts the CIA's analysis…” French spies said that the Iraqi nuclear threat claimed by the United States was a "phony threat."2

Germany: The United States “Repeatedly Exaggerated” claims on Iraqi intel. 3

   This is akin to the Chicago Tribune editorial stating that “serious consequences” was “diplospeak” for “military force.” Check out this UN website where nations that voted for the resolution said the only reason they voted for it was because it DIDN’T “automatically” authorize military force.

   When The Chicago Tribune and a Democratic Senator utter bald-faced lies I simply don’t have any faith in the powers that be. These lies, of course, originate in the White House, and have been uttered at various times by the President, Vice President, and Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee (the same dumbshit supposedly investigating the intelligence failures in Iraq. How are we to be expected to trust one Republican to investigate another?).

As reference for my earlier comments, merely check Media Matters today. Chris Matthews says that “most people” “like the president personally” even when his job approval ratings hover around 40% and polls show most people believe he lied about Iraq. Lou Dobbs continues to host Ann Coulter, the most aggressive conservative liar and demagogue in existence. The only fair counterbalance to her would be either Nome Chomsky or perhaps a violent anarchist, though it goes without saying that on Lou’s conservative show neither will appear.

Why does Dobbs host a person who has repeatedly said that women are inferior to men? Who has said that the deceased person she most admires is Joe McCarthy? Who, as the Media Matters article points out, has called Clinton a rapist (what?), New Yorkers cowards, and Canada “lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent.”

This is news, sheeple. This is supposedly what you want. Let us hope that CNN follows the lead of MSNBC, the National Review, and USA Today and makes her persona non grata. The fact that this has gone on as long as it has is proof positive that every individual involved has no moral integrity whatsoever. This, unfortunately, is not rare. Chris Matthews apparently thinks that as long as he is left of Ann Coulter and less crooked than Tom DeLay he’s somewhere in the center of the political spectrum. Ditto for Lou Dobbs, Bob Woodward, Hardball. Most of the editors at the Chicago Tribune. Half of them at the New York Times. Most newspaper editors, the two biggest radio talk shows and most of the rest, and most of the TV editorialists in this country lean right. The liberal media charge is a Big Lie: the media is conservative and the rest are cowed.

There are a disturbing number of conservative political pundits out there, and I’m not even talking about FOX News. Many so-called “mainstream” types unhesitatingly echo GOP talking points when they’re too lazy to do their own research and ascertain if their heart-felt beliefs are actually true.

   Check Media Matters for checks on these buffoons. It takes some gall to be a journalist and to sit down in front of a camera that beams its program into ten million homes and lie your ass off. Most of the time, though, their lies are small because they assume their credibility will be gone if they simply make things up.

   I feel differently. I think that when Ted Koppel goes on Sean Hannity’s radio show and tells Hannity and all of his listeners that he is a great broadcaster Koppel has blown his credibility as surely as if he had been caught in bed with a dead underage male prostitute. Calling one of the most profligate liars of our day a great broadcaster is as disgusting as calling Richard Nixon a great president. Why not say that you think Mike Savage is a great radio host and Ann Coulter is an honest historian, huh, Ted?

   Fuck you, Koppel.

   I hope to be one of many who gives you a kick in the ass on your way out the door. Fifty years of broadcasting hasn’t taught you a damned thing. It’s cowardly journalists like you who have helped seal the doom of this country and allowed politicians (mostly Republicans) to run rampant in the halls of government. Where was the independent press when Reagan told one of his many anecdotes that he completely made up? Where was the independent press when Reagan’s CIA dismantled Central America? Where were the great American investigative reporters when George W. Bush told any of his countless lies about polling, Enron, environmental bills, tax plans, medicare plans, or the ridiculous evidence regarding Iraq?

   They were asleep at the wheel.  The great American journalists like Koppel were more like fellow members of some demented country club, dining at the same restaurant and playing the same golf course and suppressing or disregarding all the evidence they saw right in front of them of politicians running wild. They hobnobbed with these people and interviewed them and looked at the government reports and scientific studies and made phone calls to some of them who were sources and they saw, firsthand, the duplicity of these fools. Washington, apparently, is a place where gentlemen don’t share each other’s secrets.

   Woodward was chief among these spineless sycophants. He went to all the cocktail parties and was on a first name basis with all of the principal villains. His best reporting efforts were watered down horseshit that consisted of all the stories the villains were willing to share with him over a martini. This was the best of investigative journalism, according to Washington.

   Our media needs to be made of sterner stuff. Especially when propaganda outlets passing themselves off as news media dominate radio and lead other stations on cable news. On FOX, Chris Wallace denied once again that Bush had ever linked Al-Queda and Saddam, using one of the most pathetically transparent straw-man arguments that anyone has ever had the courage to say out loud, in public, in front of other people.

   To either whore yourself out to a job like that for a big paycheck or to be deranged enough to actually think that your bullshit is some kind of fucking Straussian “noble lie” is a disgusting enough thing to do in front of a few friends, much less on TV. The FCC should suspend FOX’s broadcasting license for vulgarity. I wouldn’t want my kids to see a man debase himself like that.

   But this is the media we have. The media who ironically let Cheney rewrite history by accusing his critics of trying to rewrite history by saying that Congress had access to the same intelligence the President did, which has never been true under any administration. Those who don’t know this already need a refresher course on American Government. There are these cool pictures that show that the CIA and DIA and the NSA are all part of the Executive Branch, who report to the President, the head of the Executive Branch. The only oversight Congress gets is through the Intelligence Oversight Committees, who only receive the information the President releases to them. Congress has very little power to even monitor these agencies. It’s called the Separation of Powers.

   Sadly enough, most people probably do need a refresher course to spot bald-faced lies. Or a media that has the stones to point them out.

I can’t open up my local Chicago Tribune without being blasted by some tendentious editorial or article. It is truly tiresome.

