End of the Neo-Cons

"Every Dogma Has Its Day" -- (Abraham Rotstein)

I read this great editorial in the Toronto Star today, echoing a theme we've been hearing quite a bit lately. Conservatives who have been supporting the Bush administration in every detail of their criminal enterprise posing as government are beginning to turn against their masters like a pack of rabid curs. It has gotten considerably lonelier at the top of the self-created neocon shitpile. This administration, so recently described as circling the bowl, now looks more like they forgot to flush. For six. long. years. The stench is so foul that no-one wants to be anywhere near it. And that stench emits from BushCo's Iraq policy.

Military Newspapers are calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. Richard Perle, one of the chief intellectual architects of the Iraq invasion, told Vanity Fair that had he known in 2003 what he knows now about Bush & Co.’s incompetence, he would not have advocated an invasion. The very people who so fervently advocated this disaster are now against it, and trying to pretend that they had nothing to do with it. People such as David Frum, Michael Rubin and Michael Ledeen join the throng fleeing like rats from the sinking ship of state. As this article by Glenn Greenwald points out, Ledeen went so far that he, "not only denied that he ever supported the invasion of Iraq, but further, he affirmatively claimed that he opposed the invasion. And that is just an outright lie."

Even Bush himself has recently resorted to the outrageous lie that, "it has never been a stay the course strategy", despite numerous instances of he and his administration saying just that over the years.

In front of cameras.

All of this prompted noted conservative Andrew Sullivan to say the following;

"Let me put this kindly: anyone who believes that Donald Rumsfeld has done a “fantastic job” in Iraq is out of his mind. The fact that such a person is President of the United States is beyond disturbing. But then this is the man who told Michael Brown he was doing a 'heckuva job.' And, yes, our Iraq policy begins to look uncannily like the Katrina response."

I'm no psychiatrist, but I happen to agree with Sullivan's assessment that Bush is literally insane, but for different reasons. And whatever the outcome on Tuesday, he will still be in the White House on Wednesday. Oh, here's an excerpt from that Toronto Star editorial linked above. It's well worth a read.

"The neo-cons' grand design lies in ruins, having accomplished nothing other than to shrink America's stature in the world. The great unwinding of the American "benign global hegemony" first heralded by neo-cons William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1996 will commence after the election, when America's political leadership will abandon Iraq and the neo-cons. The neo-cons' starting point, of course, was the Americanization of Iraq — the "easy win" that would trigger rogue states from the Middle East to the Korean peninsula to fall in line with American values of capitalism, democracy and pro-Israel policies."

TAGS: Iraq, Quagmire, Stay the Course, Insanity

Hypocrisy Personified

Unbelievable YouTube Video of Ted Haggard

You can't make this stuff up. Ted Haggard is shown here talking about the Bible and what it says about homosexuality. At one point he looks straight into the camera points and says, "I think I know what you did last night...If you send me a thousand dollars I won't tell your wife."
Like the title says, HYPOCRISY PERSONIFIED.

Update: For more on the Haggard scandal, and the hypocrisy of the religious right in general, check out this great post at Ice Station Tango.

TAGS: Ted Haggard, Hypocrisy, Methamphetamines, Gay Hooker

The Great Leap

Get Your Bragg On!

I discovered Billy Bragg this year. I still don't quite understand how I had missed him. So much outrage; so little time...

Anyway, back in 1988 Bragg released Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.

The Great Leap refers to a period of rapid cultural change and advancement in the course of human evolution—sort of like the monolith-to-bones-to-weapons moment from the Arthur C. Clarke novel and Stanely Kubric film, 2001: A Space Oddity. And back in 1988, Billy Bragg was waiting for it (lyrics):

It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline
But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline
Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying
Over luxury's disappointment
So he walks over and he's trying
To sympathise with her
But he thinks that he should warn her
That the third world is just around the corner

In the Soviet Union a scientist is blinded
By the resumption of nuclear testing and he is reminded
That Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's optimism fell
At the first hurdle

In the cheese pavilion, and the only noise I hear
Is the sound of someone stacking chairs
And mopping up spilt beer
And someone asking questions and basking in the light
Of the fifteen fame filled minutes of the fanzine writer

Mixing pop and politics, he asks me what the use is
I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses
While looking down the corridor
Out to where the van is waiting
I'm looking for the great leap forwards

Jumble sales are organised
And pamphlets have been posted
Even after closing time there's still parties to be hosted
You can be active with the activists
Or sleep in with the sleepers
While youre waiting for the great leap forwards

One leap forward, two leaps back
Will politics get me the sack?

