Outside the Spectrum

Cave In

2007-05-27T18:35:00.000-05:00

You might be shocked to learn that democrats haved caved on the Iraq funding bill until September, though the leaders, as The Hammer pointed out, voted the right way. Did I not predict this when Nancy Pelosi, three monthes ago, told the dems in the House they would have to pas a funding bill sans deadlines if they couldn't pass the bill they were working on?

John McDumbass may think he can outflank Obama and Clinton to the right on this issue, but only a man with suspect arithmetic skills could think he could outflank a 2/3 majority of the country by taking the position of the extreme 1/3 and have it turn out to be a politically clever move. Arizona isn't exactly the reddest of the red states, either. I feel a little sorry for Arizonans, being treated like idiots by their senator (shit, Jon Kyl isn't the best, either).

Aaah, Republicans. When you go home this weekend, when leave office in a year and a half, the only thing in store for you is opprobrium.

More Torquemada

2007-03-27T15:54:00.000-05:00

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: What I know is that there began a process of evaluating strong performers, not-as-strong performers, and weak performers. And so far as I knew my chief of staff was involved in the process of determining who were the weak performers. Where were the districts around the country where we could do better for the people in that district, and that's what I knew. But again, with respect to this whole process, like every CEO, I am ultimately accountable and responsible for what happens within the department. But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That's basically what I knew as the Attorney General.

That was March 13th of this year. Of course, since then it has come out that Gonzales was at a meeting where these firings were discussed on November 27th of 2006.

“…was not involved in any discussions about what was going on” indeed. Also note, in the same USA Today article, “Internal e-mails disclosed by the Justice Department have indicated that Sampson worked closely with the White House in developing the plan for removal.” That would be Karl Rove, Harreit Miers, and maybe the president himself involved in firing prosecutors whose performance was hardly bad. And note the emails that indicated that a day after Carol Lam announced she would be pursuing Hookergate Kyle Sampson shot off an email saying that she was a “problem.”

This administration is rotten from crotch to crown.

U.S. Attorney Scandal

2007-03-20T16:03:00.000-05:00

Mr. Kyle Sampson, you DO indeed have “a real problem.”

Sweet baby Jesus. So many scandals, so little time. Kyle Sampson, who wisely resigned as soon as this scandal broke, is on the record in these emails asserting that the administration had “a real problem” with a US attorney who indicted and convicted Duke Cunningham (R-CA) of the biggest bribery case in US history and was pursuing an investigation into Hookergate, an investigation into crooked Iraq War contracts and hookers (quite a quid pro quo, eh?) involving high-ranking CIA officials. She announced the continuance of that investigation on May 10th. On May 11th Sampson indicated in his email that she was a “problem.” She was later fired.

Democrats (and some republicans) have responded with outrage and calls for an investigation and the ouster of Alberto Gonzales. Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Leahy has been adamant in his call for subpoenas of officials involved like Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. White House Counsel Fred Fielding just sent a letter to Congress saying that he would “permit” Congressional interviews of these people but that "Such interviews would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas.”

If I were a democrat on Capital Hill I would tell Fielding to stuff his offer and issue subpoenas. Democrats have already stated that they would insist on subpoenas and oaths, but now Senator Schumer sounds ambivalent, saying that he will “try” to make those things happen.

Presidential Screed

2007-01-29T23:11:00.000-06:00

Robert Parry of Consortium News has an excellent piece up on Alternet concerning the President’s State of the Union Speech. Some choice excerpts:

To heighten the fears of Americans, he again misrepresented the goals, capabilities and even the identities of the enemy. He blurred diverse and even antagonistic Muslim Sunni and Shiite groups, shoving them under the umbrella of "the Islamist radical movement."
"The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat," Bush said. "Whatever slogans they chant, when they slaughter the innocent they have the same wicked purposes. They want to kill Americans, kill democracy in the Middle East, and gain the weapons to kill on an even more horrific scale."

That last paragraph is quite a masterpiece of either boneheaded political thinking or deliberate deception. Shia and Sunni extremists hate each other: its quite stretch to call them “different faces” on anything except some ridiculously broad category of people, like “violent people” or “violent Muslims.” Then he calls them a “totalitarian threat,” which is ridiculous. Terrorists are not members of some massive, fascist industrial state like WWII Germany. They are brigands and religious extremists. But we know “they have the same wicked purposes. They want to kill Americans” blah blah blah. Right. And Hexbollah is such a threat because they bombed a marine barracks in Lebanon 23 YEARS ago. Most of our soldiers weren’t even alive when that happened.