   There is a line of thought out there about the Iraq war: weapons of mass destruction were just one reason for invading. Hussein also was a brutal dictator who was in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

   I might easily refute these arguments for invasion but I have the sneaking suspicion that, once these reasons are gone, the warhawks will bring up Hussein’s halitosis and bad eating habits.

   First of all, these arguments are made by people who are defending Chimp W. Bush’s invasion. This argument is a red herring argument if used to refute the fact that Bush lied about the WMDs.

   Secondly, these arguments are the last refuge of people looking for a reason for something they already decided they wanted to do for other reasons. Saddam Hussein was neither the worst dictator on earth nor the one in defiance of the most Security Council Resolutions.

   Our friend Israel leads the pack. Check this quote:

During the period between 1967 and 2000, Iraq was the subject of 69 Security Council resolutions. By comparison, Israel, our closest "ally" in the Middle East, has been the subject of 138 resolutions. Not surprisingly, most of those resolutions call upon Israel to comply with basic principles of international law embodied by the UN Charter. Many of them condemn actions taken by Israel and call upon Israel on more than one occasion to comply with previous resolutions that Israel ignored and continues to ignore to this day

.
   So I am happy that my friends at the Tribune have a new-found concern for enforcing Security Council Resolutions. They might also consider enforcing Security Council resolutions against the genocidal governors of Turkey, who butchered more civilians that Saddam Hussein ever did, and in the same time frame.
  
   Sadly enough, you will never hear about these felons in the pages of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial pages, nor will you hear about them from our President, whose concern for enforcing Security Council resolutions on stubborn nations ends with weak, oil-rich countries that tried to kill his dad.

   The U.S. invasion was a violation of international law, if anyone is still keeping track of how many times the United States has violated international law. The saddest part of the editorial comes here:

Several weeks after Bush’s speech, on Nov. 8, 2002, the Security Council—voting unanimously—adopted another resolution, No. 1441, ordering Iraq to disclose its weapons programs—and threatening “serious consequences” if Hussein didn’t comply. That phrase was taken world-wide as diplospeak for use of military force.

   When my hometown paper floated this shit log a while ago I beat them like a rabid dog in a letter I sent the editor, not that I really expected it to change their views. First of all, “serious consequences” doesn’t mean “invasion.” It meant “serious consequences.” Resolutions on Iraq had been threatening “serious consequences” for years, which led to the embargo of Iraq.

   The U.S. knew that no resolutions authorizing an invasion would ever pass the Security Council, especially not with France and Russia holding the veto card. So Bush dove right in anyway and his talking heads said “Serious consequences, invasion, close enough.” That phrase was not “taken world-wide as diplospeak for use of military force.” Or if it was, someone should tell Kofi Annan, who said he considered the invasion of Iraq a violation of the U.N. charter.

   Hey, listen. I remember what an irritating little prick Saddam Hussein was. I remember that he killed tens of thousands of his own people with chemical weapons and hundreds of thousands more with sanctions and starvation. But selective enforcement of U.N. sanctions to further geopolitical agendas is not justice, it’s an excuse. The people pulling the strings here are not speaking honestly, and they never have been.

  

# posted by BitterHarvest @ 12:29 PM 0 comments

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

   I wanted to take this chance to reflect on being thankful and living in America. And seeing as I am the Devil, this reflection will probably be the opposite of what you are expecting. But that’s fine with me. Put that on my grave: The Opposite of What We Expected.

   I want to be an asshole. I want to poke a hole in the inflated self-opinion of gaseous patriots.

   So, to wit, I want to ridicule this patriot who wrote to my native Chicago Tribune:

Today America enjoys a freedom unequaled in the history of civilization. Our good fortune goes unnoticed by most everyone in his or her day-to-day life.
   We are free to express ourselves.

   I hear this argument every day from conservatives and I want it to end. They cite the freedom of speech we enjoy in this country (a freedom they endlessly seek to abridge, whether through banning flag-burning or debate on the war) as proof that this is a great country. I heard the same argument on WLS, the local fascist propaganda broadcaster.
  
   They can’t be this stupid. They can’t not know that all of Europe and, indeed, the Developed World enjoys these freedoms, from Japan to South Africa. Even many (if not most) developing countries enjoy this freedom, including India, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Ethiopia, and Costa Rica. Many of the most wretched nations enjoy this freedom sporadically, depending on the government, including the charnel houses known as Liberia, Somalia, and Colombia.
  
   Being thankful for this is one thing, but using this as justification for the assertion that this is “the greatest nation on earth” is laughable. If this assertion were presented to the Swedes or Singaporeans they would shrug and say “big deal.”
  
   I know, I know. Soldiers died to give me that freedom. Actually, they didn’t. This is another myth, a guilt trip worthy of my mother. Are soldiers dying in Iraq right now to protect my freedom of speech? Of course not. They are dying to further the interests of Halliburton, of the chess players in the White House who have been playing games with soldier’s lives for generations. They are dying for $30,000 to go to college. What about Vietnam? We weren’t defending our nation in that war. We were defending South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese might be more grateful if 2 million of them hadn’t been slain in the war. What about the Korean War? Again, the soldiers died to protect another ally, South Korea. Go ask them for thanks, not me. What about the Big One? Again, Japan never attempted to invade the U.S. Nor did Germany. Japan was simply interested in knocking out the America fleet for long enough at Pearl Harbor to solidify their hold on their nascent Pacific Empire.
  
   This is one of the Big Lies: soldiers die to defend you. In reality, soldiers die to defend national interests as determined by a ruling class that never literally fights its own wars. Nor do their sons. Bush was shoehorned into the Texas Guard by a general on a phone call from a friend of the family. Dan Quayle did the same thing. Cheney had five deferments. Condoleeza Rice never served and was never eligible for the draft, being female. Bill Clinton had student deferments. So did most other boomer politicians. But more importantly, the politicians and patricians who make these wars don’t fight them. They are too old, and they don’t have the courage of their convictions.
  
