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.

From the fuzzy gray realm of “everybody is equally wrong” comes Michael Madigan, writing for the Chicago Tribune.

   I find it ironic that a man can criticize both George Bush and Ted Kennedy for not standing for anything. That’s quite a feat. That pretty much covers it.

   Mr. Madigan is one of those cranky independents who sees all sins as being equal. He also has a short memory. Ted Kennedy was advocating universal health care back in the days of Jimmy Carter, but because Carter was such a centrist he refused to go along with Kennedy’s initiatives and ended up angering Kennedy so much he ran against Carter in the democratic primaries in 1980 and split the Democrats. Kennedy has been an advocate of workers’ rights, a robust Education Department, and minorities’ rights for decades. He has been the lion the left wing of the Democrats for over a generation, which is why conservatives hate him so much. They bring up Chappaquiddick every other time they mention his name. As per usual conservative debating standards, they usually insult him personally in some way instead of arguing his ideas. BTW, if you’re looking for people with a bad driving history, look no further than the White House. Our sitting president and vice president both have drunk driving convictions on their record, and the first lady ran a stop sign when she was in high school and killed a classmate, a crime that went, strangely, unprosecuted. Kennedy’s “crime” was not calling the police after the accident, as he first tried to rescue his passenger and then called his lawyer. He pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

   Madigan also notes that conservatives haven’t been big proponents of small government lately. That’s an understatement. Nixon’s federal spending, probably because of a war he sought to prolong instead of withdraw from, was huge. Reagan presided over a congress that doubled the national debt in eight years, largely because of his administration’s direction to slash taxes and maintain massive defense spending: Reagan actually asked congress for a little more money they even they were willing to spend.

   The elder Bush was more of a fiscal conservative, but his son and the Republicans in congress have spent money like Paris Hilton on a shopping spree, angering both liberals and fiscal conservatives.

   I question how much of the Republican Party is actually devoted to conservatism anymore. Fundy Christian conservatism, maybe, but fiscal conservatism? I think not. They haven’t been real advocates of that in over a generation.

   One thing conservatives have been is a strong supporter of is imperial hegemony. Eisenhower and Nixon used the CIA like their own personal assassination squad. Ike tossed the democratically-elected governments of Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 when those governments became hostile to U.S. business interests. Nixon did the same in Chile in 1973. Nixon also used the CIA to torture, capture, and assassinate Viet Cong and then intimidate the FBI, which eventually cost him his job. Reagan used the CIA to finance militia groups in every Central American country in the eighties, with the goal of installing friendly regimes. Financing and training rebel groups like the contras operating in and against a foreign power is an act of war, as the UN ruled, but the Reagan Administration dismissed the ruling. Financing and training death squads that deliberately executed civilians and erased entire villages, like in Guatemala and El Salvador, is a war crime, as the UN ruled, but America again ignored the findings, with the possible exception of a few newspapers like the L.A. Times.

   Look at the dark history of any Central or South American nation and you will find the same, sad pattern stretching back for generations: anti-U.S. government toppled by U.S.-financed rebellion. Pro-U.S. brutal dictatorship financed by the U.S., as well as World Bank loans. Famous example: Manuel Noreiga was on the CIA payroll in the eighties, even though he stole his elections and was a drug-runner for decades. Saddam Hussein’s trial is eerily reminiscent of Noreiga’s trial: the dictator we once financed became unnecessary, so we removed him from power and had him prosecuted.

   Don’t get me wrong: America does occasionally punish dictators for human rights violations and send troops to foreign countries for noble reasons. The U.S. has intervened, on a small scale, several times in Haiti and Liberia to safeguard civilians in a chaotic, war-torn environment. Clinton sent bombers to stop Slobadon Milosevic in Serbia in the late nineties and he sent 15,000 marines to safeguard UN food shipments from predatory warlords in starving Somalia. The Grenadan government was killing dissenters, which (somewhat) justified the U.S. invasion under Reagan.

   My point is that these human rights invasions are small efforts in countries where there is no real U.S. interest. 10,000 marines here. 20,000 marines there. Never has the U.S. mounted a full-bore invasion to liberate a country from an oppressive leader. Not once. Never in our history. Not when Wilson saw the imperialist axis powers start WWI for naked territorial gain. Not when FDR saw Germany start WWII and begin to slaughter civilians. Only when we were attacked and our allies began to weaken did we jump in a world war.

   We did nothing when Pol Pot quietly locked the doors to his country, turned around, and slaughtered millions of his own people; nothing when Indonesia exterminated East Timor; nothing when Papa Doc Duvalier went berserk in our own backyard; nothing when Pinochet (our own Frankenstinian experiment) crushed his country into submission; nothing when Idi Amin destroyed the opposition in Uganda in the 1970s; nothing when Robert Mugabe degenerated into a brutal murderer a decade later.

   I could go on, but you get the idea. Only when U.S. interests are at stake does the U.S. decide to selectively enforce U.N. standards and bring up human rights issues as justification for action. The U.S. did nothing when nations bordering the Congo invaded that country and tried to topple the government, even after the peace accord signed in South Africa in 2002. The U.S. did nothing when Somalia attacked Ethiopia in the Ogaden War of 1977. The U.S. response when Eritrea was invaded by Ethiopia in 1998? Zzzzzzzzz…

   When Iraq invaded Kuwait, however, there was no delay in the U.S. and European response. We wouldn’t let half the Middle East’s oil reserves fall into the hands of man who admired Joseph Stalin. Oh, and, by the way, we had a sudden concern for international law and the poor, helpless civilians of a far-away nation.

   Not really. We just wanted a friendly government in control of that sweet, sweet crude. The supply must not stop. The U.S. needs oil like a heroin junky needs a hit. If the prices of oil even just go up it puts a massive inflationary pressure on the economy. It makes us noticeably poorer.

   This has been the case for generations, and it has made U.S. foreign policy a drug slave to the whims of oily, Middle-Eastern sheiks, shahs, emirs, and other dusty tribal despots. It has poured trillions of dollars into the coffers of Islamic fundamentalists, dissolute dictators, and violent Arab sectarians. It has cost us two wars and endless military financing to keep Israel safe. It has earned us the revulsion of every terrorist cell on Earth, as we use Israel as a military base and political colony and we go to bed with every brutal king who promises us access to the foundation of our economy: sweet, sweet crude.

   It is long past the time when we should have an Apollo-like program to find alternative energy sources. It will save us trillions of dollars over the next few generations. It will get us the fuck out of the Middle East.

   If we had simply spent, in the eighties, the hundreds of billions of dollars that we’ve spent in two wars in Iraq in the last fifteen years on research into alternative energy, we would now all be driving cars that run on starlight and dreams.

   Instead we get pilot programs like the ones that Bush provides: a pittance into alternative fuels. A program to use hydrogen-powered cars whose hydrogen fuel is made by oil-fired power plants. Drilling harder, deeper, and longer. Drill ANWR. Drill the coasts. Don’t raise fuel-efficiency standards on cars.

   As long as there is money in politics this will be the United States of Exxon. But money in politics is another issue. An issue that will be coming more and more plain as Abramoff and Scanlon cuts deals and squeal on every government official they’ve ever bribed.


  

  

And so it continues.

   The Chicago Tribune, in its never-ending quest to justify the invasion of Iraq long after the initial reasons were proved wrong, produced yet another justification for a bloody war that has killed 2,100 servicemen and women and cost 250 billion and counting.

   This is the “liberal” media at work: a vile collection of apologists and crooked historians quickly scurrying back to the history books to dig up every mention of any reason to invade Iraq besides the huge, looming one that proved so utterly false. In the words of Bill Frist: "I'm not sure that's the major reason we went to war," he told NBC television's Today Show."

   Disgusting. Deeply, deeply perverted.

   This is modern Republican Party: a syphilitic alliance of moral perverts lying loudly and publicly, in front of millions, trying to convince their head-fucked-into-Wonderland base that “we never lied” while they continue to bungle foreign policy like a band of angry drunks, loot the treasury like 19th-century robber barons, erode the gears of democracy by stuffing the Appellate and Supreme Court with rabid, fundy ideologues, gerrymander democrats out of existence, and seize control of the voting apparatus in every swing state in the union. If you are not a member of their base they are not speaking to you, because by now you have already caught them ripping up the floorboards and knocking down the walls in the House of Democracy.