This administration is an ongoing, never-ending, slow motion disaster. But there are those who support it still, though they number 28%, last time I checked. Glenn Greenwald has a ruinously effective post here about the likes of Bill Kristol. Have watched Greenwald do this for a year or more, I must say, it’s starting to look too easy for him, like watching Lennox Lewis whip Tony Tucker over and over.

The Syndicate

2007-01-28T10:28:00.000-06:00

When I and a few others say that this president is neglecting the so-called “War on Terror” this is what we mean. And this. Afghanistan and Pakistan spiraling out of control, the president actually drawing troops out of Afghanistan as this happens, worldwide terror attacks rising every year, etc.

Darth Cheney explains to the curious Newsweek reporter: “We are a criminal syndicate. I don’t know why Chuck Hagel has gone off the reservation, but our code of silence, as articulated by Ronald Reagan, our omerta, stipulates that we may not point out when a member of the family is lying, wrong, or doing something illegal.”

That is what is known as a code of silence, ladies and gentlemen. According to wikipedia, when someone "witnesses or is privy to the knowledge of an illegal or embarrassing act, but puts comradery, or loyalty to the 'unit' above informing the public or the proper authorities."

The Republican Party usually operates like a criminal syndicate, as I have written before. This is what I'm talking about.

Torquemada

2007-01-20T11:51:00.000-06:00

He’s just playing with you now. It’s funny, now, to him. In the words of Mcjoan, “willfully obtuse” to the point of being impeachable. In my words, insultingly coy. What kind of theater is it to ask a ridiculous liar like him questions at all?

Apologists and War

2007-01-20T10:39:00.000-06:00

Dinesh D’Souza has a particularly repulsive book out now, blaming 9/11 on liberals, of course. The reviewer at the New York Times Book Review rightly pans it as a “national disgrace” and calls D’Souza a “childish thinker.” I couldn’t agree more, though I’m sure the members of his political movement like good friend Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh will be happy to support his every putrid argument. If you would like to purchase this slurry shit of a novel, you can also get a deal on Jonah Goldberg’s masterwork Liberal Fascism: the Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton here. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Chicago Tribune for syndicating such an eminent scholar as Jonah Goldberg.

This stuff speaks for itself. I love this quote: “The legislation also prohibited some of the worst abuses of detainees like mutilation and rape, but granted the president leeway to decide which other interrogation techniques are permissible.” Oh, well, thank God we outlawed mutilation and rape. Now we can be assured that the electrodes and waterboarding will all be used decently and fairly.

Hows about that surge plan? Retired generals no likey.

How about Carter’s new book? How about the wiped off the map phrase?

Tues.

2007-01-09T16:40:00.000-06:00

Our president has engaged in Soviet-style propaganda efforts for a long time, purging the military and intelligence services of dissenters (“what is he, some kind of defeatist?”) and then “listening” to his hand-picked associates.

He gets $200 million for what?

A little window into what lies ahead when Congress begins investigating and issuing subpoenas and the administration refuses to comply with the subpoenas.

…And in the comments section of the above article, a man (?) who echoes my own thoughts:

It baffles me as a non-citizen of the USA that there are still people like Alternet who believe their democracy actually still works and that the evil within their nation has to be fought from within it. How can you fight it from within a system that is so thoroughly compromised it no longer works?

Indeed, my friend, indeed. Check out this post from Arianna Huffington. The Preznit os just off the deep end. Or check out this one about Tony Snow: nobody believes anything Sec. Snow says anymore. He is the American equivalent of Baghdad Bob. Editor and Publisher basically just rolls its eyes whenever he talks now.

Gary Hart lays it down.

Embarassment

2007-01-08T17:15:00.000-06:00

Progress? What Progress? LT General Odierno, the operational commander in Iraq, says that even with a troop surge it might take another few years. At least he’s honest. I’ll bet the president doesn’t mention any specific time period in his speech Wed. night.

Pajamas Media: you are an embarrassment. Where’s Rathergate now?

Spare Us

2007-01-06T10:27:00.000-06:00

What the fuck is your problem?

Are you honestly waiting for a plan to win the war from the most incompetent, dishonest, criminal president of all time?

Are you seriously looking to George W. Bush for leadership?

Perhaps you enjoyed his prepared response to Hurricane Katrina? Or perhaps you thought his leadership in the war thus far has been so honest and effective you just wanted more, is that it?

