Outside the Spectrum

   Sometimes I hate to come off as a liberal. I am not a part of the Democratic Party. I’ve never cashed a paycheck to write some politician’s speech. But when the most powerful man from your party in congress, until he was indicted, is Tom DeLay, how can you look yourself in the mirror and call yourself a republican?

   While republicans in congress launched an investigation into the democratic president’s $1 million dollar land deal long buried in his past, they neglected to do so for the sitting president’s Harken energy deal. More importantly, as of this date 239 days have passed since a request was filed with congress to investigate the Downing Street Memos, papers leaked from the British government that allege that the president “fixed the facts around the policy” of going to war in Iraq, a far more important issue than a bad real estate deal. Phase II of the intelligence investigation has been stonewalled by republicans, leading Harry Reid to close down congress to compel the continuation of an investigation that no conservative wants to conduct. The House, meanwhile, though it has the power and the responsibility to launch its own investigation, as it did for the Iran-Contra Affair, refuses to do so.

   With Roberts, the republican senator from Kansas, chairing the committee tasked with the investigation I have little hope the results will be honest. Roberts has said several times that he doesn’t think there’s anything to find. That’s improper from the man supposed to be leading the investigation. Roberts also recently criticized the ranking democratic member of the Senate Intelligence committee, Rockefeller, for simply making public his misgivings about the recent White House wiretapping scandal. Even though the adminstration’s reckless use of forged documents was already known (among other bad sources the administration used), Roberts, in his October 2003 report, placed the blame squarely at the feet of the CIA. When Kay’s report emerged in January of 2004 concluding that there were no WMDs in Iraq, democrats responded by new cries for an investigation. Roberts accused them of “politicizing” the debate. When the Plame issue comes to a head later that year, Roberts dismisses it, telling CNN "I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don't know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert," echoing GOP talking points and uttering an egregious lie.  Fitzgerald later lays to rest the conservative lie that Valerie Plame wasn’t undercover, despite Roberts’ assertion. Larry Johnson, a recently retired CIA operative who testified in the case, rightly excoriated the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee: how could a person in this position be so ridiculously ignorant of CIA procedures, especially when it was the CIA who initiated the investigation by filing a complaint that Plame’s cover had been blown?

   Both houses of congress have similarly refused to investigate the Valerie Plame leak, leaving the investigation to the independent council. Porter Goss, the head of the CIA, famously said “give me a blue dress and then we’ll talk,” alluding to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I would expect the head of the CIA to be more concerned with the safety of his operatives, but then again, he is a Bush appointee.

   The fact is that our government is run, ass to antlers, by a network of republican cronies who are incapable of honestly policing themselves.

   “Scooter” Libby, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, is under indictment in the Valerie Plame case. Tom DeLay, formerly the most powerful man in the House, was also forced to resign his position and is under indictment. The Abramoff indictments are about to begin and may implicate six members of congress, most or all of them republicans, perhaps including Tom DeLay. Unanswered allegations about the use of WMDs still swirl around this White House. Bill Frist, the senate republican leader, is under investigation.

   This is corruption of monumental proportions.

   Few journalists deserve to be as critically eviscerated as Kathleen Parker, the syndicated columnist out of Florida who wavers between mindless right-of-center political commentary and insipid cultural writing. Today she levels her guns at blogs.

   I love it when a journalist gets frustrated with blogs. What they are really getting frustrated with is the fact that a factual mistake or ignorant opinion of theirs can be exposed within the same hours it’s uttered, which drives them nuts. Most journalists are normal people who don’t have a neurosis about being corrected, but Kathleen just don’t likey when they “catch some weary wage earner in a mistake or oversight.”

   Waaaah! Waaaah! This puerile prose is typical Parker. It amazes me that this “weary wage earner” gets paid for this stuff, but journalists speak to different audiences, and I have found that there is a large audience of drooling idiots in this country.

   Parker, while maintaining that she’s been a “blog fan” from the beginning, nevertheless unloads on “most” blogs as being “spoiled,” “undisciplined,” “lacking in wisdom,” etc.

   What does it matter, though, if there are a lot of blogs out there that she doesn’t like? Because, she maintains, they enjoy a mysterious and unexplained “power untempered by restraint and accountability.”
They possess the “power of a forum.”

   Most bloggers don’t have a forum because very few people read their blogs. I’ve visited a lot of blogs big and small in my time. The big blogs, who have many hits and an actual forum, are all on a par of quality with much larger newsmagazines. Take a look at Thinkprogress or Crooks and Liars on the toolbar to the left: they are the internet equivalents of The Nation. If you check out Powerline Blog you will find the same arguments and writing as in The Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal.

   I tire of beating around the bush. When people level criticisms at something that don’t entirely make sense it’s because they aren’t being honest. Kathleen doesn’t like blogs because they compete with her in her profession and offer an alternative to her tired writing with “snark, sass, and destruction.” That’s the best thing about blogs.

      Tax Cuts…More Tax Cuts…

   After getting whipped like mules over Social Security reform, the Hurricane Katrina response, and the Terry Schiavo affair, the Republican Machine has figured out that their mandate is pretty thin. They have been reduced to throwing money to the masses as a governing strategy. Darth Cheney cast the tie-breaking vote to trim Medicaid programs, because Gawd knows that’s where are the pork is, with all those lazy poor people and their lobbyists suckling at the teat of government spending. Krugman says it as well as I could here.

   Remember all those tax cuts that were supposed to “stimulate” the economy? After three years of them, our economy is doing as well as usual, but profligate spending has created massive deficits. So what do we cut? Medicaid.

   This is Republican Strategy #1. Cut taxes mostly for the wealthy, cut programs for the poor. It is Robin Hood in reverse, justified by classist theologies about the inherent lesser worth of people with less money.

   More Wiretapping Stuff

   Don’t think the President’s wiretapping was abusive? How about if he targeted his warrantless listening on PETA and Greenpeace? Molly Ivins mentioned it in her column today and CNN had the story eight days ago.

   I have mentioned before that the Preznit has recycled the same scurvy band of convicts that helped Reagan carry out the Iran-Contra Affair. This current wiretapping scandal is an outgrowth of the data mining project headed by Poindexter that congress quashed last year, only to see it rise from the dead like a flesh-eating zombie at the will of its White House Lords. Read the CBS story here.

   This administration has gone back to the Deep Well of republican felons to carry out their most degenerate programs. They wheeled out the mangled corpse of John Poindexter, propped him up in front of the cameras, and put him in charge of developing a program to rampantly spy on Americans in the name of “security.” Elliot Abrams is the current deputy national security advisor.

   The gang leaders from the Iran-Contra Affair had a soft landing in the warm arms of the right-wing hegemony compact. Caspar Weinberger became the publisher and chairman of Forbes magazine. Robert McFarlane is a member of the advisory council of Aegis Defense Services, currently providing security in Iraq. Ollie North, is, as I mentioned yesterday, a big FOX News correspondent and one of Sean Hannity’s favorite guests on his TV and radio show.

   I also tire of Reagan’s former attorneys jumping to conclude anything that absolves the current preznit of anything. Victoria Toensing, former Reagan legal thug, has argued vociferously that Valerie Plame wasn’t really undercover and that nepotism got Wilson his job, as per her instructions from the Republican National Committee’s talking points. Read Media Matters disassemble her feeble arguments here. Lately she has (surprise!) concluded that the wiretapping of the President is not illegal. In the New York Times another pair of former Reagan legal gunmen, David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey, wrote a defense of the wiretaps on Wednesday using the same tired logic I have countered twice in the last week.