   It must be hard when most of your base is strapped down in a mental ward somewhere on a slow drip of Thorazine, so addled from a lifetime of hallucinations that they can no longer function in a civilized society, barking like a dog and trying to chew their way through the restraints.

   It must also be hard when at least half the country not only disagrees with you, but is convinced you’re a liar on top of that.

   But the Patriotism Well never runs dry, and it is, as Mark Twain said, “the last refuge of scoundrels.” Enter Max Boot, one of the few remaining conservatives brave enough to publish in the L.A. Times.

AND THE DEMOCRATS wonder why they are considered weak on national security? It's not because anyone doubts their patriotism. It's because a lot of people doubt their judgment and toughness.

   Actually a lot of republicans have questioned democrats’ patriotism, Max, in case you haven’t listened to Limbaugh bray that “leftists want this country to fail, they are invested in this county’s failure.” Or Sean Hannity saying that liberal hates this country.

As if to prove the skeptics right, Democrats have been stepping forth to renounce their previous support for the liberation of Iraq even as Iraqis prepare to vote in a general election. Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, John Murtha — that's quite a list of heavyweight flip-floppers.

   And so the administration finds another willing puppet. The same old, tired argument: dems voted for the war when they thought Iraq had WMDs and was going to use them but now they think the war wasn’t such a good idea; what a bunch a flip-floppers!

   And the regurgitated, year-old talking points of the Republican National Committee continue: the dems are drifting into “Howard Dean-George McGovern territory.” Howard Dean, what an extremist!

   And the unearthed comments of Bill Clinton in the nineties saying that he thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs.

   And the false analogy, comparing Iraq to WWII.

   Tired. Deeply, deeply tired. Its time to gather the conservatives in this country up, take them behind the barn, and put them down. Come back and tell little Jimmy that sometimes conservatives get tired, and old, and they need to go to another place where they’ll be happy. Buy a new conservative. Jimmy will soon forget.

   Bill Clinton wasn’t so convinced of Iraq’s WMDs that he took us to war. Bill Clinton didn’t doctor intelligence. Iraq is a far, far cry from WWII. These are things that every teenager knows.

   But Max and the other hypnotists of the conservative press and government continue to transmit disinformation to a section of the populace that is, incomprehensibly, still completely unaware that the republican leadership of this country has been caught in more lies than Richard Nixon.

   This is the modern Republican Party. Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan, who knowingly financed terrorists and death squads in Central America. Who fell asleep in his own cabinet meetings. Who told so many false anecdotes the press just held him to a lower standard of truth. George H.W. Bush, who oversaw the Central American butchery and helped cover it up by pardoning the administration officials he worked with who were under indictment. George W. Bush, war felon and serial liar.

   And through it all the usual domestic incompetence, tax breaks for the rich, slashes to welfare, handouts to corporations and cronies. Too numerous to mention in my little blog.

   For 23 of the past 35 years, that has been the U.S. Executive Branch. Ugly. Ugly beyond comprehension. But, amazingly, like a bear with six slugs in it that won’t go down, the Republican Party continues to wrestle with democrats for control of the country--and they are winning.

   As the other nations of the world stare in horror and mutter “What the fuck is wrong with them?” the Christo-Corporate American Empire thrashes about the world like a bull in a china closet and bites itself as it foams at the mouth.

   It’s illegal to own a dildo in Alabama. The Republican Party platform of Texas and North Carolina advocate punishing homosexuals. The party in power regularly transmits inchoate messages to the masses through a bullhorn. Wide-eyed, slightly disheveled republican congressdroids periodically march in front of a camera and reveal themselves to be completely detached from reality. Millions of equally vacant people, those who receive their information from fundy Christian preachers and the Drudge Report, regularly re-elect these zombies and angrily denounce (amongst themselves) foreigners and freeloaders while repeatedly and loudly praising their savior, their country, and their well-polished gun.

   They reverently remember the soldiers who died for their freedom in Vietnam (?). Any U.S. soldier fighting any foreign war is automatically fighting for their freedom. Any deviation from the rules of capitalism is socialism, which is identical with “bad.” It is actually used as a perjorative that deserves no explanation in the MSM.

And the Christo-Corporate American Empire thrashes about the world like a bull in a china closet and bites itself as it foams at the mouth.


  

  

Never let it be said that I am a close-minded person. I’ve read both Ann Coulter’s books. Both of Sean Hannity’s books. In fact, I absorb more right-wing lies than a Chicago city landfill. FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, you name it, I read or listen to it regularly.

   I surf the “conservative” blogs, though if those are indicative of the “conservative” movement, they are in all sorts of trouble.

   But first, a short diversion. I remember being stunned when O.J. was acquitted in 1995. As in, what motley collection of inbreds could’ve acquitted that guy? Then I saw the jury. Of course. Reverse racism. The blacks of L.A. getting some kind of “revenge” on the L.A.P.D. who have been beating them like Rodney King for years.

   Then I found out about how the evidence was presented in the case. How uneducated most of the jury was. How they didn’t understand DNA evidence. Then I thought maybe they were simply ignorant.

   That’s how I thought of conservatives until recently. That’s partially how I think of them still. But there are no simple answers to the question of the strange behavior of millions of complex people.

   When I went surfing the conservative blogosphere recently I visited a number of sites. Many of them seemed to been written by the editors of the American Spectator. Some of them were worse.

   First were the mods. The Andrew Sullivans, if you will. When I first read his site I thought he was a liberal. Honestly. Of course, I’ve heard about him on TV, and he frequently doesn’t come off so well.

   Then there were the fiscal conservatives. They seemed almost as disgruntled with the spending habits of Bush and the Congress as liberals. They gripe endlessly about taxes. ENDLESSLY. They are deeply suspicious of where taxes go. Government is pretty much all pork to them. One particularly sterling example of humanity mocked the idea that his minimum-wage restaurant employees need fiscal breaks.

   Then there were the cultural conservatives. That’s actually not really what they are, but that’s how the MSM would categorize them. My buds at Little Green Footballs are a prime example. I don’t know what their political philosophy is besides U-S-A! U-S-A! They seem to simply swear fealty to the President and have an abject hatred of “libruls,” including Howard Dean, congresspeople, the goddamned librul media and the vast majority of the university professors in the country, all champaigne-swilling limousine libruls, to be sure. They seem to be entirely directed by the whims of the Republican National Committee’s direction, which may explain their utter lack of a coherent political position. They spout vitriol and counter contrary arguments and facts with…more vitriol. They are willfully ignorant. You can explain the simple truth to them, slowly and carefully, and they will cover their ears and go “lalalalalalalalalalala, I can’t hear you, lalalalalalalalala…”

   They don’t seem to care about other opinions, other countries, other people. The underlying message is “Fuck everyone but me.” I don’t want to pay taxes cause it’s my money. I’ll take care of myself and the government and everyone else can take care of themselves. And if I knowingly pay wage slaves an unlivable wage, well fuck them.

   The assembled opinion of the vast majority of world leaders against us? They’re a bunch of crooks and despots anyway. The whole UN is crooked. Remember that oil for food scandal? Crooked. Eighty percent of Iraqis want us to leave? The statistic must be bullshit, because it’s not what I want to believe. A hundred thousand Iraqi civilians dead? The statistic must be bullshit, because it’s not what I want to believe. Racism in the wake of the Katrina Hurricane? Nah. U.S. Military torturing suspected terrorists? Good.

   They don’t argue using reason. I’ve wandered into some of these sites armed to the teeth with information and expecting a vicious logical war only to step off a cliff into a realm where logic has no place, like wandering into Bhutan with millions of Euros and finding out that their economy is based on barter. I look around, awestruck, at the vast space where reason, discourse, goodwill, and science are supposed to be. Instead, there is only a chill darkness, with the occasional burning star of xenophobic hatred. Echoes that should be full-formed thoughts pass through this space, murmuring of how we should all be reverent towards our proud men and women in the armed forces, or how speaking against our dear leader in a time of war is treason.