The president is in the midst of preparing to ask for a troop surge. Instead of “listening” to his generals, who don’t want a troop surge, he’s jettisoning them and installing generals that will ask for a troop surge. Abizaid and Casey are out, Fallon and Patraeus are in. This part of his job was always dumbshit kabuki theater. The president always claimed to listen to “the CIA” or “his generals” when in reality he chose which ones to listen to. Then he or Sec. Von Rumsfeld promoted the generals that agreed with them. Then he listened to his top generals tell him what he wanted to hear.

The joke about the president listening to “his” generals was always Soviet-style beaurocratic theater. The president picks his generals. Of course he listens to them. It’s kind of like the president’s office assuring the public the president hadn’t asked John Roberts about abortion. Of course he hadn’t. His people had read everything Roberts had ever written since he was 6 years old. They had interviewed everyone the guy had ever known. When they were getting ready for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court they investigated Roberts so thoroughly they knew how many times he wipes his ass when he gets off the toilet. They knew his favorite sexual position and which side he sleeps on at night. They knew his Select Comfort sleep number, for fuck’s sake. They didn’t need to put him through some 1 hour interview to vet him.

SO shut up about Preznit Drinky “listening” to fucking anybody. Just shut up. Spare me the “Preznit Stumbly Wumbly is meeting with Congressional leaders to listen” bullshit, because this is ridiculous. We have seen this story before. President Coke Job McTrustfund is going to “listen” to everyone publicly telling him to please stop fucking up this country and then he’s going to mysteriously come to the conclusion that a troop surge, which just so happens to be his favorite plan, is the way to go.

I have an idea. Send Nancy Pelosi, John McCain, Barack Obama, and Trent Lott a simple little email:

President Bush’s job or yours. You choose.

woohoo

2007-01-05T16:01:00.000-06:00

So the new congress is underway, and while I’m happy Nancy Pelosi is the new speaker, I must say I’m not inspired by her leadership. She comes from pretty much the most democratic district in the nation, encompassing most of San Francisco, though her political positions are significantly rightward of her constituency. This is a disturbing dynamic that is echoed in most of the democratically-controlled districts in the nation. A majority of the country wants a pullout. A vast majority of the troops want to be out within a year. The vast majority of Iraqis want US troops out of their country in the same time period. These polls have not changed for a year. Of course, what does it matter what people want? Drinky wants a troop increase, and congressional democrats have displayed no stomach for doing what they can to stop the war: defund it.

If the war was defunded the president would have to withdraw the troops. Pelosi and other double-crossers in the Democratic Party have resorted to the sophistry of “We need to give our soldiers everything they need in the field.”

No, we need to give our soldiers everything they need to get out of Iraq, not everything they need to fight for the failed policy of a stubborn, misguided, and deceitful president against the will of America and the Iraqi people. But why champion that position when you can defy the will of your constituents, the majority of America, and the majority of Iraqis, eh, Pelosi?

False News strikes again. How do you “leak” information that was published a decade ago, Hannity? How do you characterize tacit admissions as “no evidence,” Novak?

New 23rd

2006-12-23T12:16:00.000-06:00

Efrain Rios Montt and Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores slaughtered tens of thousands when they controlled Guatemala in the 1980s. Now they face trial in Spain on charges of genocide. The Guatemalan government probably won’t extradite them, just as the Chilean government was merciful towards Augusto Pinochet, as the Argentine government was merciful towards the former generals of that junta after they left power in 1983, as the Brazilian…you get the idea. Moderate “democratic” governments have shown no desire to punish former leaders of their own country, even when they were guilty of genocide. The stench of corruption still hangs over Argentina, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and certainly Guatemala.

Saparmurat Niyazov was my favorite dictator. He ruled Turkmenistan with an iron fist, making himself “President for Life” in 1999 and building a cult of personality around himself that not only included pictures of himself everywhere but also included a 200 foot tall monument topped with a 60 foot golden statue of himself that always rotated to face the sun. He renamed a month of the year after himself. He got grown men to call him “The Great Leader.” He died last week at the age of 66. RIP, you delusional, psychotic bastard.

What’s special, though, is how his little energy-rich nation was treated by the other great nations of the world. They loved the crazy bastard. They needed his country’s energy. They didn’t really care about democracy in Turkmenistan, for God’s sake. Why bother. It’sTurkmenistan. After he died Russia, the EU, and the United States all basically said “We don’t really care if a democracy replaces a tyrant in Turkmenistan. We just want you Neanderthals to keep the natural gas flowing.” You see, they’re a little skittish that all those energy contracts they negotiated with the dead man might be “renegotiated.” And I can tell you, as a citizen of a nation that has tossed dozens of governments that were uncooperative, there is nothing big business detests more than renegotiating a profitable contract with some piss ant, uppity democracy that just took over from one of our puppet dictators, or, as President Roosevelt said of Somoza of Nicaragua, one of “our bastards.”