   This is usually true. WWII was a rare exception, when two dictators blatantly started a war. The truth is the average working-class type doesn’t lose or gain from a war. The citizens of the Kingdom of Serbia in WWI wouldn’t have been better or worse off if they had been conquered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The citizens of China in WWII had an unhealthy choice in the 1940s between imperialist Japanese rule or Communist Chinese Oppression. Even nationalist fights between the Vietnamese and French or Chinese Imperialists usually doesn’t the leave the average Vietnamese peasant, so the speak, any better or worse off. He still has to spend all day tending the rice patty. Any peripheral benefits are of debatable import.
  
   The afore-mentioned patriot went on in his brainless way:

   We are free of oppression.
   We are free of fear.


   Unfortunately, we are also, apparently, free of common sense and insight, if we are writing this shit. Fear is what W banks on more Stephen King. It’s how he got re-elected. It’s how he justified two wars and hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars in defense spending. The Patriot Act. The Department of Homeland Security. Unfettered use of torture by CIA interrogators.
  
   Speaking of this Greatest of All Countries and CIA interrogators, the story of the “Iceman” recently came to light. You may remember him as the bruised-looking corpse on ice in one of the horrible pictures that emerged from Abu Ghraib. His name is known now, though it’s unpronounceable to me. His story is known now, too. He was detained by the CIA for “questioning.” This “questioning” involved breaking his ribs, putting a bag over his head, and crucifying him by hanging him from his arms with his arms cranked behind his back. The combination killed him. But, oh, we don’t torture people, according to the President. If you still believe anything that comes out if his mouth you are a fucking idiot.
  
   Speaking of idiots, the idiot in question went on:

Our lives are utopian, yet most Americans never stop to think about the many brave young men and women who are standing at the gates, guarding our nation: the soldiers, sailors, airmen and women and Marines who are fighting, bleeding and dying in foreign lands so that we may remain free.

   See? I told you he’d wheel out this old lie. They just can’t stop themselves. It’s like they need to keep dosing themselves with this intellectual opiate like Rush Limbaugh needs Oxycontin.
  
   This is the patriotic static that spews regularly from the mouth of one Dick Cheney, the soulless, blank-eyed, blood-soaked warbot of the Bush Administration. His approval rating is half of what the president’s is, which is quite an accomplishment, seeing as the president’s JAR is about 38% right now. This is one of the cynical liars in the bush administration who said there was “no doubt” Hussein had WMDs, links to Al-Qaeda, and a nuclear weapons program. He had “no doubt” because all of their sources were either discredited (see “Curveball”) or based on crude forgeries and disputed analysis (aluminum tubes, yellowcake from Niger). He later denied saying what he said in front of millions of people (here).
  
   Rice and Powell were saying the same things, though, as was the President and the SecDef. They all knew better. They are all equally culpable. I have no idea why Cheney receives more opprobrium than Powell other than he’s far less likable. I, personally, found Condoleeza’s scare tactic (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) to be especially reprehensible. This was her response to a question asking her how sure she was of her sources. A relatively clever tactic, that: she was basically saying “I’m not sure and my sources aren’t iron-clad but we can’t take the chance.”
  
   Of course, we can take the chance. We take the chance every day that North Korea and Iran sit on weapons programs. We take the chance every day that nuclear weapons rest in poorly-maintained silos in Russia guarded by underpaid scientists and technicians. We take the chance every day that Pakistan sits on nuclear weapons in the nexus of the “Islamofascist” world (the administration’s word. I use it because it amuses me). We take the chance every day because every tin pot dictator on Earth can make chemical weapons with technology from 1914. We just can’t take the chance with a nation in a strategically essential part of the world, sitting on the second-greatest proven oil reserves on Earth, threatening Israel and thumbing its nose at U.S. hegemony.
  
   Of course, the public can’t handle the truth. The administration knew this. What disturbs me is that they lied blatantly to attain their Imperial goals.
  
   When I see politicians lying so blatantly it makes me wonder. Are they stupid? Surely not. I’d like to think the levers of power in this country are more sophisticated than that, that any chimp with dumb-assed luck can’t become Preznit Drinky VIII. But the only people the President is accountable to are the unwashed masses, and as long as the Preznit gets his votes he can do anything else he wants. I’ve always known this, but the election of 2000 was a wake-up call for me. I simply didn’t realize the American electorate was so stupid. I said at the time that W was the least-qualified nominee for the Presidency that the Republican Party had ever nominated, and I stand by that analysis. He got elected anyway. I was stunned. I wasn’t bitter about Florida, because the fact that he even got close to 50% of the popular vote was inexcusable. I guess people were just tired of prosperity and a centrist government. Of balanced budgets. Of intelligent leaders.
  
   W got elected because, having had to give knob-jobs to Klu Klux Klan members and Christian Ayatollahs for decades to cobble together a majority, the Republicans knew how to service ignorance. They knew that the vast majority of voters are hideously ignorant about the most fundamental aspects of politicians and politics in general. They knew how to throw splinter groups a bone, how to play on the fears of people with no intellectual curiosity and too much to lose, how to leverage money into political power. They understood this, I think, because the only thing they’ve ever had was money and the desire for more. They never had a mandate. They never were fighting the “good” war. They never had positions that were in agreement with the opinions of the majority a majority of the time. Dick Nixon never gave a shit about what the masses wanted. Reagan was good at keeping a positive image and smiling as he slashed taxes for the wealthy and exploded the national debt. So is Bush. But they’ll wave the flag, if that’s what people want. They’ll intimidate other countries so that we can all feel macho and proud about being Americans. They’ll be happy to vote a certain way on abortion or same-sex marriage if that delivers the one-issue voters and the bigot vote, respectively.
  