   I quickly escape the algid depths of neo-fundy thought. If there were justice in this country the FCC would napalm those sites and arrest all contributors to be sent to re-education camps surrounded by razor wire and armed guards with dogs. There they would be waterboarded all day with an “interrogator” saying “What’s your opinion of torture now? What’s your opinion of torture now? What’s your opinion of torture now?”
Then they would be kept up all night with blaring music and forced to stand all day as we doused them with ice water and cranked the thermostat in the room down to 45 degrees Fahrenheit. And after a few months of this they would all be dead because that’s what happens to people when you treat them like this.

   These people are criminals. They are simply sociopaths. They have no concept of other people even existing at all. They are fueled by blind hatred. They are not safe or productive members of society, they are predators who take from others and endeavor endlessly to get more than they give. They are a dangerous bone-cancer that is gobbling up healthy cells in the body politic and threatening to kill the host. They are a mutant, motley collection of gun-fetishists, unrepentant segregationists, and Terry Schiavo-brain-dead, morally inbred thugs “knee-walking drunk on NeoCon corn liquor, willing to beat the teeth out of old women and children for the greater glory of the House of Bush.”

   My own words seem to be failing me today, so I must resort to some vintage Driftglass.

Yet another vile missive from Victor.

   I think that if I ever actually met Victor at a cocktail party I would beat him like a dog with mange. I am honestly that tired of reading his hideously tendentious articles.

   This particular one is so filled with lies that I wonder if he sat down with that intention in mind or if he is so disconnected from reality that this is a true reflection of the furniture of Hanson’s mind: chairs with three legs, tables nailed to the ceiling, and paintings hung upside-down.

   AT first I think that perhaps Victor’s medication is finally kicking in, as he gives a summary of Clinton’s career that lurches its way towards being truthful, with only the occasional stumble:

Bill Clinton frustrated Republican critics. He passed welfare reform, waged a pre-emptive war against Slobodan Milosevic without either the approval of Congress or the United Nations, and reined in federal spending. And so, anguished conservatives had a hard times proving that, despite these accomplishments, he was a tax-and-spend bleeding heart.

   Keep going, Victor. Almost, you pustulent, scabrous monster. Your burbling food-orifice almost mouthed the truth: Bill Clinton was a judicious, centrist president and the Republicans hated him just for being a Democrat. Say it. SAY IT!

   Of course, the Evil Victor hasn’t quite given up his control of the food-orifice yet. The Evil Victor tosses in that little barb trying to equate the Balkans with Iraq. Nevermind that the war was conducted with the authorization and participation of NATO, that no US ground forces were ever used, that Slobodan Milosevic said he would and then tried to destroy the KLA and conquer Kosovo. That the war lasted six weeks. That we won with almost invisible casualties. That every European government was grateful for our participation.

   The problem is Victor Davis Hanson can’t stop lying, even when he’s trying to be fair. He goes on to completely lose track of reality:

In the same sort of way, a detested-by-the-left George W. Bush has driven Democrats even crazier.

   You noxious, raunchy cur. You wouldn’t tell the truth if you were rendered to Syria and beaten with cables. Your blood-soaked fore pincer just won’t write the truth. Democrats and independents don’t hate Dubya because they’re partisan. They hate him because he is perhaps the worst president in the long, sad history of this nation, and most of them have been bad. In fact, let’s diverge a little bit. Let’s take a look at what 80% of historians had to say in a recent survey about W, who they consider to be one of the worst presidents in history:

I think the presidency of George W. Bush has been generally a failure and I consider his presidency so far to have been the most disastrous since that of Ronald Reagan--because of the unconscionable military aggression and spending (especially the Iraq War), the damage done to the welfare of the poor while the corporate rich get richer, and the backwards religious fundamentalism permeating this administration. I strongly disliked and distrusted Reagan and think that George W. is even worse.

Actually, I think [Bush’s] presidency may exceed the disaster that was Nixon. He has systematically lied to the American public about almost every policy that his administration promotes.

Bush is perhaps the first president [since McKinley] to be entirely in the ‘hip pocket’ of big business, engage in major external conquest for reasons other than national security, AND be the puppet of his political handler. McKinley had Mark Hanna; Bush has Karl Rove. No wonder McKinley is Rove’s favorite historical president (precedent?).

Although previous presidents have led the nation into ill-advised wars, no predecessor managed to turn America into an unprovoked aggressor. No predecessor so thoroughly managed to confirm the impressions of those who already hated America. No predecessor so effectively convinced such a wide range of world opinion that America is an imperialist threat to world peace. I don 't think that you can do much worse than that

Bush is horrendous; there is no comparison with previous presidents, most of whom have been bad.

He is blatantly a puppet for corporate interests, who care only about their own greed and have no sense of civic responsibility or community service. He lies, constantly and often, seemingly without control, and he lied about his invasion into a sovereign country, again for corporate interests; many people have died and been maimed, and that has been lied about too. He grandstands and mugs in a shameful manner, befitting a snake oil salesman, not a statesman. He does not think, process, or speak well, and is emotionally immature due to, among other things, his lack of recovery from substance abuse. The term is "dry drunk". He is an abject embarrassment/pariah overseas; the rest of the world hates him . . . . . He is, by far, the most irresponsible, unethical, inexcusable occupant of our formerly highest office in the land that there has ever been.

This president is unique in his failures.

   Each paragraph was a separate historian, by the way.

   I bring this up because Victor is also a historian, albeit also a slatternly intellectual whore. I thought it might be refreshing to get the majority report in the case of Historians v. Bush.

   But I have taken a large sidestep. Back to the vile missive.

   Take the economy. In Bush’s first term the president ballooned the federal deficit. But that red ink wasn’t because of too little money coming in…No, the real culprit was overly liberal federal spending…The president did not veto a single spending proposal.

   Thus we get Vile Victor’s first frame. Most conservatives hate spending. At least, that is, they hate spending when it’s coming from a Democrat. When a Republican does it, they’ll emit a little whimper and essentially wait for five years or so to really complain about it. They’ll wait for the Preznit’s JAR to drop below 40 then they’ll jump ship like rats.

   I might add to Victor’s last sentence that Preznit Drinky’s little minions have been so obedient that he hasn’t vetoed a single bill of any kind. The Republican Party has locked down every branch of government for four years and kept every single Republican politdroid saying the same thing, voting for the same bills, no matter how criminal or disastrous.

   Even the speakydroids in the media have been functioning perfectly. There is a reason I call Sean Hannity Talking Points. Every single day for the last three years I have been listening to him he has echoed the position of the Republican National Committee on every issue. Then it got creepier. I got a hold of some of the RNC DC Talkers Talking Points and caught Hannity reading off of them. Word for word. Over and over. Then he decided to take it to the next level and I caught him advocating positions a day or a week ahead of their release in the news via some Republican senator or think tank.

   There is no doubt that Sean Hannity has Tapped the Deep Well of Republoconsciousness. That he has a fibrous cable connecting his brain with The Mother Brain. That any individual that once bore the name Sean Hannity has been replaced with just another Borg. He is not a journalist. He’s not even a propagandist. He’s an orifice.

   But we digress again. To the rest of Victor’s missive:

Democrats have tried the “tax cuts for the wealthy” approach. But how is it that almost every American got some tax relief—and that most in the upper brackets still pay more than 50 percent of their salaries when federal, state, local, and payroll taxes are considered altogether?

   Here Victor falls back on his usual ploy of simply making shit up as he goes along. The reason I have so much contempt for the man is the reason I have so much contempt for Gingrich: he’s a historian. His job is (was) to evaluate the truthfulness of sources and accurately describe past events. He should know better. He’s been taught better. I guarantee that Victor didn’t write his doctor’s thesis by baldly lying like he does in all his articles. Somewhere along the way he simply decided he didn’t give a shit about the truth.

   First of all saying “Democrats have tried the “tax cuts for the wealthy” approach” and following that with the rest is essentially a non sequitor. As long as “almost every American got some tax relief” that somehow proves the tax cuts weren’t primarily for the wealthy. Secondly, his second sentence is completely untrue. Simply false. Not only that but it has never been true at any point in American history. Not only that but even if it was true it neither proves the upper classes are taxed heavily nor that the middle and lower class are taxed lightly. He doesn’t even do a comparative analysis of the tax burden of all the tax brackets. Nothing. Nada.

   If this essay were submitted to my by a high schooler as part of an English or Politics class I would flunk him. Not only are there lies buttresses every craven argument, but the logic doesn’t even follow. It actually hurts my brain to try and follow his warped logic.