   The Reagan Administration was a stinking fecal bomb detonated in the well of public discourse and politics of this country that continues to poison the water to this day. It was an egg sac of carnivorous insects jammed in democracy’s heart and encouraged to grow and eat their way out by the loving attention of corporate overlords, as well as knee-jerk patriots and cowardly moderates who paid so little attention to what they were doing that they actually looked astonished when the monsters erupted from their chest, spewing blood and entrails, and skittered away to write op-eds for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

   The Chicago Tribune’s War on Truth continues. In today’s editorial, the editors decide they are “Judging the Case for War.” There is a surprising amount of truth in their evaluation, though it is a shoddy and superficial examination. They devote 80% of their column inches to explaining all the things the administration was right about and the other 20% glossing over the sources who revealed the utter inaccuracy of the administration’s claims about Al Qaeda, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons.

   The administration’s claims that the press is focusing on the negatives about Iraq are the whining, puling lies of an administration that has been caught, in front of the world, with its hand in the cookie jar. The newspaper of record in Chicago, through editorials and op-ed pieces written by loyalist republican propagandists, has given their arguments more than equal space. The New York Times has followed suit, but we’ll look into that later.

   I find it curious that, while occasionally admitting that the President “exaggerated” this or that claim, the editors never the less conclude that “we do not see the conspiracy to mislead” that the administration’s critics do. Because exaggerating intelligence claims to justify a war is by definition misleading, the editors seem to conclude that the administration inadvertently misled the country.

   How does one “inadvertently” exaggerate, over and over again?

   This editorial reeks of intellectual cowardice. A sample of the editors torturing their prose to gingerly step around the facts: “the administration didn’t advance its arguments with equal emphasis.” That’s convoluted-speak for “WMDs were the primary justification for war.” They can’t bring themselves to say it in plain language.

   And then come the lies. While admitting the administration’s claims of WMDs were “flat-out wrong” they conclude “There was no need for the administration to rely on risky intelligence to chronicle many of Iraq’s other sins. In putting so much emphasis on illicit weaponry, the White House advanced its most provocative, least verifiable case for war when others would have sufficed.”

   In other words, he didn’t have to lie. That doesn’t change the fact that he did. Although 57% of people believe the war could be justified without WMDs (MSNBC poll here), and two-thirds believed that in the summer of 2003 (Zogby poll here), the administration was able to use bad intelligence to force the UN to step up the pressure on Saddam Hussein and to ameliorate the negative reaction from the rest of the world that overwhelmingly disapproved of the invasion. Those lies also took some people off of the fence and got them behind the president. Those lies were useful.

   And the WMD argument was not the only one in which the Tribune acknowledges the president exaggerated. Iraq’s “alliance” with terrorists was also manufactured, leading the editors to conclude that “the White House exaggerated this argument for war.”

   This argument, and the chemical weapons argument, and the nuclear weapons argument. There’s a whole lotta “accidental” exaggeration going on.

   In truth, if you examine the evidence more closely, “exaggeration” doesn’t describe it. The rancid information from known liars the administration unabashedly touted as leaving “no doubt” is so fetid as to curl the nose of any person who reads it who doesn’t already have an agenda. See my previous post “The Big Lie” for a rundown of this fetid collection of data, and a little more the following day in the post “And so it Continues…Part Deux.” That’s December 13th and 14th, on my blog.

   The editors also raise Hussein’s human rights violations as a justification for invasion, an argument I have debunked more than once before. George H.W. Bush lifted sanctions on Iraq in 1989 after Hussein had committed those atrocities. Although the Tribune rails against the UN sanctions against Iraq as “toothless,” they do not mention the behavior of our own government. They also don’t mention the fact that the US government and private companies gave Hussein chemical weapon supplies in the eighties, as the New York Times described in an article in August of 2002. Oh, but the rest of the world, yeah, they were just in bed with Saddam.

  
   Recently I was reminded of why I like the Hammer so much.

   Of all the goose-stepping, flag-waving conservatives out there, the Hammer is among the most honest. You will not find the brazen lies of a Sean Hannity here, nor the psychotic break from reality that characterizes the writings of Victor Davis Hanson, nor the wheedling deceptions of Ken Mehlman.

   No, the Hammer isn’t so warped. He is a republican hack, but he is also a screaming, pounding-the-table imperialist who dreams of an American hegemony that would make the Roman Empire pale by comparison. I have the same warped affection for him that I have for the late Richard Nixon and for the mostly fictional Richard III: these men are villains whose lust for power, not subservience to corporate overlords, propelled them in their megalomaniacal conquests.

   The Hammer actually musters a weak defense of the Preznit’s wiretapping in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune. It is weak, but it is cogent and doesn’t involve making things up from whole cloth, and I respect that. His argument, amusingly enough, is that the FISA statutes that govern this sort of thing aren’t really legal, because the president and a few legal scholars don’t think they should be.

   Think about that for a second, before we go on.

   This reeks of Watergate, of the Iran-Contra Affair, of a succession of reprobatecan presidents who didn’t really feel that congress had the powers to make laws they didn’t like.

   We’ve seen this before. The republican president feels congress has passed a law that impinges on his powers, as Krauthammer argues, and he defies that law.

   I should note this rarely ends well for the president. Nixon was ultimately forced to resign for a number of reasons, among them his use of the CIA. Reagan was spared the axe by claiming ignorance, apologizing, and then firing the people involved.

   Reagan’s example seems the closest. He defied the Boland Amendment by funneling money to the Contras. On display at the congressional hearings were a collection of criminals that stood in front of congress and revealed an open contempt for congressional oversight, public disclosure, and the workings of democracy in general. Who felt they had a right to defy laws passed by congress if, in their opinion, these laws weren’t constitutional.

   This is illegality in its most unambiguous form. This is an imperial presidency gone wild.

   I shudder to think of what a president might do if he or she actually had the power to authorize wiretaps without oversight on any individual he claimed might be working with terrorists, or engaged in some related criminal activity. What would stop the president from wiretapping the phones of political enemies or dissidents, his own sense of decency? When the president abuses this power how will we, the American people, discover it if it is secret? No Freedom of Information Act request could unearth these records when the executive refuses the request on grounds of national security, as this administration has done many times.

   The Hammer brings himself to acknowledge that, for purposes of “comity,” the president should have brought the matter before congress if he felt the existing law was unconstitutional.

   Actually, it’s not a matter of comity. It’s the law. Period. And this president broke it.

   The president, under FISA, already has the power to wiretap anyone and get a warrant from the secret court up to 72 hours after the wiretap has already been placed. The court is virtually a rubber stamp as it has only declined a handful of requests out of thousands over the past decade.

   So why would the president circumvent this imperceptibly mild restriction? Unbridled arrogance, or a desire for there not to be any record of the wiretaps. The only people who would know about the wiretaps would be him, a few administration members, and a few people at the NSA.

   He could have wiretapped John Kerry’s campaign, or a MoveOn committee meeting. Not to make an argument to ignorance of the same kind this administration used to justify the War in Iraq, but we don’t know who he wiretapped. We just know that, if he did decide to do that, there was no one to stop him who didn’t work for him.

   This is so transparently abusive that even the cowed and amazingly loyal politicobots of the Republican Machine in congress have voiced, for lack of a better word, consternation. There will be an investigation, they say.