   A note about the abortion thing: pro-life my ass. Every time I see those signs I want to shove them up the asses of the fucktards holding them. I want to shove those signs in the faces of the protesters wielding them and choke them to death with them. These people don’t know what pro-life is. These people go to the ballot box and write letters and support the death penalty, cuts in government services for the poor and elderly, and American pre-emptive war and they have the gall to call themselves pro-life.
  
   If you are a member of the minority that doesn’t fit this profile than congratulations, my hat is off to you. You are a model American. You also don’t have many friends.
    
   These people, the slaves of Dobson et al, were the ones who the Republican Majority threw a bone to with the Terri Schiavo vote. If this inane bill was all that is required to keep those yipping dogs at bay the Democrats should consider dumping NOW and adopting the position of the Christian Right on this issue. The Christian Ayatollahs deliver more votes.
  
   Gasp! Is he serious? Yes, I am. I don’t trust Democrats very much. I certainly know that as long as money and political parties are allowed in politics determined by votes cast from ignorant voters our political system will remain a moral wasteland. Have you ever looked at the most popular Democratic Presidents of the last fifty years? They are indistinguishable from moderate Republicans. Look at Jack Kennedy, or Bill Clinton. I can’t tell the difference. Look at Hillary Clinton, for God’s sake. She has spent more time tacking to the right than a plane with no right wing. I don’t blame her. I would do the same thing if I had no morals and no vision. It’s what her husband did and it won him two terms. If I were a Republican I would want her to run for President in 2008. Not only is she basically a Republican already, none of the bigots will vote for a woman anyway. Unless Condi is the only other option, of course. And then the racist vote is gone and the Republican Party will self-destruct spectacularly. Because of that, Condi Rice will get the Republican Nomination the day monkeys jump out of my ass.

   George Bush may be the worst president in history. I’ve been bouncing the idea around in my head for a few years. It’s obviously a very subjective decision, but its interesting mental exercise.

   I don’t know, and even the most knowledgeable presidential historians can’t really know, which president was the most dishonest. There simply is a paucity of information on presidents from, say, the Gilded Age, compared to the Information Age. Obviously (but it deserves to be stated) there was no internet or 24 hour news channel in 1889. Nor was there a mass of political publications like The Nation, The Weekly Standard, and The New Republic. Nevertheless, I can safely say Preznit Drinky’s* administration is only approached in dishonesty by the Reagan Administration (the contras are the moral equivalents of our founding fathers, the El Mozote massacre didn’t happen, etc.). I think, at this point, Reagan has been outdone. Read Corn’s The Lies of George Bush for a nearly encyclopedic account of his deceptions, and even then only in his first term. Corn is, along with Ivins, Alterman, and a handful of others the most consistently accurate and interesting critic of the administration. For a more insightful but somewhat less well-documented effort see John Dean’s Worse Than Watergate.

   That one was easy. My next criteria are harder to judge. I was always resistant to putting Drinky ahead of Reagan because of Reagan’s Central American Policy. Reagan’s rampantly criminal CIA funded and armed militants in every Central American country in the eighties, militants who deliberately targeted and executed about 300,000 civilians. The slaughter was the worst in the Guatemala, but similar death squads operated in the Honduras and, obviously, Nicaragua. The southern arm of the contras operated out of Costa Rica, which was otherwise mercifully free of their depredations. El Salvador was also a bloodbath. Panama’s Noreiga was on the CIA payroll through the first six or seven years of the eighties, even after he stole the 1984 elections.

   But then I started thinking. What about Johnson and Nixon? One or two million Vietnamese civilians died in the Vietnam War, largely through U.S. bombing. Is it any more moral to have killed those people through such relatively antiseptic methods? Yes, we were fighting a war, a war we couldn’t have prolonged as long as we did without the bombing, but we shouldn’t have been fighting it in the first place, should we? Starting an unjustified war based on the sham known as the Golf of Tonkin hardly gives one free license to butcher civilians because “we’re at war.” For that matter, what about firebombing Dresden in WWII? We killed 100,000 civilians in that raid alone, in a city with no military targets (Churchill, callow as ever, maintained Dresden was an important communications nexus for the German military. In other words, it was a big city with a lot of physical traffic and communications going through it. That kind of justification could be used to annhiliate any civilian city in a combatant nation during war).

   WWII, though, I’m leaving out of the discussion, for relatively obvious reasons. Vietnam is a little trickier. Both the Second Gulf War and Vietnam were started by administrations that wanted to install a friendly government in a part of the world they considered to be a vast, hostile environment that needed a counterbalancing nation. Both wars were equally wrong because of that. I have no respect for administrations that see world politics as a chess game when they gamble with real people’s lives. Especially when those lives are counted in the hundreds of thousands.

   Sadly enough, U.S. administrations have along history of dragging a reluctant public into wars based on fictitious attacks on U.S. ships. In addition to the Gulf of Tonkin, the Lusitania and the Maine were both shams. The Lusitania was mounted with guns and was carrying stores of ammunition in addition to its civilian passengers. The captain of the ship resigned a couple of weeks before its last voyage in protest of this. The Germans knew this and told the U.S. government they would fire on the vessel if it came within reach of their U-boats. Public opinion was solidly against getting involved in WWI prior to this.

   No one to this day knows why the Maine exploded, but it probably wasn’t a planted bomb, as the priapic hawks of the day maintained. The Spanish-American War led to the U.S. acquiring Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as colonies. The U.S. granted independence to Cuba shortly thereafter, but only after the U.S. refused to allow the Cuban government to convene unless it accepted the Taft Amendment to its constitution, which maintained that the Cuban government had to sell off 80% of its mineral rights to the U.S., as well as large tracts of land for, in today’s dollars, a couple of hundred dollars an acre. The Philippinos weren’t so lucky. After the U.S. informed them that they would not be granted independence, their elected government fled Manila and waged a protracted and bloody guerilla war against U.S. forces that lasted four years and led to the slaughter of 200,000 Philippino civilians. McKinley promised to “civilize and Christianize” the Philippines. I guess by that that he meant “kill.”