Here comes the future and you can't run from it
If you've got a blacklist, I want to be on it

It's a mighty long way down rock n roll
From top of the pops to drawing the dole

If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman

In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune
But this is reality, so give me some room

So join the struggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away
Waiting for the great leap forwards
(Bragg's TV debut on Letterman, 1988)

But times have changed, and so have the lyrics. Rumsfeld makes it in by name, as does YouTube. Great statement about patriots after the performance, also.

This is a song that makes me happy and sad at the same time. It laments being stuck in failed policies, stuck in a political quagmire, stuck somewhere in the course of human evolution, waiting. It also revels in hope for the future and the possibility of tomorrow. It delights in the struggle; it frolics in progressive optimism while wading through the muck of the morass of the moment. I choose to have hope, otherwise there is no reason to work for or expect a better world.

It's somehow fitting that Bush, who doesn't believe in evolution, is content "staying the course", and wouldn't recognize the Great Leap if it crept up on him from behind.

And me? I'll just stay active as I continue to wait.

Bush's Incredibly Bad Idea

pResident Bush continues to terrorize the American public while simultaneously holding his administration out as the only protection against terrorists. In one of the most politically cynical and incredibly, insanely idiotic decisions made to date, they have posted archive documents from Iraq on the internet that describe in detail how to build a thermonuclear device.
??WHAT??!! That's right, "diagrams, dimensions, diameters, fusing mechanisms, descriptions of explosive tests..." A road map to the design and construction of an atomic weapon.
This was done to revive the long debunked notion that the war in Iraq was about finding and destroying Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to 'leverage the Internet' to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein."

Against the strident objections of the intelligence community, ignoring all sane advice (as usual), this is nothing short of outright insanity. The material was posted last March, and only taken down after the fact of its existence was revealed in this New York Times article.

Report From Keith Olbermann

TAGS: Atomic Weapons, WMDs, Bush Administration, Insanity

GOP: The Great Oversight Pass

Or, the Nefarious Relationship Between Audits and Taxes

In their desperation, the GOP is telling everyone that if they vote for Democrats, the wicked Democrats will raise taxes. (According to Bush, Democrats are genetically disposed to raising taxes. I didn't know that Bush believed in or understood Genetics.)

This argument is laughable, in a tragic sort of way. Putting aside for a moment the fact that Bush's tax cuts have makedly favored the wealithiest of America's wealthy (some even say that Bush has presided of the largest transfer of wealth from to working to the upper class in the history of the nation, but who am I to blog without supporting links...), consider what has happened to Bush's employees who identified government waste and corruption in Iraq:

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

Mr. Bowen’s office has inspected and audited taxpayer-financed projects like [a] prison in Nasiriya, Iraq.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

Our GOP congress has fired the unit that identified bribery, conspiracy, shoddy construction, and failure to track weapons in the war-for-profit battle zone of Iraq...because the GOP is dedicated to keeping taxes low...except when doing so interferes with their friends' profits.

This is called fiscal irresponsibility, and American taxpayers are paying for it. And we are paying for this fiscal irresponsibility under the leadership of the President Who Made Things up and the Congress that Couldn't Say No.

Oversight. It's their worst nightmare, and they refuse to provide it.
And to think, it's been said that there is nothing the GOP won't do.

Ride the Democratic Wave

Grab your beach chairs and binoculars, friends, because it looks like the GOP is headed for a major WIPEOUT:

And they seem to know it. But they're not ready to throw in their beach towels just yet; catch their newly crafted defeat spin:

Stricken with anxiety as the polls continue to indicate a Democratic resurgence, certain Republicans have already started spouting justifications and explanations. No matter what happens on Election Day, they say, the results must not be taken at face value—because liberal Democrats can prevail only by pretending to be right-wing Republicans.

Among the first to test this excuse in recent days was Laura Ingraham, the hard-line radio and TV talker who insisted that the defeat of Republican candidates would somehow represent a triumph of her ideology. What she told CNN’s Larry King on Oct. 30 is worth examining, if only because we will surely hear more of the same in the days to come—and because those same claims are already surfacing in The New York Times...Its only defect is that it evaporates instantly upon closer inspection. (More...)

Very creative. Yet, despite the desperately spinning GOP, it looks like there is going to be a BLUE DAWN in America:

That is, of course, unless the election is hacked, which would lead to unrest, civil disobedience, and an investigation, the likes of which we've seldom seen:

No, I'm not dead certain of a Democratic takeover, but I feel the wave and it looks like a big one. I've always enjoyed a big Blue wave. Must be the SoCal progressive in me hanging (ten) out.

Kerry Botched a Joke...