The marines involved in Haditha have been charged with murder, officially, as Rep. Murtha predicted. Of course, warbloggers and fascist lunatics like Sean Hannity roasted Murtha for daring to actually say that the circumstances around Haditha looked suspicious. As usual, Blue Texan at Glenn Greenwald’s site has the post to read on the subject.

Why is it hard to find advertisers for Air America when its ratings are huge?

He's Gone LOCO!

2006-12-22T01:00:00.000-06:00

Scarborough and mainstream journalists from the Atlantic, New Republic, and MSNBC come to the conclusion Bush is “delusional” as he dismisses the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and General Abizaid and insists more troops will be sent to Iraq. General Abizaid announces he will be quitting in the near future. Next: the wheels COMPLETELY fall off the Bush Administration, the President announces he is receiving direction straight from aliens, and Elliott Abrams strangles the president in his sleep to give the GOP a chance at winning the 2008 presidential election.

Pinochet's Legacy

2006-12-21T23:25:00.000-06:00

Augusto Pinochet died recently. He was an immensely important figure in western history, though not merely because of his career. He was, in the end, just another South American strongman who ruled for eighteen years in Chile. In that sense he was very ordinary.

What was special about Pinochet was how bitterly he divided his fascist American supporters from the remainder of people who have not yet bartered their souls to Moloch. Pinochet was brought into power via a CIA-supported coup in 1973, after years of the Nixon Administration attempting to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Chile both through covert (and illegal) efforts to arm, fund, and encourage elements of the army in Chile and through overt efforts to wage economic war on Chile and ruin its economy. Chile’s economy did go south, and the army did stage a coup, and Pinochet quickly asserted his supremacy.

Judging by the preponderance of dictators in Central and South America I might normally dismiss the rise of a Pinochet in Chile as just more evidence that Latins are so poor and violent their governments devolve into dictatorships like the manifestation some kind of congenital birth defect in the Spanish-speaking world or the will of God. But Pinochet was different. America was largely responsible for his creation.

Pinochet’s regime proceeded to slaughter several thousand dissidents and suspected leftists. Tens of thousands more were tortured over his 18 year reign. The Right in America was quick to embrace Pinochet, however, because he had overthrown a leftist President, enacted free market reforms for the economy, and was a staunch anti-Communist. The Ford Administration and Henry Kissinger were quick to send aid to the budding dictator, even to the extent that Ford violated Ted Kennedy’s bill capping aid to Chile at around 40 million. Ford doubled that and sent it anyway, in a move that would foreshadow Reagan’s illegal funding of some similarly unsavory Latin murderers. Kissinger perjured himself in front of Congress when reporting on how the Nixon Administration had aided Pinochet as part of Congress’s hearing in the mid seventies on the abuses of the CIA. The Ford Administration and the CIA in general quickly established operational relations with that of Pinochet’s dictatorship and his secret police. William F Buckley and the conservative establishment were quick to defend Pinochet, as they defended and celebrated the likes of D’Aubuisson of El Salvador, or the Contras, or, Hell, any dictatorship or motley band of cutthroats who were willing to defend property rights and fight Marxists in this hemisphere. Even, by the 1980s, as it became painfully obvious how many people Pinochet had killed and tortured and how uninterested he was in “restoring democracy” after he had run the country as his personal fiefdom for seven years and more the Right still sang his praises and defended him. Elliott Abrams, the smirking, venomous assistant Secretary of State who was the Reagan Administration’s triggerman for Iran Contra also was instrumental in justifying and arranging for Reagan’s financial assistance and trade relations with Pinochet’s government. Abrams wrote many assessments of Pinochet’s Orwellian police state that were ugly brutalizations of the truth as a defense of the Administration’s financial aid and trade relations. He would write ten paragraphs discussing what a visionary leader Pinochet was because of his Chicago-style free-market reforms, and then he might spare a paragraph at the end with an oh-so-gentle mention that Pinochet was “working towards” restoring democracy. Yeah, he was getting around to it. The Pinochet government’s human rights record was “improving”—that was Elliott’s favorite. He said that for years about El Salvador’s military government in the eighties as they slaughtered 70,000 of their own people in their counterinsurgency effort. He said that about the Contras, too. He loved that one. The ever-improving human rights record, using cooked statistics and witnesses that were the butcherers’ cousins and friends. The Reagan Administration sent massive aid to them all. Margaret Thatcher was right there by his side.