   Returning to the Hammer, I must say I enjoyed his jab at George Tenet saying there was a “slam dunk” case for WMDs in Iraq. Didn’t the president you’re defending give Tenet a Presidential Medal of Freedom after his amazing miscalculation, Hammer?

   Some people’s opinion of a law doesn’t make it optional. The president doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws he thinks are constitutional and which are unconstitutional.

   This should not be a surprise, moderate republicans. Your brazen leaders have flaunted the law for decades. Reagan’s administration did this same thing and you cheered. Eliot Abrams got a job working for this administration, as did John Poindexter. Oliver North is a darling of the right and a correspondent for FOX. Limbaugh still brays the Boland Amendment was unconstitutional and Reagan was right in what he did. Ann Coulter agrees, even going so far as to say the Iran-Contra Affair was a “brilliant” plan. Just today I heard Limbaugh’s replacement host on his radio show agree with a caller in echoing the above sentiments.

   These are the stewards of your party, the rhetorical leaders of your movement. Criminals. This is part of what they mean when they reverently refer to themselves as “Reagan Republicans.”

   Lawlessness. Contempt for the workings of our government. It is reflected in every little thing this administration has been doing quite openly for five years, every lie this administration uttered and their media puppets echoed. Every disinformation campaign: “Clear Skies,” Terry Schiavo, WMDs in Iraq, Elaine Chau as Secretary of Labor, ID as “science.”

   This administration has been thumbing its nose at every governmental institution it considered inconvenient and the people of the US, collectively, for years. Their tool has been bald-faced lies, and their motivation has been contempt.

   Contempt for science. Contempt for labor, the FDA, and the EPA. Contempt for the will of the international community. Contempt for the freedom to dissent. Contempt for the workings of the courts (especially in Florida). And now, contempt for congress. Contempt for democracy.

   You voted these felons into office, not once, but twice. Remember that.

   Big news cycle today, with varying topics, so I’ll be forced to wander.

   First, my Chicago Tribune gave its own version of fair-and-balanced coverage to the wiretapping scandal: three opinions, one maintaining the wiretapping was illegal, one article that couldn’t make up its mind, and a third maintaining it was illegal.

   The article maintaining it was legal actually managed to muster an intelligent defense of it, something our president and secretary of state were inexplicably unable to do (Bush’s defense was, laughably, “trust me”). It was written by one John Schmidt, a former associate attorney general and a real, live lawyer. He cites several court precedents that confer on the president the power to use wiretaps and searches “for foreign intelligence purposes without warrant.”

   His argument is seemingly undermined by his following quote. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review wrote in 2002 that the courts have ruled “the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence.” But this argument isn’t about gathering intelligence in Zibabwe. It’s about gathering intelligence from U.S. citizens and residents. Of course the president has the authority to covertly use wiretaps to spy on foreign powers.

   His next citation seems to undermine his case even further. He mentions that FISA doesn’t grant the president the authority to use warrantless electronic surveillance to intercepts communications “sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person,” when the intelligence gathering is “intentionally targeting that United States person.”

   He argues that September 11th justified this kind of response, but that is a weak argument. As I have written before, it is besides the point of it being illegal. Terrorist attacks don’t excuse illegal responses by the government. The president has also said that he will continue to use warrantless searches, which seems to be quite an extended “response.”

And So It Continues…

   The Tribune again continues its War on Truth, highlighting the nascent democracy of Iraq.

   I tire of all the ex post facto arguments about why the war is still a good thing because “look at all the good we’re doing.” This war was sold to the American people based on the presumption we were countering an “immanent threat.” That presumption has been proved false. Even if critics won’t acknowledge the mountain of evidence that the president flat-out lied, where is the outcry over being sold a war based on faulty intelligence? Despite what good we may fish from this debacle, where are the cries for responsibility from a president who sold a war to his people on a premise that was proved false? Where are the reforms that might ensure this never happens again? Why was George Tenet, the CIA director ostensibly responsible for all this bad intelligence, given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003?

   The message seems to be that we don’t even need a good reason to invade a country (even if that reason, I might add, never justified an invasion according to international law). The message seems to be that a president can start a war with another country for any reason that sounds remotely justifiable, invade and conquer, and if the reason turns out to be bogus, well, so what?

   Neither the United States nor any other country on Earth has the right to invade a country because it’s ruled by a dictator or it possesses the same weapons of mass destruction we have, according to international law and common sense. We don’t have a right to turn Zibabwe into a war zone because Mugabe is a dictator. We don’t have a right to invade Iran because they have a nuclear program. We don’t have a right to invade Israel because it still stands in violation of more UN Security Council resolutions than Saddam Hussein ever did.

   Nor should we want to. There are dozens of dictators around the world and there will continue to be well into the lifetimes of our grandchildren. This one war in Iraq is costing us 100 billion dollars a year and a thousand combat fatalities a year. It has done massive damage to Iraqi infrastructure that still hasn’t been repaired two-and-a-half years after the fact. It has cost Iraqi civilians 100,000 lives.

   This is why we use diplomacy, however slow or tedious the process.

   But now that we’re there we can’t pull out before democracy is established, right?

   Why not? We seemed to have to no problem doing that in Afghanistan, where a mere 20,000 troops support a free and democratic government that controls little outside of Kabul. Warlords and Taliban control the rest of the country. Much of the country could still be the base for terrorists that right-wing commentators warn us could spring up in Iraq. Opium production is rolling again. America has forgotten.

   So why can’t we do the same in Iraq? What makes Iraq so much more important? Why is it so vital to make sure all of Iraq is secure?

   We all know the answer. O-I-L. To let the production of sweet, sweet crude get interfered with would be dangerous. To let the country fall into the hands of Shia extremists would be…well, Iran.

   This isn’t about terrorism anymore. In truth, it never has been. This is about geopolitical power, just like Vietnam, just like Korea, just like Nicaragua. This is about the U.S. installing and maintaining a friendly government in an area of the world the U.S. government considers to be strategically important. This is about the same global chess game that the U.S. government has been playing with real people’s lives for generations.

The Wall

   Speaking of Israel, the Crusade to Take Land From Brown People continues. Front page on my Tribune today is the story. Israel is constructing a 30 foot high concrete wall (condemned by the international community) around itself to “protect” itself from terrorists.

   This might actually make sense if they were constructing the wall on their border. Instead, as shown by the helpful little map in the story, the wall wanders all over the West Bank, interfering with Palestinian traffic in Palestinian land, virtually encircling Jerusalem. You know, that city that isn’t theirs except in their own minds.

   Am I hallucinating? Is no one else seeing this?

   Israel says it wants peace, but refuses to cede land it seized way back it 1967. Every month they do something like this, then act shocked and outraged when suicidally angry bombers detonate themselves in populated areas.

   This is why Israel has violated more Security Council resolutions than any other nation on Earth. It is not the product of some demented, world-wide conspiracy. It is the product of forty years of actions like this.

   This is the black heart of the reason Arabs hate America: we support Israel, politically and financially, like no other nation on Earth. Throw in our support for the despotic Saudi monarchy and our overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953 and you have the reasons why Arabs hate us almost in total.

   It wouldn’t take an invasion to ameliorate these situations, just a little diplomacy. A public condemnation, maybe, of Israeli excesses. That would be a start.  

New York is Paralyzed; Mayor is Apoplectic

   Though I usually don’t write about this stuff, this time I had to. This story is almost like an Onion parody of itself. I’ve taken a few liberties inserting additional material to clarify the original writing. My additions are in italics.