The Democrats face the same sort of dilemma in regard to Iraq, even though the war is currently unpopular…privately, Democrats concede that while going to war may have been naïve or idealistic, it was not done simply out of self interest.

   Yup. This is another reason why I hate Vile Victor. He lies so frequently they pile up on each other and you have trouble finding out where one starts and another ends. Polls show that the majority of Democrats and even the majority of the public thinks that Preznit Drinky lied us into war, and this poll has been out and in the news forever, and Victor simple—guess what—makes shit up as he goes along.

   Maybe he meant Democratic congresspeople, though it is beyond the scope of virtually any argument to guess what your opponent really meant. But if he did mean that, then where is he getting access to these private conversations? And how about some quotes? No? Some kind of evidence? No? They why are you wasting our time?

And since gas prices skyrocketed after Iraq, Democrats can hardly use "No blood for oil" sloganeering. Since Israel got out of Gaza, so much for any claims of a surrogate war for Israel. And since U.S. troops left Saudi Arabia, so much for the argument that the administration is after perpetual hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

   I sit, stunned. Silent. Victor has left mere duplicity behind long ago. He is at peace now, safely swimming in a Technicolor ocean of commutation of conditionals. Logic is far, far away. Sleep, Victor. Sleeep.

As progressives, are Democrats cynically to say that Arabs, unlike Eastern Europeans, Asians or Latin Americans, aren't ready for democracy? As admirers of John F. Kennedy, are they now to complain that we need to deal with the world as it is--not as we dream it might be?

   Yes, Victor! Dream! Dream, you starry-eyed idealist! Your giant, conservative heart is just aching with love for Arabs, isn’t it!

At home, many supply-siders and libertarians charge that he is a big spender who is deluded for thinking the federal government can solve social problems by throwing more money at them.

   Thus the conservatives complain about the one, shitty thing this president has done for Medicare: the incredibly complex and ineffective but somehow still expensive Medicare Prescription Drug Plan. Never mind that this president has cut funding for food stamps, Head Start, after school education programs, and welfare in general.

But as George W. Bush oddly seems to be doing many things a Democrat might have done, his base supporters stay with him. They see progress in Iraq (a war most Democrats in Congress once voted for). They know that the economy is strong and that the deficit is starting to decline. And they have nowhere to go anyway.

   This shit pretty much Ipso Loquitor. I love “George W. Bush oddly seems to be doing many things a Democrat might have done.” I love how Victor reminds us that most Democrats voted for the war but says nothing about the lies they were told to get them there. I love how he mentions the “deficit is starting to decline” and doesn’t cite shit-all worth of numbers to show just how it is “starting” to decline.

Some still cry that the rich have become richer and the poor poorer, but there is little actual demand by Democrats for more taxes and more federal entitlements.

No real idea what planet he’s living on.

That's why instead of a real debate or an alternative agenda, we get more of the same old, same old: flushed Korans, federal blame for floods in New Orleans, or purported fibs by Lewis "Scooter" Libby--always on the outside chance that some misdemeanor might still turn into a Monica-like felony, and thus make up for Democrats' inability to provide a comprehensive alternative agenda.

   Yes, yes, yes, Victor. All lies. Stories of abuse/the Taguba Report? This does not trouble Victor. The FEMA debacle? Pah! Perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Libby and the maybe others? Merely “purported fibs,” my good man! And nothing approaching Lewinsky levels!

    Stunning. Baldly ridiculous. And proof positive that no matter how far down the sick path of minimization and ignorance you travel you will always have Victor Davis Hanson ahead of you. No matter how egregious the crimes of the present administration there will still be a quarter or a third of the population, including many apologists like Hanson, who will simply refuse to admit anything.

   You can’t use reason and logic to get profligate liars and stooges like these to admit the truth. You just have to gather the center of the political spectrum to your side and then leave the Victors of this country behind. There are sociopaths still saying that Drinky isn’t so bad. But the better half of our populace will be the ones who write his obituary.

   Righties are frothing with rage over Dean’s latest comments. If you are a thinking person this should be a good indicator that he’s saying something penetratingly truthful.

   He’s said the War in Iraq is not winnable. We should withdraw and support the Iraqi government as they handle the problem.

   I suppose there was a significant minority of people who were saying the Vietnam War was winnable. They still say that. That we should have stayed for generations if need be. 550 billion Y2005 dollars more could have been spent. Fifty thousand more dead soldiers. Two million more dead Vietnamese civilians.

   I’m distantly curious as to where the squealing point is for these warmongers. How much blood and treasure is too much to spend for a third-world country?  

   There is a feeling that if we leave now the country will collapse into anarchy. There will be civil war. Iran will intervene. Bad, bad things will happen.

   Eighty percent of Iraqis polled say they want the U.S. out now. Forty-five percent think it’s OK to shoot American soldiers. We’ve been there two years and the battle for their hearts and minds has been lost.

   Can you blame them? The only peer-reviewed study on the subject, done by the prestigious British journal of medicine The Lancet revealed that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war, mostly at the hands of U.S. bombardment. Cluster bombs bouncing in through people’s windows. The U.S. military laying bloody siege to cities like Falluja, cutting off water supplies to starve the populace and shelling hospitals that might be treating insurgents, in violation of Geneva Conventions. Commanders have admitted using napalm in a few instances, though the substance they use isn’t chemically identical to napalm, so they maintain that it isn’t illegal to use. Commanders have admitted that in Falluja they used white phosphorous rounds to soften enemy positions. White phosphorous is usually used in artillery shells to create light over a position. If it is fired into an enemy position it has other effects. White phosphorus burns on contact with air and adheres to wet or moist surfaces: any soldiers in those positions would have had their eyes and mucous membranes burned out of their skulls. The unlucky survivors would have had permanently painful and crippling burns the likes of which they could never recover from.

   Most civilized nations agreed to forgo the use of chemical weapons after World War One. But our nation has a history of weaseling out of troublesome treaties when our government thinks it has a straighter and clearer vision of justice than the rest of the world. See the Kyoto Protocol, the ABM Treaty, and the Geneva Conventions for the most recent examples.

   There are options on the table, as there always have been. Get UN peacekeepers into Iraq. Get NATO forces into Iraq. Withdraw bases to unpopulated areas. Withdraw bases to Kuwait. Set a timetable. Set goals and metrics for success that, once met, would lead to progressive troop pullouts.

   The administration has repeatedly dismissed these options. They insist on a blank check from Congress and an unlimited time frame. They refuse to set goals, metrics for success, or other public measures of success. They refuse to communicate with the American public in concrete terms about how close the war is to ending. As Rumsfeld said, it might be five years, it might be twelve years. It might be right before November elections next year.

   This arrogance is not surprising. This administration invaded on false pretenses and then proceeded to bungle the war, admitting that progress was not going as well as planned. Now they refuse to provide their constituents with a measure of how far we have come.

   Unforgivable. Impeachable. And the Republican-controlled Congress has dragged its feet on investigating even the most glaringly obvious “failures” of intelligence.

   First the administration said there were WMDs in Iraq. Then they claimed to have found them. Then they admitted they weren’t there and blamed the CIA. Then the President gave the outgoing CIA Director the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

   Curious, is it not?

   There is ample evidence the administration doctored the information. The PNAC letter. The Downing Street Memo. The testimony of dozens of current and former CIA officials in the Guardian, The Progressive, the L.A. Times, and other publications. The insistence of administration officials in using information after the CIA, the State Department, and the Department of Energy told them the information was bad.

   In response to damaging allegations the administration alternately accused the accusers of treason or lied their asses off. First they maintained they found the WMDs. Then they gave wildly differing accounts of the number of battle-ready Iraqi divisions. Cheney said the insurgency was in its “last throes.” Rumsfeld said it might go on for a decade. First they denied accounts of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Then the Taguba Report came out. First they said they weren’t torturing anyone. And then the news about secret CIA prisons, extraordinary renditions, and more horror stories from former prisoners backed up by witnesses and expert testimony.