The rest of the world was not so pleased. Because of his role in overthrowing Chile’s democratically-elected government Kissinger can not travel to Chile or Spain, and I doubt he would roll the dice in England, either, where British authorities arrested Pinochet at the request of a Spanish judge. If he were to travel abroad to these countries he would be arrested. International pressure mounted on Chile through the 1980s. Even Elliott started sounding peevish in his State Department reports late in the Reagan Administration. Pinochet agreed to hold a referendum on his dictatorship in 1988. He lost. As it became clear from election returns that he was going to lose the referendum he gave an order to the Chilean Army to close the voting sites and annul the referendum. For once the other generals of the ruling junta refused. He was allowed to declare himself head of the military and “Senator for Life” in a pathetic and transparent effort to shield himself legally from prosecution for his crimes. It never worked. Neither Spain nor England recognized his diplomatic status as protecting him from charges. Eventually Spanish and Chilean courts declined to prosecute him for crimes in the last 8 years of his life because of his poor health and dementia.

As an unimportant afterward, Pinochet was later found to have secreted $27 million away that he siphoned off the government of Chile when he ruled it.

Pinochet was a murderer, a poor student who became a colorless bureaucrat of a general who devolved into a tyrant. His family has said they would not raise a tomb that could be defiled. They, at least, know where Pinochet stands in the estimation of his people and the World.

Since Pinochet left power the Right no longer had a use for him, and dictators that are no longer useful to their American masters do not meet good ends: just ask Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noreiga, Haji Suharto, or Rafael Trujillo. Thus the positive press the fiend used to enjoy in America in the 1980s began to get more critical over the last sixteen years. What was tacitly admitted in the 1980s became the entire subject of articles in newspapers and periodicals: Pinochet had been a bloody tyrant. Bravely left defending the ramparts of Castle Apologia was William F Buckley, who continued to pen apologias for Pinochet as of 1998, when Pinochet was arrested in England.

Well the worm has finally turned. The Economist, a bastion of conservative establishment thought, wrote a eulogy for Pinochet that was less than complimentary. It was pathetic in that they actually framed it as somewhat controversial that they were asserting that Pinochet was a monster when it was only controversial in the craziest 10% of America or Chile, but that’s OK. They came around, after all…33 years after he started his reign of terror, true, but they came around.

Even WFB, in a sullen, miserly way, grudgingly conceded that in some ways Pinochet had been bad. Of course, Buckley can’t admit that without lying about what Pinochet did seven times and mischaracterizing what Chile was like five more times, but one of Buckely’s ass-licking manservants over at the National Review finally tapped the vile bastard on the shoulder and informed him that defending Pinochet had become unacceptable sometime around the time Punky Brewster went off the air.

I take little pleasure in the fact that Pinochet died, as he left power years ago and was never punished for his crimes. And don’t say like The Economist that that’s a small point; tell that to the Mossad who hunted Eichmann down in Argentina decades after the Holocaust and kidnapped him to stand trial in Israel.

What is left is to ensure that Pinochet’s lackeys, enablers, and defenders suffer the fate he should have. Chile has a long way to go before justice is achieved, but there’s no statue of limitations for murder, in Chile or the United States.

We have a long way to go in America, too. The WFBs of America are free to say whatever they like, but it is a sad fact that defenders of people like Pinochet aren’t shunned and derided like Holocaust deniers and white supremacists. Anyone who aided Pinochet should be brought to justice, whether American or Chilean. In 1998 Salon published a far more fitting summary of Pinochet’s significance: “He became an object of adoration for William Buckley, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the reporters of the New York Times, the claque of conservatives at Heritage and Cato and the Baroness Maggie Thatcher… Chileans no longer need to hold tight to the faint, fading words of Salvador Allende. They are now free to publicly remember Pinochet. To recoil in horror and disgust. To scorn and despise him. And with a bit of luck -- to see him judged and condemned.”

Indeed. I wish that the criminals who supported Pinochet could face the same fate Pinochet was willing to offer Salvador Allende as the coup was completed. Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, trapped and under fire with his bodyguard in the presidential palace, was clearly on the verge of either surrender or extermination. Carvajal, another coup plotter, suggested that Allende be guaranteed passage out of the country if he surrendered. "He can be flown out of the country," Pinochet said, "but then, old boy, while he's flying, the airplane falls out of the sky."