NEW YORK-Commuters used cars, cabs, boats, trains and their own foot power to make the journey to and from work here Tuesday, the first day of a transit strike that shut down the nation’s largest bus and subway system.

   The strike, which was called at 3 am Tuesday, prompted the 33,000 members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 to walk off the job for the first time in 25 years.

   Under state law, public employees…are prohibited from striking. The law provides for fines of up to two days’ pay for each day a worker is on strike.

   And on Tuesday afternoon, a Brooklyn judge cited Local 100 for violating the law and imposed a fine of $1 million for every day the strike continues.

   Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who walked across the Brooklyn Bridge during the morning rush hour, ostensibly to show that somehow he, too, is affected by the strike, condemned the strike as “selfish” and “morally reprehensible,” though he has never taken public transportation in his life.

   In an unusually fiery statement, Bloomberg said the union leadership “has thuggishly turned their backs on New York City and disgraced the noble concept of public service, for which I, for example, paid a record 72 million dollars for in my last election campaign.

…The age at which employees could retire with full pensions was another sticking point in the talks. The authority wanted to raise the age from 55 to 62 for new employees.

   Emotions about the strike ran high. A businessman from suburban Westchestere County, who would give his name only as Brad, said the union had no right to strike.

   “If these workers don’t like their contract, they should quit that job and get another,” he said, clearly not understanding that if the workers all quit the situation would be even worse, “That’s what people in the private sector do, and that’s what they should do. Goddamned union labor! These thugs don’t know how hard it is to be a suburban businessman from Westchestere County who has to take a cab to work for awhile!”

   New York City Comptroller William Thompson estimated that the first day of the strike would cost the city 400 million in lost sales and other revenues, with the total rising to 1.6 billion if the walkout lasts a week.

   Ouchie. No wonder the mayor is unleashing the “fiery” rhetoric. Ironically, this massive shortfall could be covered by a personal check written by the billionaire mayor, but this “noble concept” would be going too far, of course.

   The strike is illegal and the union will have to pay its fines. I just couldn’t resist loosing a few barbs in the direction of a billionaire mayor decrying the degradation of the “noble concept of public service,” a noble service that involves driving a bus for $30,000 a year and seeing your profession’s retirement age get pushed back.

   It’s over.

   The long, national nightmare is over. When some kids ask me one day what it was like to live through the presidency of George W. Bush I’ll say “Well, the guy was a conceited son of privilege who spoke English like it was a second language and who had an ugly financial history and who dodged the draft. When he got the Republican nomination in 2000 I said he was the least qualified candidate that party had nominated for the presidency in modern history. When he won I said the democratic process of this country was badly broken. He proceeded the lie about everything he did and every government program he proposed or oversaw. He put lobbyists in charge of government offices charged with overseeing the industries they had just lobbied for. He put Mike Brown in charge of FEMA. He lied about intelligence to convince the country to go into Iraq. Some people in his administration (maybe with his approval) betrayed the identity of a CIA agent who just happened to be married to an outspoken administration critic. The Republican-controlled congress either refused to investigate these things or dragged their feet on investigating the intelligence scam. Then, after it was revealed in a newspaper article, the president admitted to wiretapping people in the United States in 2002 without ever getting a warrant, and he said he’d continue to do so.”

   My story would end there. The listeners would know about the rest, the spectacular collapse of Bush’s administration.

   I just listened to Ed Schultz on Air America radio. Barbara Boxer said she was sitting next to John Dean, the former Nixon attorney made famous by Watergate. I’ve mentioned Dean before on this blog as an extremely incisive political observer. He said to Boxer that “this is probably the only time in history that a sitting president has admitted to an impeachable offense.”

   When Dean speaks I listen, but I didn’t need him to tell me this. Listening to Condi Rice, current Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor at the time, make lame excuses for those actions told me all I needed to know. She stumbled around, blindly flailing for a precedent or statute, finally settling on “I’m not a lawyer.”

   Pathetic. Deeply, deeply sad. Neither FISA nor the authorization given by congress to the president to make war on the Taliban using “all necessary force” even come close to mentioning giving the president the power to place wiretaps without ever getting a warrant. Nothing in the Patriot Act gives the president these powers. What the Patriot Act does give the president is the power to place a wiretap immediately, if necessary, and then take up to 72 hours to get a warrant from the super-top-secret court that oversees this activity. So all protestations that the president needed to act quickly are both disingenuous and besides the point.

   I’m extremely interested in seeing how the Preznit weasels out of this one. I feel like a front-row audience member to a Harry Houdini show. How can he possibly escape the box chained and dumped at the bottom of the lake? Will the amazing President Houdini make another miraculous escape?

   I am similarly interested in finding out how the right-wing propaganda machine excuses this, though of course they will try. If they succeed it will be like David Copperfield making the statue of liberty disappear.

   As of this date even Arlen Specter has said there will be an investigation, though I’ll believe it when I see it. I predict a long investigation stalled for years as every republican chair in congress finds a reason to gather more information, schedule something ahead of a hearing, etc.

   But you can only delay the inevitable so long. So when they actually decide the President did break the law, what then?

   My Chicago Tribune, who hasn’t endorsed a democrat for president in a century, does occasionally criticize the president for wrongdoing, including in this case. But they never suggest anything like an impeachment. Their solution is always to just sternly correct the president and go on with business as usual.

   Isn’t this congress, though, filled with congresspeople who impeached a president over lying about a blowjob? Didn’t this president, at the time a governor, say that the president should be removed from office because he “broke the law”?

   This president has broken the law. I’m waiting for an impeachment.

  
   The Hammer speaks again today. His opinion piece is largely one long hyperventilation about how bad Iran is, and how they are threatening Israel, and how, in the ominous closing paragraph, “Negotiations to deny this certifiable lunatic genocidal weapons have been going nowhere. Everyone knows they will go nowhere. And no one will do anything about it.”

    Or, put more simply, “Waaaaaaaaaaaah! Waaaaah!” Yes, yes, Hammer, we know. It’s hard to deal with all the nut jobs in the world. But this paragraph caught my eye because Hammer doesn’t really seem to have an answer. He seems to be implying we should impose sanctions, or perhaps invade. He doesn’t explicitly offer any solutions, though.

   What is the world supposed to do? What are we supposed to do, invade a country just because we don’t like its leader? Impose sanctions because we have a right to weapons of mass destruction but others don’t? Or should the U.S. try to impose sanctions because we don’t like the idea of Iran having nuclear reactors (reactors that are legal)?

   Neocons like Krauthammer have this amazing assumption that the United States can invade other countries just because we don’t like their government. Doing so is unambiguously illegal under international law and in the eyes of the international community. The only justification for war is in self-defense or to stop genocide. Neither case would be even remotely applicable.

   Thus we get the whining. The simpering, pathetic scrawling of Charles Krauhammer crying about Iran because there’s not shit-all his imperialist buddies can do about it and they know it.

   Belligerent rhetoric doesn’t justify anything.

   Iran isn’t going to solve this problem with violence. Israel is conventionally more powerful than Iran and Israel has many nuclear weapons courtesy of the U.S. of A. Even if Israel was like a babe in the woods the western world would never let Iran destroy her.

   Krauthammer raises the specter of Iran nuking Israel, though this would certainly result in a counterstrike that would destroy Iran. Iran would gain nothing from this scenario.