   McKinley is looking pretty bad right now, isn’t he? Thank God the U.S. had a cheap source of rubber, though. McKinley had some advantages that Drinky lacks, however. McKinley went from being one of nine children of working-class parents to being the President. He was legendary for his courtesy. He served in combat in the Civil War.

   I’m also unwilling to put Wilson on the same level as Preznit Drinky. WWI was started by the Austro-Hungarian Empire declaring war on the Kingdom of Serbia out of a naked desire for territorial gain. The allies were the good guys, relatively speaking. The problem is that the American people were largely right in their reluctance to get involved. They were not measurably better off after the war than before. The IWW and the Socialist Party of America realized this and protested the war. Thanks to the draconian Sedition Act that Congress passed and the Supreme Court upheld protesting the war in any significant way was illegal. This led to the largest mass arrest in U.S. history, with 10,000 members of those organizations being arrested, convicted, and sentenced to jail terms of between two and twenty years. Legal immigrants were deported. This effectively broke the back of those organizations for the remainder of U.S. history.

   Drinky lacks some other things that McKinley, Wilson, Johnson, and Nixon had, however. Wilson was the President of Princeton. Drinky was a legacy admission. Wilson’s idealism led to the well-intentioned but failed League of Nations. Drinky’s administration scoffs at the U.N. and international law. The above four pulled themselves up by their bootstraps on their path to power: Drinky’s path to the presidency was paved with money his dad’s friends donated. Before becoming the Governor of Texas, Drinky’s resume consisted of a series of failed business ventures (including the Harken stock deal which was never prosecuted by the SEC) and minority stock ownership in the Texas Rangers, a deal brokered by yet another family friend. The same Texas Rangers who screwed the taxpayers of Texas out of ownership of the stadium they built for the team (sports business has always been one of the most transparently sleazy businesses in the United States, comparable only to the gangster-ridden gambling business of the mid-twentieth century and maybe the porn industry. Maybe also the railroad business of the late nineteenth century, but I diverge).

   The list goes on. Nixon was a straight-A student. Drinky was a C student. Johnson initiated the most courageous civil rights reforms in U.S. history, bar none: after he did so, as he remarked, he knew he would lose the South for the Democratic Party for a generation or more. Drinky, along with the Republican Congress, has axed every civil rights and environmental initiative they could. Drinky and Co. has cut taxes, increased spending, and ballooned the national debt to levels that would have made Reagan proud. This includes the eighty or ninety-year-old Estate Tax. This is unprecedented stuff.

   I scoff when I hear about how corrupt the Grant Administration was, or what a big deal the Teapot Dome scandal was. Bullshit. In inflation-adjusted dollars none of the above scandals come close to the suspicious no-bid multi-billion dollar contracts Halliburton has, or to the nine billion dollars that was “lost” (read “stolen”) from the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer (whose masterful oversight earned him a Presidential Medal of Freedom. This, along with the same medal given to George Tenet [allegedly responsible for what must be the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history] is one of countless instances of how performance is completely divorced from reward in the Drinky Administration).

   I’m also not impressed by the “ineptitude” of the presidents leading up to the Civil War. Buchanan et al presumably could have done more to avert the war, but inaction as a form of ineptitude pales by comparison to preemptive war. I might also argue that the Civil War was inevitable, in some form or another, as long as this asinine argument about “could’ves” and “should’ves” continues. See where I’m going? Arguments about what these presidents might have done to avert the war are purely speculations founded on an assumption that the war was avoidable, which begs the question. They also involve projections along a chain of events that is so complicated it’s akin to guessing what might have happened if General Lee had decided to sit the war out. It’s far-flung guesswork and a feeble indictment.

   I saw a lot of parallels between Reagan and the Preznit. That was why I was unwilling to place Drinky ahead of Reagan in the coveted position of Worst President of All Time. But Reagan had charm and he was a self-made man, even if the man he made himself into wasn’t very admirable. Drinky has never been charming. Drinky stutters and misspeaks like English is a second language for him. He smirks at inopportune times and mocked a woman on death row pleading for her life. He was beat like a drum in every debate he was in. He had to lie his ass off about his domestic plans just to look like he had a domestic agenda beyond looting the treasury for the benefit of his corporate masters.

   Reagan had the Southern Strategy. Bush had the South Carolina primaries and the endless fearmongering. Reagan had his own pathetic enemy to prop up to the American people and justify massive defense spending: communism, not terrorists.

   Reagan had the Iran-Contra Affair. Bush has Plamegate. Plamegate is more serious. The Iran Contra Affair was about the Reagan Administration illegally selling arms to Iran to free hostages and fund the Contras (also illegal, after the Boland amendment). Democrats, in an act of generosity (or spinelessness) elected not to try to impeach Reagan on these charges, presumably because he might not have been aware of the sales, though this is a laughable assertion not borne out by the facts. I guess breaking the Boland Amendment just wasn’t a big enough deal. Maybe it wasn’t. No Americans died in Nicaragua—at least, not very many. The deal didn’t involved billions of dollars, just millions of dollars.

   The lies of this administration have led to 2,100 combat deaths, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. The numbers grow every week. This is bigger than Nicaragua. This is bigger than a “second-rate burglary.”