That’s the Right’s hero. The same General who, in the months following the coup, ordered suspected supporters of the former president rounded up in a soccer stadium, interrogated, shot in the head, and buried in unmarked graves.

RIP, Augusto. If you had a grave I would spit on it, exhume your body, feed it to dogs, and return the coffin to the people of Chile to save “the Chilean government the price of more nails,” as you said of the people you thought should be “congratulated” for burying the disappeared two to a grave.

And Fuck you, too, William Fucking Buckley.

Cry

2006-12-12T19:46:00.000-06:00

Whiny titty baby cries about the Iraq Study Group report.

I don’t much care what the Iraqi government thinks about anything, any more than I ever really kept track of what the Vichy French government thought about anything in World War II. Pathetic, propped up governments organized and run by an occupying foreign power are contemptible, at best.The ISG has been alternatively attacked as partisan, “not serious,” “veiled surrender,” etc. Of course it is. It called the Preznit’s strategy a “failure” and recommended a withdrawal in the near future, among other things.

James Baker: surrender monkey!

The ISG

2006-12-10T12:29:00.000-06:00

So now that the Iraq Study Group has come out and Drinky has summarily dismissed their ideas and, yet, desperately latched on to a few ideas he agrees with (“the Earth is round,” “the sun rises in the East and sets in the West,” “the United States needs to do better”) I and other commentators have come to a question.

When do we get to storm the White House with torches and drag the Preznit out by his large and irregularly-shaped ears?

Steve Young points to a fact that many have noticed: among many other things, the ISG points out that the White House was systematically and purposefully under-reporting the numbers of deaths and acts of violence in Iraq. Many others have noted it as well.

Let me put this in language more plain: the President and his people were lying their asses off.

So now that “crazy” estimate from the Lancet people of civilians killed (650,000) seems a lot less crazy when you figure that the Preznit’s people guesstimated 30-60,000 dead only counting ten percent of the dead.

Ridiculous. Impeachable. This presidency has surpassed routine badness: its existence long ago became an insult to the brave soldiers and patriots who defend us, a blemish on the country, a stain on our history, a blight on the World, an affront to the Constitution, a mockery of Christianity, and an insult to God.

The ISG’s caustic analysis of the Preznit’s work is remarkable, to me, because this was a bipartisan group made of Washington insiders. Truly, excoriation in Washington only comes when the president fucks up as badly as this one has.

News

2006-12-04T18:03:00.000-06:00

The first four headlines on Yahoo this morning:

• Bush accepts U.N. Ambassador Bolton's resignation
• Annan: Iraqis worse off than under Saddam• Chavez vows more radical socialism after election win
• Video images show harsh treatment of Padilla in custody

It is NOT a good day to be Preznit Drinky.

Dec 1 Update

2006-12-01T15:58:00.000-06:00

Big Oil gears up the massive money effort to influence lawmakers. But, oh, industry doesn’t overly effect government. That’s just “free speech.” That, in fact, is $100 million dollars worth of “free” speech.

Civil War in Iraq? Not according to FOX News, but most sane political scientist beg to differ.

Condi Rice is either stupid or is lying her ass off. My bet: lying her ass off.

Errata Tuesday

2006-11-21T19:55:00.000-06:00

   Yet another poll in Iraq showing that Iraqis want the same thing—the rapid exit of U.S. troops from their country.

   W is protested in Indonesia and his father is verbally assaulted in Abu Dhabi for...well, being Drinky's father.

   More evidence that right-wing think tanks help run the country.

Robots!

2006-11-12T04:52:00.000-06:00

This just in from Driftglass--robots think we taste like bacon.

Aaaaaah! The great human-robot war has begun!

And the US vetoes another security council resolution to protect Israel from political censure even as the turmoil in the Occupied Territories continues with little coverage in the United States.

Schadenfreude

2006-11-11T11:50:00.000-06:00

The only thing sweeter than Daniel Ortega winning the elections in Nicaragua recently is listening to the Chicago Tribune cry about it.

Mwahahahahahahaha! Oh, sweet schadenfreude! Oh, yes! Yes! Or, in the words of Cartman from South Park: "mmmm, yes, the tears of unfathomable sadness, mmmm, they taste so good!" FSLN para siempre!

But that evil Daniel Ortega! He might withdraw Nicaragua from CAFTA! He might have friendly relations with (*gasp*) Hugo Chavez! Nooooooooooo!