   The United States has given more military and non-military aid to Israel than to any other nation on Earth. Haven’t we done enough? Apparently not.

   Mr. Lieberman was blisteringly critical of Democrats who were obsessing on part of the rationale for the United States going to Iraq, made three years ago, and of Republicans who were faltering because they speculate that support for the war might cost them their re-election next year. Mr. Lieberman sees "the big picture" of Iraq and the Middle East, and how the success in building a local representative government there will affect its totalitarian neighbors, not to mention the most important impact of all -- significantly furthering the vital goal of creating a democratic Palestinian state that ends the region's half century of hostility and violence to the state of Israel, our oldest and best ally in the region.

   Brave, brave Barry Casselman in the Washington Times. Still advancing the notion that WMDs were “part” of the rationale for the United States going to Iraq. Let’s reread that one quote from the President’s Speech to the Nation when the war started:

   Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.

--President Bush, March 19, 2003, address to the nation

   So what was this war about, now?

   But oh, no. This is just Democrats “obsessing.” Joe L. is a “big picture” kinda guy, willfully striding forward with this administration into the sunny prospects of the Iraqi future, heedless of “little picture” details like the number of people killed or the amount of money spent. That is the way of “defeatists.”


  

   I am actually tearing up, I am laughing so hard. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A PRESS SECRETARY GET ROASTED THIS BADLY! EVER!

    Whew. Calm down. OK. Check out Crooks and Liars here. Watch David Gregory of NBC news shove a spit up Scotty McClellan’s ass and slowly turn him over a fire, pausing occasionally to brush on a drawn butter sauce and sprinkle him with seasoning.

   I’d like to give a shout out to Mr. Gregory. Fuck that. I’m writing a letter.

   I’d also like to give kudos to Scotty. Though humiliated in front of millions, he didn’t collapse into a whimpering heap like he has in the past. I think I saw him smirking. Good for him. He’s the Press Secretary. If he doesn’t have the sand to take the heat for the president’s actions he shouldn’t be in the job.

   So the Preznit commented on an ongoing investigation (DeLay’s) while before, as McClellan told the press core ad nauseum, the President doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations (Plamegate).

   I think we all see how this works. When the president doesn’t want to comment, he doesn’t. We he wants to comment, he will.

   Is this any surprise coming the president who said, “I'm the commander in chief, see, I don't need to explain, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting part about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." Once again, this president is not hard to figure out. He pretty much says what he thinks. I almost admire the man for being so openly and brazenly corrupt.

   But why would the Commander-in-Chief-see choose to comment on the DeLay investigation? Because he wants his political leg-breaker back on the hill? Because he wants to influence a jury?

   Go ahead, you dry-drunk son of privilege. An endorsement from you, at this stage in your career, is the kiss of death.

   Jack Cafferty unloads on G.W. at Crooks and Liars (is there any doubt why I have a link to them on the left?). I think the media criticism is getting to the point where we might have a critical mass here. Cafferty just ranted.

   In their never-ending quest to justify the Iraq invasion ex post facto, the Chicago Tribune continues its war on truth and decency.

   The latest installment of the Apology for the Road to War series was today, another exercise in the old bait-and-switch trick. We’re going in to find WMDs…no WMDs? He was a bad guy anyway!

   Indeed, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. But, as Martin Luther King said, the greatest purveyor of violence on Earth is my own government.

   Saddam Hussein didn’t give target lists to Indonesia in the sixties which helped them butcher a quarter of a million people, nor did he aid them in the seventies and help them erase another quarter of a million civilians in East Timor. A similar amount of civilians died in the eighties as a result of U.S.-funded and trained death squads in Central America.

   I pray another country doesn’t invade the United States and cite those figures.

   So why didn’t we invade Indonesia? How about North Korea, where untold hundreds of thousands have died at the hands of the merciless dictator, and where millions have died in a preventable famine? How about invading the Sudan, where 50 to 80 thousand have perished and a million been displaced just in the last two years at the hands of the government’s air force and the Janjaweed Arab militia? Why didn’t we invade Cambodia in the late seventies when 1.7 million died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge?

   As I have said before, the U.S. doesn’t invade nations for human rights reasons. Those certainly weren’t the reasons given by the president:

   Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.
--President Bush, March 19, 2003, address to the nation

   So what was this war about, now?

   So the Preznit finally figured out that a ninety-senator endorsement was pretty much veto-proof, and he agreed to McCain’s amendment, essentially, after being dragged there, kicking and screaming. After having dispatched Darth Cheney to “convince” senators that the emperor needs the tool of torture in his trusty toolbox.

   This guy is a leader on human rights the way that China is a nation open to reform.

   Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are still advocating torture, which gives you an idea of where in the political spectrum these guys get their marching orders from. These oozing, running sores on the face of public discourse are the praetorian guard of Dobson, DeLay, Roberts, and Stevens. Even Bill Frist didn’t have the balls to vote for this excrement.

   This is the leadership of your modern Republican Party, moderates: an unsightly cult of blood-drenched war criminals, torturers, and petrogluttons served by a fawning mass of stenographers to record their every putrid argument and transmit this glorious wisdom to you, the gibbering inbreds that serve as political cannon fodder in their fifty-million-person army.

   I couldn’t help but notice a pattern in the voting again in the house, as taken from the Washington Post:

In all, 200 Democrats, 107 Republicans and one independent voted for Murtha's motion to instruct House negotiators. Voting against it were 121 Republicans and one Democrat, Rep. Jim Marshall (Ga.).

   Republicans: the Party of Torture. Even on a non-binding resolution more Republicans in the House voted for torture than against it.

   You are disgusting.

   The American Spectator

   I frequently get a kick out of reading The American Spectator. I think I have actually read more conservative publications in the last month that liberal ones.

   The Regnery Empire publishes The American Spectator, which says a lot about the quality of the product.

   Offal. An elephantine, fly-covered, steaming mound of excrement.

   Issue after issue is the same. Personal invective that would never make it into any other major publication. Flat-out, unambiguous lies. The most sickening collection of weasels and guest weasels flown in from their warrens in Turkmenistan to argue against evolution.

   The magazine always begins with an address by the High Priest of Feculence, editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Grand Wizard rarely disappoints. His current address was its usual foul self, littered with nuggets of truly odorous feces like road apples trailing a parade.

   His diatribes are essays that wander across the news of the day and only pause to personally insult a person in the news the High Priest hates. This one opens with, frankly, the most unprofessional writing I have ever read in any magazine in my life. Period. This is the level of discourse The American Spectator is dragging the political discussion down to:

…Maureen Dowd, the matronly New York Times columnist, adumbrated her new book by publishing a stool sample from it in the New York Times Magazine. Apparently it is a disquisition on the mystery and potent sexuality of Miss Dowd, the plain-Jane journalist, whose delusions of winsomeness provoked her to pose for a full-page picture in the magazine, her shapeless rump settled on a barstool, her rouged slab of a face turned three-quarters toward the photographer to gruesome effect. She wears a shapeless black dress that conforms to every hillock of her shapeless body…

   And so on. Nary a whiff of actual political thought. I can’t even call this an ad hominem argument because the High Priest never makes a political point. He just dropped trou and squeezed out a big paragraph of hate for a political enemy right on the opening pages of his magazine.

   It goes on. A long line of alley apples all across the beginning of a long voyage into Reprobatecan Land. He refers to an audience listening to Joe Wilson at San Francisco State University as “the usual audience of imbeciles.” Colleges, you see, are full of idiots because they don’t vote Republican.