   The documented abuse was just “a few bad apples.” Then the story about the government using doctors to aid in interrogation techniques, a la Dr. Mengele. The Justice Department’s efforts to restrict the definition of “torture.” The allegations of the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N., all who said they encountered many instances of abuse and torture and they were restricted from accessing much of the prisons. Amnesty International calling the U.S. extrajudicial jail system across Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force Base the “Gulag of our times.”

    Proponents of “The War on Terror” might dismiss this, saying that war is messy and torture is frequently justified. This position is immoral and illegal, but sadly common in America.

   What strikes to the core of this issue, however, is the administration’s deception regarding the reasons for going to war, all of which have been debunked by me and other news outlets. Plamegate. The aluminum tubes. Yellow-cake uranium from Niger. Traveling vans as chemical weapons platforms. Al-Qaeda links.

   All lies. Every single piece of evidence they produced as justification for an invasion was wrong. Not just one. Every single one. Every single one of them vociferously repeated by the administration long after their own coerced experts told them it was wrong.

   Many lies the public was too ignorant of or too unconcerned with to hold the administration accountable for. The Clear Skies initiative. The Healthy Forests initiative. The $1600 tax break for the “average” family. The surplus projections. Slightly increasing veteran’s benefits, but not increasing them in proportion to the amount of new veterans using them, then claiming they had massively increased veteran’s benefits. Initiatives to cut welfare money while passing massive tax cuts aimed primarily at the wealthy in a time of war. Gale Norton as Interior Secretary. Ann Veneman as Secretary of Agriculture. Stuffing every department of the Executive Branch with former lobbyists who advocated for companies that were now their responsibility to “monitor.” Denying any connections with Enron. Brown in charge of FEMA. The Terry Schiavo Bill. Appointing partisans to the Federal Appellate Court, then accusing Democrats of obstructionism and complaining that a record 96% confirmation rating was not enough. Billions of dollars of no-bid contracts to Halliburton. Endless efforts to undermine and destroy the SEC and the FDA. Endless handouts to corporations. Endless slight-of-hand with budgetary numbers. Endless, concrete promises to fund a 500 million dollar program to prevent mother-to-child AIDs transmission, No Child Left Behind, the DOE’s renewable energy programs, and a hundred other programs never enacted.

   Every Administration official, from the deliberately deceptive Labor Secretary (Elaine Chao, the anti-labor former board member of Clorox and Dole Foods) to the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, is criminally corrupt. But most people slept through the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Why should they pay attention now?

   War, that’s why. This they cannot hide, or blame on Democrats. As the trial of Scooter Libby proceeds, as Fitzgerald and another grand jury continue to investigate, as more and more information comes out about the lies of the administration before the war, this will get worse for them.

   The Abramoff/Scanlon Scandal isn’t going to help. Abramoff took 82 million dollars from Indian Tribes and used that money to line his pockets and the pockets of between twenty and sixty politicians, 98% of whom are Republican Congressmen, Senators, and aides. Bob Ney (R-OH) apparently advocated for Abramoff’s clients (the Tigua Indians) for the tidy sum of $30,000. Ralph Reed (former director of the Christian Coalition) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) is also involved. Abramoff convinced his clients to pony up 185,000 clams so he and DeLay could get their own little performance by the three tenors. From this source:

In the first ten months that President George W. Bush was in office, "GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration as they pressed for friendly hires at federal agencies and sought to keep the Northern Mariana Islands exempt from the minimum wage and other laws," the Associated Press reported (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-06-abramoff-bush_x.htm) May 6, 2005

'I hope you will keep my office informed on the progress of this initiative,' Bush wrote in a July 18, 1997, letter praising the islands' school plan and copying in an Abramoff deputy," the AP reported.

"At least two people who worked on Abramoff's team at Preston Gates wound up with Bush administration jobs: Patrick Pizzella, named an assistant secretary of labor by Bush; and David Safavian, chosen by Bush to oversee federal procurement policy in the Office of Management and Budget," the AP wrote.

You might remember Safavian as the Bush Administration official who was arrested recently.

   Abramoff is not alone. Since 2000 the number of lobbyists in Washington has doubled. This makes the House Banking Scandal look like a joke.

   Abramoff hasn’t even started to squeal yet. His court date is four weeks away. But the damning testimony is coming very, very soon.
  

  

Stop it.

   Whatever you have on John McCain, stop it. Whatever nude photographs, whatever information you have—stop making John McCain your little helper after you fucked him in South Carolina.

   This on the McCain Amendment from today’s New York Times:

The White House has threatened to veto any bill containing such a ban, but President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has been negotiating with its chief sponsor, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to find a compromise.

   Although I have little respect for a man who has spent the last five or ten years being ass-raped by the Republican Right and telling everyone that it actually feels good, any remaining respect I have for the Senator will be gone if he compromises. We’ll see if it even survives the House.

   I might add that Hadley is one of the nefarious architects of the “lie this country into war” strategy that worked so well in 2003. He was the head doctor in the Office of Special Plans operating room dedicated to adulterating U.S. intelligence, with Drs. William Luti and Douglas Feith assisting. He was the one who “forgot” to tell the President that he shouldn’t include the Niger uranium info he adduced in his State of the Union because the CIA sent him two memos before the State of the Union saying the Niger uranium info was bunk. Hadley also repeatedly claimed that Iraq had ties to Al-Qaida after the CIA warned him repeatedly that such charges were not backed by intelligence. A few weeks after the 2003 State of the Union Hadley, to remove any further doubts about his desire to make claims despite intelligence estimates, again repeated the claim in a Chicago Tribune editorial that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger.

   Also from this seminal article:

The Bush administration has previously said the ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment did not apply to Americans working overseas. In practice, that meant CIA employees could use methods in overseas prisons that would not be allowed in the United States.

   Am I taking crazy pills? How many times must this administration advocate torture before we, as a people, stand up and say “Whoa. This is America.”

   Proving once again that the line between 1933 Germany and 2005 America grows exceedingly thin, there’s always a justification and an apologist for Evil. We have to win the War on Terror! We have to use evil methods to do so! The ends justify the means! God knows we would never misuse torture!

   Ridiculous. I’ve been flogging the torture horse for a few days now just because the issue is so important. And unambiguous.

How Much Money?

We have spent $277 billion. That’s what’s been appropriated for this operation. We have $50 billion sitting on the table right now in our supplemental, or bridge fund we call it, in the Appropriations Committee. They’re going to ask for another $100 billion next year.

   That’s Murtha speaking, a quote I peeled off of thinkprogress.org. Did you know that the Marshal Plan was only 97 billion in year 1950 dollars? That Vietnam was 531 billion in Y2005 dollars? At our current level and spending rate this war is approaching the cost of the Vietnam War, and will exceed it in two years. It has already cost us half of that war in dollars spent.

   Disaster. Over and over again the evidence piles up that this preemptive, illegal war in Iraq is a disaster, even if we leave next year. Even if 2,100 dead and tens of thousands of American soldiers maimed means nothing to you. Even if 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians means nothing to you.

   I overheard Talking Points saying that Preznit Drinky’s* JAR is up to 48%. Try 45%, Misquote. And that is from the Rasmussen Poll which, as my friend Chris Bowers said, “records a higher number of Republicans in their polls than other outfits. Generally speaking, along with their practice of pushing out all undecideds, this largely accounts for the discrepancy between their results and those of other polls.”

   Even Gallup runs two or three points higher than other poll in Drinky’s JARs, a discrepancy I have no desire to explore.

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls…

Paging Mr. Delay…paging Mr. Delay…you’re wanted in THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL.

   This from my buds at the burntorangereport:

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll taken from December 1-4 shows that, if the election were held today, Congressmen Tom Delay would lose his CD 22 seat to an unnamed Democratic candidate. Here are the numbers from CNN's website:
QUESTION: If Tom DeLay runs for re-election in 2006, in general, are you more likely to vote for the Republican candidate Tom DeLay or for the Democratic Party's candidate for Congress?
Democrat49%Tom DeLay 36%

   I smell something, Mr. Delay…it’s…it’s….the smell of death.

   Right now the Bugman is shitting baby-sized bricks and popping hillbilly heroin faster than Rush Limbaugh on a bender. If you don’t think he’s aware of or cares about this poll you’re nuts. The Overlords of the Republican Corporatocracy realize that unless Delay beats the charges, kisses a thousand babies and then receives a small miracle from God he’s going down like W’s Job Approval Ratings. Time to jack up the terror alert level, boys!