Lush the Waterboy

2006-11-10T16:33:00.000-06:00

   Rush Limbaugh finally admitted he won’t be “carrying the water” anymore for people he doesn’t think “deserve to have their water carried.” He feels safe to say this because the GOP Party hierarchy is officially eating itself alive so no one is going to punish him for joining in.

    “Carrying the water” is Lushspeak for “lying my fat ass off” or “slandering innocent people.” It’s Lushspeak for saying that the teenage male pages who were objects of Foley’s lust (and who later testified about his advances) were vicious kids pulling a prank on a gay congressman. It’s Lushspeak for accusing the victims of sexual harassment of being liars. It’s Lushspeak for saying that a famous actor with a terminal disease who campaigned against a republican over the stem-cell issue was faking his symptoms.

    Seriously, if you listen to this clown (John McCain’s description) and are a fan you are a moral failure of a human being. He lies constantly. He lied about Michael J. Fox’s endorsed candidate voting against the bill Fox was advocating for. He lied about paying a settlement to law enforcement authorities to drop their charges against him. He advocated in the past for the stiffer pursuit and prosecution of white drug offenders and then cried foul when they came after him. These are just the things I can remember him saying in the past year off the top of my head.

   He’s sick. He tacitly admits to lying. He does it constantly, and all in the service of the GOP. He is so base as to routinely slander people to shill for corrupt politicians.

   Apparently there are 20 million people in this country who don’t mind being lied to, 20 million people who so desperately want to believe in a set of principles that they will close their minds and let craven thugs like Limbaugh lie to them and never confront their faith in him by seeking out a second source or bothering to check up on his infinite set of factual inaccuracies or remembering what he said yesterday that is the opposite of what he said today. 20 million people whose conscience doesn’t raise a red flag when their hero slanders sexual harassment victims baselessly and, in fact, in the face of all evidence.

   Is this Reagan’s legacy? An army of trolls and moral perverts who have no concern for the truth or common decency? Tens of millions of people who any nation would consider a shame to count as citizens?

2006-11-04T11:43:00.000-06:00

   So I was bored recently and reading Laura Ingraham's monumental and intellectual tome of political and cultural criticism, Shut up and Sing. I have a few truly choice excerpts:

Remember what happened to the Roman Empire after its elites no longer believed it was worth defending against the onslaughts of barbarians. (page 66)

[Talking about Michael Moore's Stupid White Men] To call the book sophmoric would be an insult to sophomores in high school and college. Don't come a-lookin' for a piece of the pie around Michael. He ate it all. (page 104).

We're the most powerful nation of all time and one that could rule the world if we wanted, but we don't want to. (page 320).

   Honestly, this book was like a master class of how to write a shitty book. I had to skim the last half of this shitburger because it was close to the worst book I have ever read, and I make a habit out of reading the demented writings of right-wing commentators.

   Seriously, just take a look at the top three. Laura honestly thinks the Roman Empire collapsed because some bisexual elite class decided not to fight for it. Her second quote is my fave: she criticizes Moore for being sophmoric by being unintentionally sophmoric. I actually reread that chapter to see if she was some kind of subtle genius but, no, she's sophmoric talking about pretty much every subject she talks about. Quote number 3 reinforces number one: Laura has no grasp of history or military strategy. Although we were straining our society and economy to the breaking point just to try to hold on to South Vietnam or Iraq somehow we could conquer the whole world if we wanted to. Even though we were fought to a standstill in Korea by Chinese infantry and a detachment of the Soviet airforce we really could have just conquered the whole world.

   This book is a 6th-grade-level screed against "elites" and it wouldn't have been published by anybody but Regnery Press.

Disaster

2006-10-17T20:38:00.000-05:00

   It’s important to not look back. Looking back means actually analyzing yourself and your behavior, and that’s bad when you’re a blackout drunk leading a nation with lies through a bloody, bungled war. It’s also important to, rhetorically speaking, fellate your interviewee as a “tough” journalist in the “no-spin” zone.

   Speaking of blackout drunks, how’s the JAR doing, Drinky? Not so good.

    Iraqi and U.S. doctors conduct a study that indicates that 650,000 civilians in Iraq have died (who otherwise wouldn’t have died) following the “allied” invasion in 2003.That’s even more than that bullshit 400,000 number Tony Blair blurted out about how many people had been found in a mass grave attributable to Saddam Hussein. That’s even more than the 290,000 Iraqis Hussein killed in his reign.

   And, like the Lancet/New England Journal of Medicine report before it, it will certainly be slandered vigorously by the right.