   He meanders into the realm of anti-Arab bigotry, snarkily writing “The holy month of Ramadan got off to a good start with small arms fire throughout the Middle East and suicide bombings in Bali, Iraq, and Israel. In London, Sir David Frost announced that he will be presenting a current affairs program on al-Jazeera, though he will remain clean-shaven.”

   And so on. I suppose I should not be surprised. As they pointed out in last month’s issue, Ronald Reagan said his favorite magazine was The American Spectator. Birds of a feather, as they say. I suppose if Southern Partisan gets published, so should The American Spectator. The real question is this: who’s taking these idiots seriously?

   That’s were the rub is. This administration is. This is the joke that the Republican Establishment has become: they read an angry version of Mad Magazine like it’s Harpers. Like serious, reputable journalists contribute to this festering sore on the face of the periodical community. The conservative movement as it is is destroying the fabric of our political discourse.

   The rag goes on. Grover Norquist writes an article on the “Best and Brightest” in the Republican Party. On the facing page are nine pictures of the “best and brightest,” and the three in the middle are Bill Frist, John McCain, and Rick Santorum. That pretty much says it all.

   Followed by an article on Independent Design, arguing that it is based on “neutral principles and facts drawn from mathematics, information theory, biochemistry, physics, astrophysics, and other disciplines.” I won’t repeat the rancid argument that follows. Let’s just say it wasn’t based on any science I recognized, unless you call being a greasy huckster for the Priests of Plundering Pensions a “science,” which is kind of like saying a paranoid schizophrenic’s theories are based in “abnormal psychology.”

   I start skimming the rest. An article on how feminists are making college life hard on the perpetually oppressed young white male. I heard the same argument on Limbaugh just yesterday.

   Despite the fact that The American Spectator and The Weekly Standard continually battle for The Most Putrid Periodical in Major Circulation Award, I still read them, just to keep an eye on what the orcs are planning next. After all, I don’t need The Nation to tell me what I already know. That’s why Al Gore invented the Internet.

   Is there any subtlety left in the Corporatist movement? Childish vitriol, bigotry, Grover Norquist, and science by secessionist ministers?

  

   I considered a full-blown Coulter beat down session, but to put it bluntly, this twitching, foaming freak refutes herself.

Reagan took an approach to the Cold War dramatically different from any other US President. To wit, he thought we should win. This was a fresh concept. At the time, it was widely ridiculed as a dangerous alteration of US policy. Only after it worked was Reagan's dangerous foreign policy recast as merely a continuation of the policies of his predecessors.

   In Coulter’s demented worldview there were no anti-communist presidents before Reagan. Apparently, all of our presidents before him thought we should lose the Cold War. Eisenhower putting missiles in Turkey? Never happened. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis? Never happened. Nixon engaging China and further isolating the Soviet Union? Never happened.

Even if corners were cut, (Iran-Contra) was a brilliant scheme. There is no possibility that anyone in any Democratic administration would have gone to such lengths to fund anti-Communist forces. When Democrats scheme from the White House, it's to cover up the President's affair with an intern. When Republicans scheme, it's to support embattled anti-Communist freedom fighters sold out by the Democrats.

   Indeed. The Iran-Contra Affair was a “brilliant scheme.” It destroyed the president’s approval ratings, forced the resignation of many of his staffers and cabinet members, led to their indictments, and, most importantly, funded a motley collection of terrorists trained by the CIA to target civilians and destroy the infrastructure of a third-world nation in flagrant violation of international law, as the UN ruled.

   By the way, the Sandistas weren’t Communists. They never said they were, they never aspired to be. And if getting funding from Communists makes a nation a Communist nation, then I guess the U.S. of A. is a Communist nation because China loans us billions of dollars every year.

The reason any conservative's failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It's an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites.

   Not even going to bother with this one.

(Sheryl) Crow explained that the 'best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.' War solves that problem too: We won't have any enemies because we're going to kill them.

   The subtlety of Coulter’s foreign policy is on full display here.

Liberals said Reagan was dangerous and his rhetoric scary. They ridiculed him as an idiot for believing the Soviet Union could be toppled. They opposed him on every front -- strengthening the military, aiding and arming anti-Communist rebels around the world, invading Grenada, preparing to win a nuclear war, building a nuclear shield, and waging a spiritual crusade against Soviet totalitarianism. Reagan said the Soviet Union was an evil empire and we would prevail. He called the ball, the shot, and the pocket, and he won the game. But now we're supposed to believe he was lucky. Liberals lie about Reagan's victory because when Reagan won the Cold War, he proved them wrong on everything they had done and said throughout the Cold War.

   I love the “Reagan won the Cold War” stuff. It actually brings a smile to my face to read that every time I do.

The Great Satan is wearying of this reverse hegemony, in which little pipsqueak nations try to impose their pipsqueak values on us. Aren't we the ones who should be arrogantly oppressing countries that unaccountably do not have the death penalty?

   Again, Coulter foreign policy on full display here.

Gore said foreigners are not worried about 'what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do.' Good. They should be worried. They hate us? We hate them. Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell anger. Japanese Kamikazes pilots hated us once, too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons got their attention. Now they are gentle little lambs.

In the corporeal world, international law is whatever the United States and Great Britain say it is.

   More Coulter foreign policy.

Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do. They don't have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now.

   I love this quote. I have actually cracked a smile. Unambiguous bigotry right here.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

   Dead civilians? No problem!

The Democrats have no actual policy proposals of their own unless constant carping counts as a policy.

   Simply, laughably false.

I know Jesus Christ died for my sins, and that's all I really need to know.

   LOL! Whew! The tent of Christianity is getting mighty broad these days, isn’t it?

Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.

   Woah, woah, woah. God never said anything about rape!

There are a lot of bad republicans; there are no good democrats.

   An insult to the intelligence of every American.

[Bill Clinton] masturbates in the sinks.

   This is political commentary?

I think [Whitewater]'s going to prevent the First Lady [Hillary Clinton] from running for Senate.

   Dead on prediction there, Ann.

“I think we had enough laws about the turn-of-the-century. We don't need any more." Asked how far back would she go to repeal laws, she replied, "Well, before the New Deal ... [The Emancipation Proclamation] would be a good start.”

   Yup. That gives you an idea of where she is, politically speaking.

People like you caused us to lose the war." (to a disabled Vietnam Veteran)

   LOL!

I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote. No, they all have to give up their vote, not just, you know, the lady clapping and me. The problem with women voting -- and your Communists will back me up on this -- is that, you know, women have no capacity to understand how money is earned.

women are "not as bright" as men. [09/23/04, Hannity & Colmes]

   How is this unabashed sexist a guest on CNN? Even FOX? WHAT IS SHE DOING ON ANY MAJOR NETWORK IN THIS COUNTRY?

   I hate that wrinkled, congested-looking pseudo-journalist. That casual, off-the-cuff kind of cruelty of his language that he utters so matter-of-factly, like a serial killer given a suit and told to say whatever he wants, but say it like he was a journalist reporting the news. I would bet money that before coming to FOX Brit was a) an enforcer for the mob b) a prison guard c) a bodyguard for a wealthy republican.