...Bush Botched a War. And we have been paying for his mistakes with the blood of America's children, which has been running in the streets alongside the blood of Iraqi civilians--about 650,000 of them.

But let's do step back and put this in perspective, shall we? Compare Kerry's bungle (presented and disected by Keith Olbermann) to the words of the Commander in Chief and his chosen staff, which in contrast to the words of Senator Kerry, actually have caused irreparable and tangible harm to our troops:

• "Bring 'em on." -President George Bush [CNN]
• "...weeks rather than months." -Vice President Dick Cheney [Washington Post]
• "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." -Vice President Dick Cheney [Washington Post]
• "They want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that." -Vice President Dick Cheney Washington Post]
• "The campaign will be unlike any we have ever seen in the history of warfare, with breathtaking precision, almost eye-watering speed, persistence, agility and lethality." -Vice Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of U.S. naval forces in the Gulf [Washington Post]
• "It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." -Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld [Washington Post]
• "Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder." -Former Pentagon Chairman Richard Perle [Washington Post]
• "I don't know anyone who thought this would be a war without resistance." - Former Pentagon Chairman Richard Perle (after the war began) [Washington Post]
• "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." -President George Bush [Whitehouse.gov]
• "I have a special word for Secretary Rumsfeld, for General Franks, and for all the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States: America is grateful for a job well done." -President George Bush (being careful to use the troops as shields in this praise of Rumsfeld and Franks) [Whitehouse.gov]
• "It's very important for us to stay the course, and we will stay the course." -President George Bush [US Department of Defense]
• "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld [Washington Post]
• And let's not overlook this Bush laugh riot [WH Correspondents' Dinner, 2004].
  

Oh, just for fun, shall we now take a look at the GOP take on Clinton's humanitarian, UN-approved involvement in Bosnia:

• "You can support the troops but not the president." --Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)
• "Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years." --Joe Scarborough (R-FL)
• "Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?" --Sean Hannity, Fox News,
• "[The] President . . . 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 about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy." --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 on behalf of George W Bush
• "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)
• "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." --Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

Oh, you can just smell the GOP outrage against the injustice of deploying troops to bring humanitarian aid to Bosnia, with international support no less, and the righteous indignation over the poor strategic planning in Bosnia, where not one U.S. soldier died. The odor you smell, by the way, is that of virulent hypocricy and false patriotism mingled together in a morality vacuum chamber.

Bush recently revealed that controlling the oil fields was his reason for attacking and occupying Iraq. Recall that Cheney's Energy Taskforce, convened before we attacked Iraq, involved Iraq oil field maps. Any day now, the deal will be cut on control of Iraq's oil fields, involving the usual suspects (Bush's oil cabal). It's wrong to make money on other people's blood.

I ask but one question: Who needs to apologize to the troops?

I know how history will answer.

Related Posts:
Republicans Cut Deal and Run?
Oil History Lesson
Kerry Swiftboat Redux

Open Thread

Open Thread. Have at.

Get Firefox 2.0 Now

I've been using Firefox's new 2.0 version of their fantastic browser long enough now to be able to give it an unqualified recommendation. We layout and edit Les Enragés.org with Firefox, so naturally the site looks best using this state of the art browser. I know, I know, Internet Explorer version 7.0 has finally caught up with the rest of the world to offer tabbed browsing, but Firefox invented the concept. Long story short;

Friends Don't Let Friends Use IE

Olbermann Demands Bush Apology

Following cynical exploitation of Kerry gaff

"Get someone to make fun of the cripple."

TAGS: Olbermann, Special Comment, Bush, Kerry, Controversy

Some Important Information

Glenn Greenwald has a nice post up today that points out the futility of electoral defeatism among progressive voters. His argument, that Democrats can't stay away from the polls on the assumption that their candidate will lose anyway is an important one. Pessimism can often lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. We have to fight that.

This post is not about Greenwald's argument, though. It is about this graphic he linked to, shown above. From the University of Minnesota, it is an accumulation of results from several polls during the Bush Presidency occupation of the White House. If there is one thing that we in the reality-based community like, it's facts. Graphs, charts and maps fascinate us, because they provide a large number of facts in a way that can be analyzed and interpreted. From this analysis and interpretation we derive more facts and conclusions that have a high probability of being valid, based as they are on reality.

Conservatives on the other hand have opinions, which are based on nothing more than the opinions of other conservatives. They titter derisively when they hear the word analysis, because it happens to contain the word anal. And yet, ironically, conservatives like Limbaugh, Coulter and O'Reilly get most of their own 'facts' by pulling them out of their ass. They mumble and turn away when they hear the word interpretation because it reminds them that other languages than English exist. For some conservatives even one language is too much of a challenge. Take the pResident as an example.