      There are many issues in the news today that have two legitimate sides. In fact, the vast majority of them do. It is a distinct effort for your humble Bitterharvest to find issues to talk about, not because they don’t abound, but simply because I don’t like to bloviate about what is a debatable issue. Should Tookie Williams live or die? What about the Pentagon covertly publishing stories in Iraqi newspapers?

      There are many issues, however, where there are not two legitimate sides. The legitimacy of torture. The “liberal” media. Into these issues I wade with a bludgeon and rhetorically beat down and humiliate opponents, hoisting the corpses of their logical fallacies on a flagpole and staking the heads of their arguments next to the path to my city as a warning to all others who would dare to voice such noxious lies in public.

      My latest victim had the temerity to repeat the lie of the So Called Liberal Media, a lie they have whipped every last scrap of mileage out of in order to bully the Main Stream Media into remaining silent in the face of ridiculous lies or categorizing such lies as “opinion.”

      Historically, this may have worked, though the MSM has always been cowardly, introverted, and obsequious to those in power. Whipping the MSM for the Conservatives has always been, essentially, raising the pimp hand to beat down an already beat-down whore, just in case the bitch gets any delusions of running, tear-streaked and bruised, to the local police station to file charges and escape an endless life of slobbing the GOP knob for a ten-spot a turn.

      Raising the pimp hand yet again is one David Gelernter, who will, this time, face a Progressive Party police raid, complete with a Rodney King-style beating and a rendition to a warped little country Outside the Spectrum where he will be rhetorically tortured and scarred forever.

      David (I’m going through the Davids this week) had the courage to publish in the L.A. Times last week, a bastion of decency and excellent investigative reporting for many years now. I guess he’s necessary so there’s a balance between liberals and frothing-at-the-mouth-and-attacking-passerby conservatives, because God knows that’s so important.

      From David’s putrid article:

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, conservatives saw a country that was split about 50-50 between the left and the right, as it is today and will continue to be for a long time. But the country's main cultural institutions were nearly all liberal — making conservatives rage and despair. Things have now changed for the better, and technology has been the main enabler.

      That’s his thesis, kids. He puts it at the front of his paper, as all good sixth-graders learn. I hear that’s the reading level of most newspapers today. But on to the pith, if you will:

Take the news. Most major newspapers and hundreds of local ones, as well as the Big Three TV networks, remain liberal bastions. But blogs and other Web services, and cable TV and talk radio, have expanded the news. Conservatives were unable to take over existing institutions, so they invented new ones using groundbreaking techniques.

      AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I’m sorry. I momentarily lost my mind at the sight of a paragraph with nearly more lies in it than words, a freakish little journey into a writhing, slimy, Lovecraftian world of tentacled, many-eyed, anciently malevolent squid-things seeking to subvert the very laws of time and space. Much like a GOP convention.

      Whoooooo. Deep breath in. Hold. Exhale. It’s over. I’m back. Must deconstruct brain-destroying paragraph.

Most major newspapers and hundreds of local ones, as well as the Big Three TV networks, remain liberal bastions.

      In the words of Ace Ventura “Re-heh-eally?” I suppose he’s right. The Wall Street Journal is a bastion of liberalism and has been for generations. The New York Times was so skeptical about the war that the administration couldn’t get its point across. The Washington Times, whew, we won’t go there. And my own Chicago Tribune, well, let’s just say that just because the editors routinely write conservative tripe that I lambaste in this blog doesn’t mean that they aren’t a citadel of dreadlocked, pot-smoking, dirty-assed, barefooted 60s refugees.

      As far as the Big Three TV networks being liberal, well, I refer you to David Brock’s The Right Wing Noise Machine for the only use of actual, statistical studies to refute this shit. Shit, I might add, that Fucktard makes no effort to support with, you know, evidence.

But blogs and other Web services, and cable TV and talk radio, have expanded the news. Conservatives were unable to take over existing institutions, so they invented new ones using groundbreaking techniques.

      Yes, he’s right. When Dave says conservatives invented, apparently, “blogs and other Web services, and cable TV and talk radio” who can argue with the obvious truth?

      Important conservative scholars are scattered all over the country, like rhinos in zoos. Most universities have one or two. But sometime soon, a conservative think tank will offer a new type of Web service. (I say so because it's inevitable, not because I have inside information.) This new service will help those professors create high-quality online courses so that lots of conservative scholars can come together for the first time, electronically. The result will be a cyber university that presents an integrated, conservative world view.

It only took a few smooth operators to reveal the vast, untapped market for conservative talk radio. The same thing will happen with conservative cyber universities. When it does, watch out. The culture war will no longer be a liberal walkover.

      I beg to differ, idiot. Your scabrous kind will never be welcome in any institution that values reason and truth. If Dave wants to scurry off into a cyber-bolt hole and make a breeding warren with other damp, poisonous things that fear the light, fine. This, however, is a far cry from storming the world of light.

      David is a very special person in the Inferno of Bitterharvest’s imagination. He’s got a two-fer today. This is because he is one of the crawling, wormy creatures that lair at The Weekly Standard, much like David Tell. The Weekly Standard is a truly unique hole of decency and cleanliness, a place where the most shameless arguments find a home, as I wrote yesterday. You see, Gelernter, as Tell, wrote a filthy little piece defending torture also.

      Amazing. Vileness of this caliber is truly beyond offensive. It’s breathtaking. Let’s look at a selection from this work, shall we?

But of course you don't have to be "pro-torture" to oppose the McCain amendment. That naive misunderstanding summarizes the threat posed by this good-hearted, wrong-headed legislation. Those who oppose the amendment don't think the CIA should be permitted to use torture or other rough interrogation techniques. What they think is that sometimes the CIA should be required to squeeze the truth out of prisoners. Not because the CIA wants to torture people, but because it may be the only option we've got.

McCain's amendment is a trap for the lazy minded. Whenever a position seems so obvious that you don't even have to stop and think — stop and think.

      I’m disappointed in the Davids. Same first name, same rhetorical technique. Muddy the waters.

      The real “trap for the lazy minded” is anything ever written and published in The Weekly Standard, as only the truly stupid or morally inbred could have the mental ability or motivation (respectively) to believe the unbelievable filth that this publication extrudes onto the American consciousness.

Whenever a position seems so obvious that you don't even have to stop and think — stop and think.

      Translation: What are you going to believe, your own common sense or my tortured explanation? (Pardon the pun)

      David wheels out Levin’s 1982 torture piece, and reading David explain this to me is insulting. I’ve taught Levin’s childishly simple defense of torture. I certainly don’t need some Weekly Standard thug explaining it to me.

      The argument is simple: what if the government knows a terrorist knows the location of a nuke about to uncork in a populated area. He’s refusing to talk. Should we torture him? Of course, Levin argues, striking a blow for moral relativism and utilitarianism.

      The depths of conservative hypocrisy revealed in this deserve explication. Levin was one of those philosophers Christian Conservatives love to hate. His kind of moral relativism was decried by the pope not too long ago. Born again fundies hate utilitarianism.

      But David Gelernter is not a Fundy Conservative. He’s an East Coast Elite Conservative. His type doesn’t mix well with the unwashed masses they lead. He’s not born again. He’s probably an atheist. If he isn’t he sure argues like one. Jesus Christ wasn’t a moral relativist.

      But Levin’s argument deserves refutation. It is a somewhat irritating argument. It’s like some smart-assed fifteen-year-old’s response to the Ten Commandments. “It must be OK to kill sometimes, right? God commands people to kill in the Old Testament! See, you don't have to follow the Ten Commandments!”

      This is the difference between the spirit and the literal meaning of the language. Levin’s argument is flawed because the premise is flawed. The U.S. government essentially never knows what a terrorist knows. Usually, the U.S. government doesn’t even know whether or not a suspect is even a terrorist for sure. It is the rare exception when the military or CIA picks up a person they know is a terrorist with some command responsibilities. By “rare” I’m talking once a year.

      Neither the U.S. nor any other nation on earth has ever faced a situation like Levin’s premise. It is an extrapolation of the most questionable kind to say that we will ever face this exact situation. As McCain himself has said, if, God forbid, we should ever face that situation, the President could authorize whatever he needed to and would take responsibility after the fact. If it averted a nuclear holocaust no one would care. He would be a hero.