   He’s a thug. He also lies like a republican. You can generally tell the real journalists from the cloned doppelganger aliens of the Mother Republican by the smell of death about them, and the occasional, ill-concealed bloodstain. Underneath the stolen skin of the journalist in question you will find the ravening, bloodthirsty abomination that was hatched in the Heritage Institute’s cloning rooms and raised to abhor the truth and obey the Republican National Committee and dismember any idea or person that stood in their way. These monsters generally resemble the aborted fetuses of normal people, creatures who, before they had a chance to develop normally, were fed a diet a lies and hatred, taught to fear authority, and rewarded for cruelty. They are grown, fed, and groomed in the Heritage/Cato/Hoover/Mellon-Scaife/FOX Corporate Consortium’s minor league attack journalist system, and when fully matured, released into the wild to hunt, kill, eat, and take the place of a real journalist. After which their brains are carefully vacuumed out of their skulls and a fibrous cable is attached to the base of their neck, through which the talking points of the Republican Motherbrain can be transmitted on a daily basis.

   Brit’s latest travesty can be found here, where he asserts that something is only torture if it causes trauma equivalent to something “associated with the failure of your organs.” Ironically, Saddam Hussein is currently being accused of, among other things, supervising the abuse of a woman who was stripped and suspended naked while she was beaten, treatment that does not meet Hume’s definition of torture. Unfortunately, Hume can’t detect the irony because his skull is currently a gaping cavity filled with the echoing talking points of the Republican National Committee, most likely penned by Mehlman while he was recovering from an all-night bender in which he downed a pint of whiskey and spent most of him time servicing Bush and otherwise enjoying a little man-love.

   Hume has a long, rich history of raping the truth and gloating about it afterwards. He even has his own little section in Media Matters here. He rode shotgun in the Bush Train of Denial out of New Orleans, claiming that Bush “pleaded” with Mayor Nagin to evacuate the city when Nagin didn’t want to. He’s hosted every parasite the right can come up with the argue their point for them, including Bill Sammon of the Washington Times, who argued that the London bombings should shut all those stupid critics up who were criticizing the abuse at Guantanamo Bay. Hume has defended Rove’s comments that:

MoveOn.org, Michael Moore and Howard Dean may not have agreed with this, but the American people did. Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9-11 and said: we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: we must understand our enemies…Let me put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Sen. Durbin, certainly putting America's men and women in uniform in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

   Hume argued that Rove was referring to “liberals,” not the Democratic Party. Never mind the fact that Rove specifically referenced the chairman of the DNC and the democratic senator by name.

   Hume launched a smear campaign in April of 2005 aimed at discrediting critics of Bolton, even stooping so low as to dredge up her account of abuse at the hands of her father as “evidence” that her account involving Bolton was untrustworthy (from Media Matters):

On April 25, Hume noted that Lynne Finney, former U.N. policy adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), "remembers being verbally abused by U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton more than 20 years ago." Hume quickly added: "But it turns out this isn't the first time Lynne Finney remembers mistreatment from long ago." Hume then quoted statements from Finney's personal website about how she had recovered suppressed memories "of having been abused by her father."

   Disgusting. So deeply, morally perverted that only an alien imitating a human could come up with it.

   But there’s more! On April 12 Hume obediently echoed the Rush Limbaugh talking point of the day when he lied:

The CIA says that Massachusetts Democratic Senator John Kerry and Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar inadvertently identified a CIA officer working undercover, this during yesterday's Senate hearing on John Bolton's nomination to be U.N. ambassador.

   Unfortunately, the CIA officer in question, Fulton Armstrong, had been identified as a CIA officer for years before that.

   Hume is willing to go to bat for any Republofascist cause. He attacked Robert Watson, a UN scientist who reported on the dire consequences of global warming, using lies apparently derived from the report of industry-funded global warming skeptic Patrick Michaels. Hume touted and hosted advocates for Bush’s social security reform initiative with nary a whiff of analysis. Hume even went so far as to say that FDR advocated privatizing social security which, needless to say, is a lie. Hume defended Dennis Hastert with another lie, saying that “Hastert never said Soros was receiving funds from drug cartels,” when, in fact, Hastert said

I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from. ... George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there.

   Oh yes, Brit. Hastert just implied Soros was a drug kingpin. Which, by the way, is a craven lie that makes me ashamed to share the same state with that bloated worm.

   Hume decided it was wise to throw in with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, echoing their claim that

There's not a single official record that backs up that claim [that Kerry was ever in Cambodia], a quite striking claim. So when you start from there, you're already dealing with something that, for all intents and purposes, has been shown to be false.

   How does an undocumented claim automatically become false, Brit? Kerry’s claim is backed up by many sources here.

   If I were Kerry, I would have demanded an apology. But Hume, perhaps, is beneath contempt. He is a hollow shell of a reporter, a contemptible, loathsome reprobate spawned in the bowels of the Republican Hate Machine.

And it continues….

   The Chicago Tribune, in its perpetual quest to defend the administration’s drunken lurch towards war, publishes another section on apologizing for The Road to War series.

   My post yesterday (The Big Lie) is largely a refutation of the Tribune’s rancid argument, but I feel the need to expound.




   I wouldn’t trust the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee further than I could collectively throw them. According to Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the committee, [Roberts was trying to] "lay all of this out on the intelligence community and never get to any other branches of government; in particular the White House and associated high and visible government agencies," he told Knight Ridder.

   Roberts, the Kansan Republican who chairs the committee, is a blind thrall to the White House. His concern for the outing of Valerie Plame? "I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don't know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert," he tells CNN.

   Yup. To quote Larry Johnson, an actual CIA agent who worked with Valerie Plame, “Folks, there is no excuse for this level of incompetence.  There are thousands of undercover CIA employees who drive through the three gates at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia everyday.  And this Senator from Kansas who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee has the audacity to blame CIA for intelligence failures?  How can he recognize failures when he does not even understand the very simple basics about people who work undercover at CIA?”

   Of course, Roberts understands “the very simple basics about people who work undercover at CIA” well enough. He simply chooses to echo Republican National Committee talking points because he is a rank traitor who puts loyalty to party over loyalty to truth and loyalty to country. The conclusions of the committee he chairs are swarming with omissions, mischaracterizations, and willful blindness like maggots devouring a head-sized block of rotten meat.

   The report, like many other similar reports (the Butler Report for one), concluded that although Al Qaeda made overtures to Iraq, “these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship.” Period. The Tribune editorial even quotes this, but then goes on to selectively quote other parts of the report that relay tidbits of information that do not come within a country mile of supporting Bush’s claim that “You can't distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam” on 9/25/02. Cheney used the standard administration deceptive generalization to claim that Iraq "had long-established ties with al Qaeda," not bothering to mention that, by his definition of “ties,” 60 nations have “ties” to Al Qaeda.

   But The Tribune cites misleading and weak bits of evidence anyway.

   “Al Qaeda or associated operatives were present in Baghdad and northeastern Iraq,” but there are Al Qaeda cells in an estimated 60 countries!

   And that a desperate Hussein might use Al Qaeda to conduct a terrorist attack in a time of war, though that is pure speculation.

   The Tribune article goes on to claim that “Iraq was a likely suspect. Its chronic refusal to heed United Nations mandates made it more so.” And so now we launch wars based on suspicions of collaboration?

   At least the article makes a passing attempt to acknowledge the discredited assertions, like the supposed Czech rendezvous between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi officials, which never happened. Czech officials told the Bush Administration so at the time.

   American Progress has a good analysis of the claims v. the intel here.