Update: from our comment threads, the idea to include this video in the post earns a tip of the revolutionary headgear for Macaca Doodle Doo!! - Great Handle, BTW


"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative." -- John Stuart Mill

So what facts can we derive from the graph?

#1) The more people get to know George W. Bush, the less they like him.
#2) Standing on a pile of rubble with a bullhorn makes you look Presidential, and hugely increases your popularity. (a 35% bump)
#3) Starting a needless war in Iraq makes you look Presidential, and increases your popularity (a 20% bump)
#4) Polls taken by FOX "news", ABC/WP and ABC/Ipsos consistently show Bush approval higher than other polls. Harris, Zogby and PEW often show lower approval, but not quite so consistently.
#5)Differences between the highest and lowest poll results often exceed 10%, despite the standard claim of 4% accuracy.
#6), #7), #8)...For our visitors in comments.

TAGS: Election, Polls, Bush, ?Popularity?

President Elmer Gantry

“I’m going to tell (the evangelicals) the five turning points in my life: accepting Christ, marrying my wife, having children, running for governor, and listening to my mother.” George Bush, September 1998

If George W. Bush wasn’t born, Sinclair Lewis would’ve had to invent him. For good measure, though, Lewis had already invented him when he created Elmer Gantry, thereby giving us an always timely prophecy of what to expect when America falls prey to yet another paroxysm of sweaty canvas tent evangelical revivalism and what can sprout from it like a noxious blossom.

The parallels between Bush’s naked hucksterism and Lewis’ masterpiece of satire has already been delved into more than once but I think, as election time draws near, we ought to revisit them and remind people of just how George Bush could’ve taught that other boozing, womanizing former college ath-e-lete-turned Methodist a thing or two in hypocrisy. The David Kuo book and Bush’s recent lapses in piety demand it, in fact.

Now, we all know after last month’s revelations from the former #2 man in Bush’s Office of Faith Based Initiatives that Bush’s dog-whistle to evangelicals in the late 90’s was really nothing more than sophisticated political tools to get out the Christian vote. I doubt that Bush was smart enough then to hit upon this himself but someone, somewhere along the way was able to tell him that Ronald Reagan had softened up America with his buddies in the Christian Coalition so that America was ripe for a religious revival. It was festering like a barely-closed zit ready to erupt. And like Gantry, the way was paved for George W. Bush, who came along at just the right place at the right time.

So out Bush went on the campaign trail blowing his little dog whistle and perking up the ears of the True Believers who were trained to listen to those sweet, sweet little words. Yes, brothers and sisters, I had sinned. I had sought answers, or avoided them, in the bottom of many a bottle until I was saved by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But let us not talk of those dark, dark days and look, instead toward the future.

Of course, this is what blind faith in God and His instrument George W. Bush demands you overlook. Obviously, it helps to have snakes slithering all over you while in a fugue state and injecting their numbing venom inside you considering the ample evidence of President Gantry’s ongoing battle with the bottle and hardly-concealed hypocrisy. But Christians have always displayed a resounding resiliency when confronted with inconvenient truths.

And you especially need that resiliency to overlook the literal and symbolic overtones when God’s chosen instrument goes out of tune in moments such as these. This is why they choose over evolution a belief that Eve was hacked out of the side of Adam like a cut of beef.

And, lo, a resonance was struck when the Anointed One, tapped by God to be President as surely as Dick Cheney tapped himself to be his Vice Presidential running mate, expounded on the evils of working class people striking for higher wages (which is to say a living wage) and that it’s “great, just great” that they choose, instead, to work three jobs to avoid stoking the fires of that messy class warfare.

Who cares that President Gantry dropped the canvas tent evangelizing by breaking all his promises, giving them there preachers less than 1% of the money that he promised them and began hobnobbing with the power elite in the secular world. Even when it was revealed that one of his hires privately mocked these people who swept him to power, did they display any normal self-respect and call this hack, this Methodist fraud, on his hypocrisy? Hell, no. The Christian thing, we learned, is to shoot the messenger even when he’s one of their own.

And, maddeningly, like Gantry, it’s hard to convey the frustration of liberals who see this rampant hypocrisy exposed time and again, a downfall always imminent, just to see this still-boozing, still-womanizing fraud reach higher and higher heights in social standing.

Here, one difference ought to be noted between Elmer Gantry and George Bush: I don’t recall a single instance in Lewis’ novel in which a cardboard image of Elmer Gantry is prayed to by children at a Jesus Camp.

Plus Elmer Gantry never actually got anyone killed, let alone hundreds of thousands.

--- Jurassicpork