   As Cenk Uygur has said, this president “will live in infamy.”

Jackasses

2006-10-16T11:43:00.000-05:00

   You deserve him.

   Although I have said it before, sometimes it deserves repeating. Recently perusing the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune (that filthy rag is ubiquitous here) I noticed the usual stuff: an editorial by Charles Krauthammer, that malignant cripple, using some of the most painfully clumsy logic to justify threatening North Korea and Iran. Dennis Byrne writing his throwaway garbage--I can’t even remember what his article was about. Timothy McNulty, the public editor, writing a piece whining that an article in the last Sunday Tribune was too critical of some rich people’s houses and that rich people deserve respect, too, as well as enormous amounts of money.  Not a progressive voice to be seen: in short, the reason why I usually reserve the Chicago Tribune for cleaning up after my dog and little else.

   I couldn’t help but notice the letters to the editor from some people who had clearly been listening to Lush Limbaugh and Orifice for years. They were responding to a piece a while ago in which some law professor defined what a “liberal” was and advocated the general precepts: tolerance for dissent, progressive social values, blah blah blah. This prompted quite a few moral cockroaches to come crawling into the public eye after the article had left and begin gnawing away at the thesis of the story with high-school jokes about liberals and mischaracterizations the likes of which usually come spilling out of Mark Levin’s mouth at 3 am when he’s a bottle of whiskey into his night:

A liberal is someone who wants to salve his guilt with your money.
                         -John Knoerle
                         Chicago

A liberal is someone who believes government is responsible for his well-being from birth to grave. A liberal believes he has no personal responsibility for his own welfare or actions.
-Michael Sheridan
                         Mokena

The left does not tolerate any dissent whatsoever…The left regards the United States as evil and hence unworthy of defense, which is why the left opposes the War on Terror…The defining characteristic of the left these days is intellectual dishonesty…
                         -Mark G. Arnold
                         St. Louis

A liberal is a person who is open minded but only to his way of thinking, and he thinks that anything goes as long as it benefits him.
                             -Rita Rucin
                         Oak Lawn

And so on. The intellectual equivalent of watching four people shit their pants and then crow about how sophisticated they are. Note John Knoerle’s 11th grade, nasty little sarcasm. Note Michael Sheridan’s ridiculous, Limbaugh-like mischaracterization of those liberals. Note Mark G. Arnold’s hysterical projection of the vices of the right onto the left. Note Rita’s inadvertent sarcasm (trust me, it was inadvertent. The rest of her letter is written at the level of an 8th grader).

   These are the remaining 36% who still, after six years, give a thumbs up to Drinky, the worst president in history. These are the kind of voters who, no matter what the outcome of the mid-term elections this November, will end up sending most incumbents (and most republicans) back to office.

   They deserve the worst president in history and the worst Congress in history. They deserve to live in a country where wealthy individuals shift the tax burden onto them, where their poor friends and relatives get ground into meat to serve Thurston Howell III’s dogs, where their sons and daughters are kept fighting foreign wars against their will, where the conservative religious leaders they love are dismissed as “nuts” by their leader’s chief advisor and then cynically used for the votes they can deliver, in short, they deserve to live in a country in which there is no law but the law of the jungle--a country that is despised.

   Driftglass echoes my writing (or perhaps I echo his). As I excoriate these Sean Hannity fans, Drfitglass urges his readers to remember that America is worth fighting for. 58 percent of people in this country officially believe Preznit Drinky “purposely misled the public about evidence that Iraq had banned weapons in order to build support for war.”  A similar majority believe that terror suspects should be given due process rights. Public opinion polls usually show, to the never-ending surprise of a pessimist like me, that the majority of the American public is very frequently right in its opinions on a host of issues from the Israeli-Palestinian problem to priorities for government spending.

   Indeed Driftglass, there is hope. The GOP has written off Mike DeWine’s seat in Ohio. Bwahahahaha! Lights OUT, Mike!

   Occasionally, David Brooks says something that reveals what a great love of democracy the Bush Administration really has…

   Glenn Greenwald, brilliant as he is, finally realizes that GOP Congresspeople are all part of the same machine. God bless, Glenn.

   These are just drops in the ocean, though. A lot of progress needs to be made in this United States. I think optimists should be cautious speaking of a nation that has just officially legalized torture. I think Driftglass should be realistic hoping for a nation that, even if the election this November goes the democrats’ way, will still be run by a criminal president and a cowed and bought democrat caucus in the Congress.