   The Bush Administration had access to all sorts of Curveball-false informers, DIA dissents, and CIA suspicions that collectively added up to known lies, refutations of the weak arguments to invade, and baseless speculation. And on this sterling evidence they launched an invasion in violation of the UN charter, without the assent of the Security Council, and against the will of the vast majority of the people of the region and the world. To paper over their porous wall of bad intelligence they used the broad brush of generalization to quote out of context, appeal to ignorance, make a one-sided argument, and make an appeal to fear (“we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”). All in the service of starting a war.

  

  

   This is not a joke.

   This is the front of the Daily Mirror, one of the top four newspapers in the U.K. It has the same circulation as the Wall Street Journal, a little over 2 million.

   Take a good look, America. Take a good, long fucking look. This is your guy. This is the leadership you wanted. This is the smirking, stuttering, twitchy, arrogant, aggressive, duplicitous man you’ve had a close-up view of for four years and you just couldn’t get enough. This is your leader. He believes Independent Design should be taught in schools. He doubts the existence of global warming. He mocked a woman on death row. He relaxed air standards on polluters and called it “Clear Skies.” He let loggers log on Federal Lands and called it “Healthy Forests.” He cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy. He destroyed the surplus and exploded the national debt. He invaded Iraq and went “whoops, guess there weren’t any WMDs here. Well, we’re here so we have to finish the job, right? Let’s not look backwards. Let’s go forwards.”

   No. Let’s look backwards. I insist. Let’s find out why the rest of the world thinks we’re fucking nuts. Let’s see why the rest of the world is pretty sure Dubya lied about Iraq and knew it. Let’s find out how eager Scotty McClellan is to go forward when Congress wants to go forward with an impeachment.

   The aluminum tubes. Colin Powell was briefed about these tubes. The CIA told him they were for nukes. The IAEA and the Department of Energy disagreed. The Administration went with the CIA.

   Yellowcake uranium for Niger. These allegations were found, by February 2002, to be baseless by both the CIA and the State Department. The deputy commander of U.S. Armed Forces Europe, Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford, the U.S. ambassador to Europe, and Joe Wilson all investigated the Niger uranium story and found it to be unlikely. Stephen Hadley, a former aide to Condoleezza Rice who replaced her as national security advisor and worked the closest with the Office of Special Plans, received a memo and a phone call from the George Tenet, DCI, in October 2002 before Bush’s State of the Union address warning him to remove reference to the Niger uranium information because it was bad. Hadley “forgot” and Bush used the reference in the speech. Then Hadley must have “forgot” again because he himself referenced the bad information in a Chicago Tribune opinion article a few weeks later. The Bush Administration continues to maintain that there were British sources who indicated that Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger, none of which were ever cited specifically by the Bush Administration or the Butler Report, which nevertheless maintains that Iraq was five years away from obtaining a nuclear device if all UN sanctions were to be lifted immediately.

   Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose testimony was “the principal basis,” in the words of a Newsweek report, of the administration’s claims that Al Qaeda was working in and with Iraq, was full of shit and everyone knew it. The Defense Intelligence Agency report in February 2002 concluded that he was “intentionally misleading the debriefers.” A January 2003 CIA report came to the same conclusion. The Bush Administration used the bad information anyway, including specifically referencing al-Libi in Colin Powell’s address to the UN Security Council in February of 2003.
  
  Curveball. “Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year,” reported the L.A. Times. Committee Chairman Pat Roberts told NBC's Tim Russert that "Curveball really provided 98 percent of the assessment as to whether or not the Iraqis had a biological weapon." The U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s WMD programs was largely based on this informant’s testimony while in German custody. The L.A. Times reports the German intelligence (BND) people who worked with him considered his testimony suspect. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst. The story continues, “More problematic were the three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's story. Two had ties to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds. The most important, a former major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was deemed a liar by the CIA and DIA. In May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in U.S. intelligence databases.” The controversial October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate was based "largely on information from a single source — Curveball," the presidential commission (Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction) concluded. On February 8th, 2003, U.N. Team Bravo raided one of Curveball’s sites and found out his description of the site was unambiguously false.    

   The creation of the OSP. The Office of Special Plans (“Special” as in “Special Olympics”) was headed by Douglas Feith, a neoconservative militant with close ties to Israel. The office’s job was to sort through information and find the stuff that implicated Iraq and use it, or at least look at it really, really hard after the CIA had discarded it and make really, really sure there might not be a tiny little kernel of truth to it.  

   His law office does most of its business with Israel. Feith has advocated a hard line in Israeli positions as consistent with her “moral superiority” over the Arabs. For instance, he criticized the Camp David Accords because they required Israel to weaken itself by surrendering “Judea and Samaria” to the Arabs.

   This guy is an old-school Biblical zealot convinced of the racial superiority of Israelites as related to him personally by the Living God in a little tête-à-tête he just had with the big guy in a tent in the Sinai Desert.

   According to Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack Gen. Tommy Franks called Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” referring to bad intelligence he fed the military.

   The BBC reported in March of 2005 that “The Bush Administration made plans for war and for Iraq’s oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC’s Newsnight has revealed.” The Guardian Unlimited reported in July of 2003 that “[the OSP] surveyed data and picked out what they liked,” quoting Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department’s intelligence bureau. “Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to talk about it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended.”

   The American Prospect reported in its November 2005 issue that, “based on two-dozen interviews with former intelligence officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department…From 2001 on, [the CIA’s] covert operatives were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line.”

   In the first few days of October of 2005 President Bush said on his Saturday radio address that Iraq had 100 battalions of battle-ready soldiers. By the following Thursday, in his television address, it was 80 battalions. The very next day, General George Casey, who oversees US forces in Iraq, said that there was only one battalion ready to fight independently of US forces.

   George “Slam Dank” Tenet oversaw a CIA program that supposedly told the president there were WMDs in Iraq. All of the evidence was wrong. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom a year later.

   Paul Bremer, the master of the Coalition Provisional Authority that “lost” 9 billion in Iraqi reconstruction money and an unknown amount of oil that was pumped out of Iraq’s wells while the meters were broken, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom a year later.

   ABC polling shows that a solid majority of people believe Bush intentionally misled the country about Iraq, and Ipsos and Zogby polling in November of 2005 showed that, by a margin of 53% to 42%, George W. Bush should be impeached if he lied about the war in Iraq.

   Oh, but the Republicans have no problem with the status quo. Let’s get a little selection of what they said about a far smaller conflict and one in which we had the support of NATO (Kosovo):

   President Clinton is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces aout how long they will be away from home.
                    Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.
                      Karen Hughes speaking for George W. Bush

You can support the troops but not the president.
                    Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.
                    Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

Do you think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo.
                    Tony Snow, FOX News, 3/24/99

And other great quotes here.

   This president is a bungler and a war criminal and a bad liar. His stooges in congress are blood-soaked hypocrites. This dry-drunk was convinced Iraq had a nuclear weapons program because of unnamed sources, and he was dead-sure Iraq had chemical or biological weapons, because British and American intelligence told him Saddam was being evasive and if he had a program he could have biological or chemical weapons within weeks.

   That’s because chemical weapon technology is WWI stuff that Botswana could manufacture. Nerve agents are WWII technology that is similarly easy to manufacture. Any intelligence estimate of any nation on earth could end with “nerve agents might be created within weeks of the start of a chemical weapons program.”

   The bottom line is that the U.S. and British governments had nothing. Bush deliberately used bad intelligence to justify a war he had long ago decided was necessary. For this he should be impeached.