   This administration will never recover from this. Whether or not their poll numbers improve is of little interest to me. Both Reagan and Clinton suffered prolonged job approval ratings of around 40% in their first terms for little reason beyond economic malaise and perceived ineffectual leadership, respectively. JARs are frequently bad measures of the efficacy of the president. But the sins of this administration are horrendous and numerous. And the continued revelations regarding the intelligence in Iraq, the Scooter Libby indictment, the DeLay indictment, and the fundraising case involving Abramoff and Scanlon that is swallowing the reputations of 60 (almost all Republican) congresspeople will destroy the careers of the Drinky Administration and a huge swath of the Republican Congress. They largely already have. Every day for the President has been turned into a punishing marathon of angry journalists demanding answers and newspaper pages spinning tales of the latest allegations from Bob Woodward. Drinky has alternately been silent, lashed out at critics, and finally retreated into the seclusion of well-planned speeches in front of captive military audiences with programmed applause that looks as pathetic as a fat, balding man energetically humping an inflatable doll. Scott McClellan is batted around like a puffy white punching bag on a daily basis by irritated journalists for his administration’s secrecy and lies and is currently planning a hasty departure from his job, if rumors prove right.

   By the time this president finishes his final term he will wish he had never been re-elected.

*again, term borrowed from Driftglass

   I wanted to publish this from about a week ago. This should be about November 14th.

   “Woooooooooooooh! Bye bye JUDY!” That was my first response upon hearing of the resignation of Judith Miller, former New York Times writer, disgraced journalist, war cheerleader, administration meatpuppet.

   Few journalists rooted as hard for the war as Judy. When in became clear in 2003 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, her response was blithe: “When your sources are wrong, you are wrong.”

   Actually, she was wrong there, too. Her sources weren’t wrong. They lied. They especially liked lying to Judy, as she was a prominent journalist at the Newspaper of Record who was fascist-friendly. She was used like a roll of toilet paper and then discarded and she deserved every disgusting minute of it. She deserved it because instead of investigating she relied on hearsay from highly-placed administration sources who, no matter what the administration, will always have an agenda. She deserved it because instead of listening to what the world intelligence community had to say she listened to the ever-trustworthy administration of George Bush the Younger. She deserved it because she turned her space on the Paper of Record into a space for government propaganda. She deserved it because a journalist has a responsibility to report the truth, not what her friends at the White House say is the truth. She deserved it because she went to jail for months and stonewalled the Fitzgerald investigation until after the 2004 election. She deserved it because she’s not a journalist. She’s a tool.

   Never fear, Judy. I’m sure your friends at FOX News have a position open for a political whore right next to Ann Coulter.

   One of the Defense Appropriations bills that contain the amendment to ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" are going to the House today. Only nine senators voted against the amendment, among them Pat Roberts, the Republican senator from Kansas who chairs the Intelligence oversight committee. This is the jerk-off we’re trusting to head the investigation of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. This makes a lot of sense.

   Take these names down, ladies and gentlemen. These are the senators who are on the record as voting against this amendment: Allard (R-CO), Bond (R-MO), Coburn (R-OK), Cochran (R-MS), Cornyn (R-TX), Inhofe (R-OK), Roberts (R-KS), Sessions (R-AL), Stevens (R-AK).

   I have long maintained that the plains states are the festering pit of our democracy. Every single county in Oklahoma and Kansas voted for “Preznit Drinky*” in the 2004 elections. The results were similar in Nebraska. Note the votes of the senators from Oklahoma and Kansas.

   Preznit Drinky has threatened to veto (his first!) the FY 2006 Defense Bill if it has that amendment. This would be a fitting addition to his legacy, though the House looks like it will approve the bill with a large majority and, if the bill is sent back, Drinky’s veto would be an empty gesture.

* a title borrowed from Driftglass, bless his little heart. Rock on, my brother.

Ahhh, the acrimony of honest debate. You know, a lot of people are not pleased with the tone of the debate raging on capital hill nowadays, but I like it just fine. I’m amused that FOX News has no problems broadcasting lies in a Goebbels-like fashion 24/7/365 but most of the “journalists” there are abhorred at the biliousness of the debate. A whole lot of parents apparently taught their kids growing up that as long are you are well groomed and well spoken you can slip a skiv into your enemy’s ribs and not have to worry about the morality of it. But God forbid you should yell at the person. That’s just not polite.
   Speaking of biliousness, I’ve got Misquote on. I might also call him Talking Points, because if you want to know what was in the D.C. Talkers Talking Points that went out from the Republican National Committee yesterday just tune in to what Hannity is saying. Maybe I’ll use both names.
   The Talking Point du jour is that Bill Clinton and a lot of Democrats said Saddam Hussein had WMDs in 1843 so that justified that ridiculous October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. What Bill Clinton said years before the case is of so little relevance I will not linger on this asinine argument. An NBC poll recently said that 57% of the people in this country are convinced the president lied about WMD in Iraq. But the spineless Democratic Party is not daring to raise a voice and call for an impeachment, even if they don’t have the votes. Some bloated war veteran and Democrat calls for a rapid pullout and this makes news. I will say this about Murtha: he was right. The American people are way out in front of congress on this one.
   I’ve considered sending Misquote’s boss a letter suggesting they replace him with a twenty-minute recording of RNC talking points yelled through a bullhorn. Just something to think about.
   Talking Points is yapping on about Clinton now. Apparently, he’s everywhere. I haven’t seen Clinton in any news recently. These conservatives get so red-in-the-face about a popular former democratic president that they see him everywhere. They blame him five damned years after he left office for everything from bad intelligence on Iraq to global warming. Conservatives a hundred years from now will be blaming Clinton for some problem, I guarantee that. Do any of you ever remember the Clinton supporters blaming Reagan and Bush the Elder for problems he was suffering?
   There is this stupid talking point going around that no liberal seems able to put to bed. I heard Dennis Kuchinich debate Misquote and it was painful to listen to (this was 11/18, I think). It was like listening to a retarded 30-year-old argue with a stubborn 10-year-old. Misquote wheeled out, among others, the old canard that if you don’t support the war you don’t support the troops.
   America is apparently so traumatized from its own treatment of its veterans after Vietnam that people are deathly afraid of even being accused of not supporting the troops. I think its time for an injection of personal responsibility here. Every soldier has upon his/her shoulders personal responsibility for all of his or her actions. Just like any other human being. Sometimes, in some ways, its ok not to support the troops. If US troops began rounding up Sunni Muslims in Iraq and crowding them into gas chambers would we support our troops then?
   Of course not. We all feel the need to support troops fighting a war they didn’t ask for in a far-off, worthless, dusty nation. I’m, frankly, not concerned about it. First of all, the men really responsible for the troop’s position are all in the White House and the Pentagon. I’ll let those bastard lose sleep. Secondly, most troops are conservative: they voted for Bush, they believed in the war, and they are still pretty positive about the reasons for war. Many actually in Iraq are convinced it’s a fool’s errand, but their morale isn’t effected by what newspapers say: they sweep over the same territory over and over again, occasionally hitting IEDs that blow their up-armored Hum-Vees to shreds, then interrogating the locals about who buried the 100-pound charge only to find that no one saw anything. Newspaper editorials don’t matter.
   Frankly, I’m ashamed I even have to rebut this “support the troops” argument. Any abridgement of debate or discussion about the righteousness of this war is a simple tactic of the clumsiest fascists. Twelve-year-old schoolyard bullies have better justifications than this. Instead of debating in the realm of ideas, as Rush Limbaugh says he does, conservatives unearth every argument they can think of to silence debate and dissent: support the troops, don’t undermine the president in a time of war, this discussion is just obstructionism, you name it.
   Most of this offensive rhetoric escapes from the closed minds of media conservatives who don’t actually hold office. These fucktards are popular debaters of politics who are to real political discourse what Paris Hilton is to real acting: an inexplicably popular rancid imitation. I put Hilton, one of the most popular people of her day, in the same category as Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, Rush Limbaugh (#1 radio host in U.S.), and Sean Hannity (#2 radio host in U.S.): a shining example of pop culture. I enjoy pop culture as an ever-changing effervescent expression of people’s dreams and interests until one of two things happens: a particular  element gets over-exposed, or a particular element takes itself too seriously.
  