      Levin makes the same irritating mistake that many philosophers and economists do. They live in an airy world of ideas and mathematical models that frequently has little grounding in reality. To translate their intellectual constructs to a form that is actually efficacious you have to maul their model to such an extent that it rarely resembles its original form.

      Gelernter, however, makes a mistake that is more than irritating. His adulterated argument against the McCain amendment pollutes utilitarianism with political cynicism, using a high-school argument to conceal the fact that everyone involved already knows that a singular exception could be overlooked. It is the practice of torture that Gelernter is working to defend, as he essentially says:

…sometimes the CIA should be required to squeeze the truth out of prisoners. Not because the CIA wants to torture people, but because it may be the only option we've got.

      “Sometimes,” David? How frequently, hmmm? Whenever they suspect a captive has the needed information to avert a nuclear blast? How about when they think a suspect has information about someone who might have information about a suicide bomber who might kill a few dozen?

      This is the kind of wanton use of torture the McCain Amendment is designed to avert.

      Add David Gelernter’s name to the other apologists for Evil who infest the highest reaches of our government and media: David Tell, 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).

      These names deserve repeating.

Thank you, David Tell.

   Proof positive that morality doesn’t correlate with intelligence; proof positive that there is no shortage of apologists for indefensible behavior; proof positive that sickly, depraved muddy-the-water and slippery slope arguments still have a home at The Weekly Standard: all these things come together in the amazing person of David Tell.

   I think Tell woke up one day and said “I need to stretch my rhetorical abilities. I’m going to defend…torture!” Then he shambled downstairs to his desktop, poured himself into his chair, and tapped out his Ode to Brutality with a single, squamous finger. Leaned back, exhaled a putrid vapor, and said “that one is for you, Father Cheney. My loyalty is, as always, yours to command.”

   Tell writes in his apologia for Evil titled “Torture Logic” that the vote on torture might be “a teeny bit more complicated than that” Muddy the waters, Servant of Satan, muddy the waters. He goes on to explain that, if approved, the McCain Amendment might force Gitmo and Abu Ghraib to meet “exactly the same standards federal judges have cumulatively imposed, under the Eighth Amendment, on San Quentin and Leavenworth.” Detainees enjoying all the constitutional protections of –gasp--American Citizens!

   A vile slippery slope argument. David Tell, if alive in 1920, would have been arguing that giving women the right to vote would eventually lead to hamsters being given the right to vote. OH! Where will it end!?! His fellow shuffling, slurping Things from the Depths use similar arguments to shoot down gay marriage, i.e. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa), arguing that giving gays the right to marry will inevitably lead to “man on beast” marriage.

   Weak. Craven. And strongly stinking of moral decay and the panic of gangsters just caught with a body in the trunk.

   This, children, is how conservatism justifies torture: false analogies, the Masked Man Fallacy, moral cowardice, wanton cruelty, and arguments that extending any legal protection to prisoners will inevitably lead to known terrorists enjoying cable TV and massages in country-club prisons run by the U. S. of A.

   Safer simply to waterboard them. Forget the fact that there has historically been no way for detainees to prove their innocence (and, indeed, no burden of proof on the government to prove their guilt). These suspected terrorists have among their number people who were turned in by their neighbors, who have had no legal recourse, who have languished in jail for years with no attourney, no court date, and no few protections against torture other than the good word of the Bush Administration that it doesn’t torture people, despite what the Taguba Report says, despite the fact that Amnesty International has called these prisons the “Gulags of our times.”

   This is not brain surgery, ladies and gentleman. For the record, I would like to add David Tell’s name to the list of men below who opposed the McCain 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).

   These names deserve repeating.

   There’s an old adage out there: money can’t buy happiness. I always laugh whenever I hear some poor, ignorant slave bark this out with wide eyes and a tremulously incredulous voice. I imagine his master gives him a doggy treat every time he says this.
  
   I’ve found that money can buy pretty much anything in this world. I have no reason to believe that it can’t buy happiness, too. I’ve seen money buy Armani suits, cars that cost more than some people’s houses, politicians to make laws for the buyer, bodyguards, wives, mistresses, jewelry (to keep them both happy), small Central American armies, therapists, vacations, opportunity, admission to prestigious universities, even studies and papers written by intellectual prostitutes who sell the thesis to the highest bidder. Consider becoming a member of the Cato Institute’s board. Or start your own propaganda network, a la Roger Ailes.

   In my Chicago Tribune today we have another editorial of sterling intellectual pedigree, the gist of which is that money can’t buy happiness. Just look at all these lottery winners who pissed away 50 million dollars!

   I laugh when I see those shows and articles about lottery winners who blew money like MC Hammer and Mike Tyson. The real lesson to me has always been that you can bring the retard out of the ghetto, but you can’t bring the ghetto out of the retard. I’m surprised but not stunned when I read stories of trailer trash winning the lottery and losing the money. If only they had inherited that money instead of winning it they might have been raised in a good enough environment that they would at least have the wisdom to give control of their investments to a decent accountant. Do you think Paris Hilton handles her own money?

   This is an aside, however, to the conservative mythology that infects this country. I could ask a bunch of sixth-graders about this mythology and they would know what it is. Money can’t buy happiness. Rich people earn their money: “They’re the ones responsible for all this prosperity” (Neal Boortz). One person one vote. Capitalism is the most successful economic system on Earth and interfering with its operations, whether through regulating companies or taxing profits, results in unemployment, poverty, and generalized unhappiness. Daddy’s always right, even when he hits you because you’ve been bad. We don’t talk about what Uncle Larry does to us in the bathroom because we’re little whores who deserve it and Uncle Larry is an adult who knows better than us.

   I want to try it, for once. I’d like to see what this country looks like with no inherited wealth, with no vast inequalities in wealth, with no poverty and universal health care. I would like to see a country that tries something better.

   I’m not really talking about a state-run communism. I notice that the U.S.S.R. is always cited as the example of how that doesn’t work. Never mind that capitalism never worked very well for them, either. Never mind that China, with a modified kind of communism, is growing explosively.

   I’m talking about progressive values.

CHANGE OF TOPIC

Hahahahaha! In my little blogoworld I can make absolutely no effort to segue. All it takes is a large font. I’m not in a graduate English program anymore, bitches! You will obey BitterHarvest’s Laws of Composition!

   Mr. Krauthammer is one of my favorite least-favorite people. Despite the fact that if this were 1930s Germany he would have been one of the first to sign up for the SS, there’s something about Chuck’s voice that makes me feel better about being an American. There is no greater believer in the American Empire than a man I affectionately refer to as “the Hammer.”

   The subject of the Hammer’s beat-down in this morning’s Tribune was one of his usual gimps, the Palestinian People. The Hammer, like all Gawd-fearing conservatives, believes in Israel’s right to punish and humiliate any group of people who have even one miscreant in their midst. In fact, in a very Biblical sense, these Hammers of God believe that guilt is a physical thing slightly heavier than air that is emitted from people doomed to the Fiery Pits and it settles and adheres to anyone nearby. This explains both the belief in collective guilt and the excessive washing that I see displayed in the Jewish faith as practiced by the people of Israel.

   According to The Hammer the recent lull in explosive violence is due to the inspired leadership of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli people. He credits fences between Israel and Palestine as well (the Hammer loves the fences. He was and is a BIG BELIEVER that the fences salve the problems. Keep the clean from the unclean, if you will). Credit for the diplomacy and policing of the current Palestinian administration is nowhere. He does take a little time to give Yassar Arafat a kick in the ass, even though Arafat’s been dead a while.

   It would be nice if any American newspaper had anything but a massively pro-Israeli viewpoint in either the editorials or the news items. Try reading one of the Arab papers to the left. Links are provided. Visit them from time to time. Walk in another’s shoes. It’s good for you.

   We see the bias in the endless coverage of the aftermath of suicide bombers but nothing on the brutal policing of the Israelis. We see nothing of the effects of their artillery fire, bombs, and missiles on Palestinian civilians. Because of this most Americans understandably come to believe that Palestinians don’t suffer and die in this conflict. The Israelis are the perpetual victims.