   I recently read another vile missive from Victor about France, stinking of intellectual dishonesty and cultural arrogance.

   I don’t really need to find inspiration to write when Victor Davis Hanson finds it for me. I could just write an essay to respond to his essay, going point-by-point and refuting him one sentence at a time. I would also have one advantage over him, besides being smarter and better looking: the facts.

   Victor labors in a cramped, well-guarded world where there are no poor people and capitalism is the answer for everything, from education to crabs. Any deviation from this doctrine is punishable by termination of employment and public excoriation. He has many companions in this gamy intellectual environment. They call themselves “conservatives.”

   Conservatives cherish a sad and brutally simple-minded illusion: the market can fix essentially all ills. If you are smart and hardworking, you will make money and succeed. If you are lazy and/or stupid (or black, which is usually the same thing to them) you will be “punished” with poverty.

   This frighteningly simple logic works (miracle of miracles!) both ways: If you are poor, it’s because you have been weighed by the all-seeing Mother of Markets and Liberties and found wanting. If you are successful it is because you are hard working, smart, and generally loved by God.

   Voltaire (several centuries ago) laughed at this stupid worldview, this belief that this is the “best of all possible worlds.” Read Candide, for God’s sake. The Bible denied this axiom: read Job. Nevertheless, conservatives maintain that Jobs are the exception rather than the rule.

   The complicated part comes when you ask “how many exceptions do there need to be to disprove the rule?” Maybe if 5% of all “rich” people were found to be of average mental abilities, moral standing, and work habits? How about 25%? What about 50%?

   What about 100%? The equally brutal truth is that, leaving out those who have inherited wealth, the only personality factor that correlates strongly with wealth is ability to amass wealth. Yes, this is Petitio Principii, or circular logic. The conclusion is the same as the premise. Nothing correlates with wealth. Conservatives might argue that “productivity” does, but what does this word mean? Something like “ability to generate revenue for your company,” which is within a hair’s breadth of being identical.

   Unfortunately, only people who can climb to the top of the corporate ladder can control enough of the corporate decision making to be able to personally enact changes that might make the company 10 million more dollars in a year, thus justifying the 1 million dollars worth of stock options they get awarded. Climbing to the top of the corporate ladder, or getting a small business you own to grow into a large business, is based on far more than hard work and smarts. But even Dilbert knows that. Check out this piece from an article Krugman wrote for the nation:

According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez-- confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.)

   The truth is that these numbers have been published in a hundred studies over the last ten years. I might ask conservatives this: has the productivity of the top .1 percent of the population risen 343 percent since 1973? Are the big business types really that much smarter or harder working? Are their businesses making that much more money?

   Of course not. Their taxes are less. Corporate executives take profit from their companies like never before. And conservatives STILL rammed an abolition of the estate tax and dividends tax through Congress last year.

   If anything else so alarming in this country had grown by 343 percent the masses would be howling. If the per capita death rate in Los Angeles grew by 343 percent over the same period the people would vote to triple the number of police officers on the streets. If the national rate of inflation more than tripled over the same period, or if the unemployment rate more than tripled over the same period, there would have been riots and impeachments by now.

   The corporate class knows that the masses are largely ignorant and quiescent. As long as they keep the real wages for the serfs stagnant or rising at a super-slow rate there won’t be electoral and legal repercussions. As long, then, as the economy grows they can then pocket the profit for themselves. And the super-rich, so few in number, don’t even need to see the economy grow. Because of their scarcity they can simply take what they can get away with because they are too few to make an impact on the bottom line of the nation.

   I can’t know whether these people honestly believe the shit that comes out of Sean Hannity’s mouth. Or Bill O’Reilly’s mouth. Or anything coming from the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation. It’s largely irrelevant. I don’t care whether the liar believes his own lies. I just care whether the sane people do.