   But what’s this? Even the Hammer provides some insight, from time to time! This intifada has “left more than 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians dead.” Hmmm. Palestinians are dying at a 3-to-1 ratio in comparison with the Israelis. Where are the pictures, Time/Newsweek/Chicago Tribune/U.S. News and World Report/New York Times/CNN/MSNBC? Where is the coverage of the true effects of this war?

   There is some simple math associated with this. Suicide bombers aren’t the ones being punished. Suicide bombers are notoriously good at both destroying themselves and killing five or ten or a hundred others with their own death. The way the ratio swings back to the Israeli’s favor is when the IDF hammers Palestinian militants and civilians in response to bomb and rocket attacks. When an American-made Apache piloted by the IDF sends a Hellfire missile up the tailpipe of a car containing a Palesitinian militant, destroying him and his driver, as well as a pregnant woman and a puppy on the nearby sidewalk.

   But this is just part of the “extremely effective campaign of targeted assassinations that ultimately induced their successors to declare a truce with Israel.”

   Call me civilized, but I always looked on assassination as a distasteful tool to be used as a last resort. The Hammer holds no such reservations. The Hammer realizes that in order to make an omelet, you have to break a few civilians.    
  

    I was listening to Don Imus beat Joe Lieberman like a diseased cur earlier today. I must say listening to Imus ask Joe four or five direct and pithy questions had the beautiful sound of a pealing bell to my oft-abused ears.

   Joe was for the war against Saddam. “Mistakes were made after the invasion.” Wake up Joe. The invasion WAS a mistake.

   Drawing down troops has to be due to the situation on the ground, according to Joe. Joe sees a lot of progress in Iraq. Imus said he’s talked to many journalists and they all say that the situation is not getting better. Joe says that entire world thought he had weapons of mass destruction, etc., a lie I and many others before me have repeatedly debunked. But what good was removing him?

   “Saddam was a mass murderer,” Joe solemnly reminded us. He supported terrorists (he paid money to families of suicide bombers, like many in Saudi Arabia do).

   Imus asked Joe what evidence do we have that Saddam worked with terrorists. Saddam convened conferences with terrorists after the Gulf War and maintained contacts. Really? How about some dates, times, and names, Joe?

   “I think it’s a profile in courage for me to come on this program today,” Lieberman says near the end.

   “With this nonsense of course it is,” Imus laughingly replied.

   Don Imus brings the pimp hand!

   I enjoy humiliating a man who won office by attacking his Republican opponent from the right (“You’re closer to Fidel Castro than Ronald Reagan!”). This guy has been carrying water for the GOP for too many years. He’s also not in agreement with some people that should know. Check this quote out from Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware:

I and some other journalists had lunch with Senator Joe Lieberman the other day and we listened to him talking about Iraq. Either Senator Lieberman is so divorced from reality that he's completely lost the plot or he knows he's spinning a line. Because one of my colleagues turned to me in the middle of this lunch and said he's not talking about any country I've ever been to and yet he was talking about Iraq, the very country where we were sitting.

   Speaking of the mess in Iraq, how many Iraqi troops are ready for mobilization? Check out this video of CNN’s Anderson Cooper pointing out more inaccuracies in the President’s most recent speech. The number is all over the map and has been for years. David Corn recently wrote a great article on this here. Why do I still have confidence that the troop withdrawal will begin next year? Mid-term elections, my friend. This war is an albatross around the neck of the administration and the GOP and they don’t care about public opinion until right before an election. Reich pointed this out on Hannity and Colmes, and he is rarely wrong on these matters.

   The continued stonewalling of the Republican-controlled congress, however, will not ebb next year. The unwillingness of Congress to initiate investigations is appalling. These gangsters apparently feel that Whitewater was a more important issue to the country than the “faulty” intelligence leading to the war, the disaster of the Bremer Occupational Authority (9 billion dollars gone), and the torture of prisoners across Iraq, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

   Hypocrisy hat tip to Duke Cunningham. He pled guilty to bribery charges and blubbered like a child on national TV, begging for forgiveness. This was after this typical Republican firebrand led House efforts to get a constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning, decrying flag burning on the floor as an affront to the nation. How about taking 2.4 million dollars in bribes, Duke?

   I love the Wall Street Journal. If ever I need positive proof of the presence of Evil in the world, if ever I lose my way and question if I am on the low road, all I have to do is look at the Wall Street Journal. If this journal is the voice of Wall Street this is incontrovertible proof that there’s something wrong with capitalism. The most recent piece of filth published by this snot rag appeared on the Editorial Page, a vile charge against Hugo Chavez: “In seven years he has a domestic record of human rights abuses, election fraud, property confiscations a la  Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, erosion of the independent judiciary, limits on press freedom and militarization.”

   Seeing as the editors adduce no proof of these allegations I don’t feel it’s necessary to adduce proof to my counterargument that every single thing they said is absolutely false. They go on to explain why they are angry Chavez is offering cheap heating oil to Massachusetts, one of the ways that Chavez has thumbed his nose at the Bush Administration.

   The real reason they’re angry is because Chavez has opposed U.S. free trade initiatives in the region for years, initiatives that would benefit U.S. and transnational corporations far more than they would benefit Venezuela. Most of these corporations have ample representation on Wall Street and in the Bush Administration. This is a partisan smear attack of the lowest quality.

   I don’t particularly admire Chavez, though he has enacted initiatives to help the poor of his country, which is why they admire him so much. Much of Central and South America has grown disillusioned with World Bank and Wall Street requirements for loans and prescriptions for economic growth. Chavez is merely the most flamboyant representative of this group.

   This is also why Pat Robertson suggested Chavez should be assassinated, which shows the unholy alliance between religious fundamentalism and the economic elite in this country. If Pat Robertson was really just teeing off on a dictator he would have chosen a truly brutal or repressive one like Kim il-Jung of North Korea or Niyazov of Turkmenistan.

   This disgusting alliance is the throbbing, fundamentalist heart of the GOP. These are the people who, while selectively targeting foreign leaders for invasion and vilification, choose to ignore the far more egregious examples. The reason is simple: they are not overly concerned with human rights violations; they are primarily concerned with geopolitical power. This is why they cite Iraq’s defiance of U.N. resolutions while ignoring the more numerous examples in Morocco and Israel. This is why they (now) are suddenly very critical of Saddam Hussein’s butchery of his civilians, while they ignore worse slaughter in Turkey. Years after Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against his own populace, Bush Sr. lifted sanctions on Iraq in 1989. Now we want to try him for war crimes based on these same events.

   It’s surprising what a few years will do to our opinion of a dictator’s oppression, isn’t it? When we needed Hussein as a counterbalance to fundamentalist Iran he was our best friend. Now he’s trash. As long as we need Turkey as an important ally in the Middle East you won’t see the Wall Street Journal lambasting their butchery of tens of thousands of Kurds in the nineties. As long as they feel the same way about Israel we won’t see exposés on Israel’s assassinations of militants, bulldozing of homes of suspected militants, oppressive policing of Palestinian roads and towns, and seizure of West Bank territory. The list goes on, and on, and on. Don’t take my word for it: google Morocco’s history, or Iran’s history under the Shah, or Indonesia’s genocide in Timor and elsewhere, or Uzbekistan’s current spate of brutality.

   These are the same people who, in the Nixon administration, decided that “peace with honor” meant the wholesale annihilation of millions of Vietnamese civilians. That August Pinochet would be a better ruler of Chile than Allende.

   These are the same people who advised Ford and Kissinger when they visited Indonesia and gave a green light to Suharto to begin the massacre.

   These are the same people who, as members of Ronald Reagan’s Administration, engineered his “Southern Strategy.” His refusal to embargo racist South Africa. His Central American policy. His invasion of Grenada and funding of the death squads of El Salvador.

   They are not pro-life. They are not “compassionate.” They are not concerned with democracy, life, fairness, or justice. They do not believe in a “Culture of Life.” They are “Conservatives.” They are the editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune. They are “Conservative” talk-show hosts and TV personalities. They are, sadly enough, the people who elected these monsters and who listen to these outlets of disinformation. They are the CIA. They are the U.S. military. They are the President of the United States.

   We, as Americans, must undergo an expiation of collective guilt reminiscent of Germany in the 1950s to begin the healing process. We must recognize what we have done wrong before we can ever prevent it from happening again.