   When Bill Clinton talked about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” he was talking about these people. If you’ve read this far you probably already know who I’m talking about. Bill O’Lielly. Sean “Misquote” Hannity. Rush “I Make This Up as I Go Along” Limbaugh. Scarborough. FOX News. The above-mentioned institutes. The Federalist Society. The Hoover Institute. The list goes on.

   What do liberals have? Move On. That’s the only liberal organization with comparable clout. Maybe the Sierra Club.

   The reason is that the corporate class has the money and the connections to make the Cato Institute and its sordid friends. Money is power. It has proven very effective at lining the pockets of selected politicians, buying advertisements, and underwriting entire companies devoted to nothing but telling poor people that they deserve to be poor unless they can play by the rules of the “free” market, rules which they make up.

   Don’t think so? Think about it. Ever wonder why, in America, drug companies get to make a newly-developed drug exclusively for twenty years? To recoup the R & D costs, of course, they say. Pay no attention to the fact that drug companies make 15% profit when other companies average around 4% (1), that Pfizer is #4 on the list of donors to the Republican Party over the last thirty years, that they essentially own the Congress of the United States. Check out this article by the New England Journal of Medicine. Paying for R & D doesn’t cost as much as the companies say it does. And with the World Trade Organization bending the arms of developing countries to conform to western standards, Big Pharma will continue to make a killing.

   Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, ever wonder why conservative think tanks come to similar conclusions on wildly differing topics? What does conservative economic policy have to do with abortion? How do conservative “think” tanks come to the same conclusions about economic policy and abortion (try this article for one of millions of Heritage Foundation examples)? Why does free enterprise advocacy seem so closely linked to tolerance for intelligent design (See this article from the Cato Institute)?

   If you are a worthy audience for my teaching, you already know the answer. They don’t. They are MADE to. The Republican Party is a Frankenstinian monster composed of the head of East Coast Affluence sown onto the body of Rural Cultural Conservatism. The only reason these two groups share the same party is because there are only two parties in this country, and if you leave the Democrats (like the South did in the sixties and seventies) there is only one place to go.

   But it’s miraculous how these “think” tanks come up with the same answers to the same cultural questions on wildly different topics. It’s almost as if, instead of being composed of legitimate thinkers independently arriving at conclusions (as they assert they are) they are, hmmmm, coordinated. Coached. Directed.

   The truth is they are stinking intellectual whores who will wrap their scabrous lips around any idea their corporate backers tell them to. They will assume any position, no matter how degrading or humiliating, as long as the price is right. They deserve the contempt of all honest people.

   As I grew to understand this frightening truth about America I became, well, disturbed. Upset. Rich people are buying politicians, public relations companies, and companies devoted to doing nothing but inventing justifications for policies they want simply because they benefit from them.

   Goebbels would be proud.

   Bob Woodward is dead, ladies and gentleman.

   At least, his credibility is.

   Media Matters has the story here. I was wondering why he was so dismissive of the Plame Investigation. It’s because he was potential target of the investigation. Aaaahhh….

   I’ve never been a big fan of Woody. I was wondering, as I read Veil, for example, how he could recreate private conversations between the Director of Central Intelligence and a regional CIA director when both of them were under investigation at the time of the book’s publishing for criminal misconduct. If he had one or both of them as a source for the conversation, fine, but neither was a credible source for anything. This detail never stopped Woody from publishing book after book with questionable sources and no footnotes. He made a lot of money writing books that should have been in the fiction section. Reading a Bob Woodward book was always like being taken aside by a reporter with a lot of friends in high places and being told “lemme tell you a story about what really happened, guy.” I never bought it. I don’t take Bob Woodward’s word for anything. I don’t take any journalist’s word for anything. I trusted that he didn’t make things up from whole cloth, but God only knows what really happened behind closed doors. Woody’s books are realistic, but not reliable. If I want a realistic book to read based on conjecture I’ll check out Tom Clancy. He’s more entertaining, at least.

   The sad truth is that the man who was once an icon of investigatory journalism is now the archetype of the deceptive establishment journalist. The Judy Miller, if you will.

   RIP, Woody.

Ahhh....

BitterHarvest is here! It's nice to have a voice.

I won't waste time talking about myself. That's not what this blog is going to be about. Instead, let me roll out my writing from Nov. 11. It's a good place to start.

Plame Games

What? Did Valerie Plame fucking advertise her name? Is Prosecutor Fitzgerald off his rocker? Check this:

NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell: "[Her identity] was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger."

Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely: "I have friends back in Washington, D.C. [who] have told me that on the social circuit back there, the State Department, the social circles, also in CIA that it was very well known she worked for the agency. She was an analyst, not a covert agent."

Bullshit. I'll believe Fitzgerald and the testimony of Wilson's friends and neighbors any day over the lies of Republican cheerleader Mitchell and FOX News favorite Vallely. If it was a crime to lie to the public these bastards wouldn't be so eager to spew filth like this. Vallely is especially ridiculous, as it has already been confirmed that Plame was a covert agent. The CIA initiated the investigation, for Christ's sake. Do they not know when one of their own is undercover or not?

I especially like Victor Davis Hanson's testimony. He met Wilson in the green room and said that Wilson was unusually talkative, in a "stream of consciousness" kind of way. What a pussy. He doesn't even have the balls to lie about Wilson "outing" his own wife, he just implied that it was probable because of Wilson's indiscreet nature. Pathetic. I have no idea why this idiot is still a syndicated columnist. This is the brilliant historian who concluded that one of the lessons of the Peloponnesian War was that democratic societies must stand behind their armies or risk losing the war. I question whether Hanson has ever even read Thucydides, or if he just read the Cliff's Notes and filled in the blanks with RNC talking points. This is the quality of scholar who warms the chairs over at the Hoover Institute.