"TO DESTROY THIS INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT, TO DISSOLVE THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN CORRUPT BUSINESS AND CORRUPT POLITICS IS THE FIRST TASK OF THE STATESMANSHIP OF THE DAY." -- Theodore Roosevelt--
"News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic Caucus which appears to be controlled by radical fringe out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party. In the past, Moveon.org has said they 'own' the Democratic party -- while most Democrats don't agree with that, it's clearly the case in Nevada." - David Rhodes, VP of Fox “News”
Plus, we hired the Blackwater snipers. And do you have any idea how much we put down on a deposit for those water cannons? We can’t get that money back!
The first time I ever defended myself against a bully as a child was when I lived in San Vito, Italy. This psychotic little fuck named Paul Villanno was beating me up near the courtyard of our school in front of dozens of people and I’d had enough. I blindly flailed and missed with a right lead by about a country mile and Villanno went berserk and basically creamed me with renewed vigor.
The second time I ever defended myself against him was considerably more successful. We were in the Youth Center on base and Paul launched a kick at me. Now Villanno gave up a few inches and a few pounds on me and his abuse was neverending. Why? Well, Paul obviously had… issues and was clearly insane. And since no one ever came to my rescue I figured I had it coming to me. Maybe I deserved it, maybe it was a right of passage into manhood.
But this time I’d really had it with him. So when Paul raised his foot with the intention of doing me more harm, I simply caught it with my right hand, gave it a little twist and watched him sprawl onto the floor. I stood over him with an eerily blank expression on my face and when he realized that I was no longer going to silently suffer his abuse, he literally ran out of the Youth Center.
This is pretty much what the Nevada Democratic party did to Fox News and what Bill Clinton did to Chris Wallace when he wouldn’t allow himself to be blindsided in Wallace’s clearly partisan “hit job.” Except Fox “News” is fighting back at being mortally embarrassed by Harry Reid, John Edwards and now Bill Richardson backing away from Fox’s televised debate that was to be televised in August.
Fox Chairman Roger Ailes, in accepting, if you can believe this, a First Amendment Leadership Award (but we live in a world in which people nominate Rush Limbaugh for the Nobel Peace prize and clowns like Paul Bremer get the Presidential Medal of Freedom) basically used what should’ve been a moment of victory as a platform for sniping at the Democrats. Here’s a sample of the wit and wisdom of Roger Ailes:
And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?'
It is true that just in the last two weeks Hillary Clinton has had over 200 phone calls telling her in order to win the presidency she must stay on the road for the next two years. It is not true they were all from Bill.
Then, after setting the table on a roar, Ailes had this to say about the Democrat defection:
Recently pressure groups are forcing candidates to conclude that the best strategy for journalists is divide and conquer, to only appear on those networks and venues that give them favorable coverage.
I think I’ll stick with the good Roger Ailes for my laughs in the future.
Now, the hypocrisy of Ailes is breathtaking even for a Republican windbag who controls Fox “News.” After taking potshots at two major Democratic presidential candidates, as well as France, Ailes then accused the Democrats for backing out so they could get “favorable coverage”, the implicit understanding that in order to look brave, you ought to go on a channel that will almost surely not give you that favorable coverage.
One hardly knows where to begin feasting on this cornucopia of hypocrisy and willful stupidity. Let’s start with his charge of Democrats seeking a friendly, sympathetic forum. Where would that be, Roger? Free Speech TV, which is channel 1434 here in Central Massachusetts and the only channel where they’d be guaranteed of getting a fair hearing?
Or should they take a chance with CNN and Wolf Blitzer? How about having Glenn Beck moderate the debate? Or would ABC be a better bet? After The Path to 9/11, how could they possibly not get a fair hearing? We could even get Mark Halperin's non-partisan operatives at The Note to give a fair and balanced commentary on the debate, with perhaps a supplementary commentary by Pat Robertson on ABC Family's the 700 Club.
This is just the latest confirmation of the battered wife syndrome that we’ve been seeing from the far right. If you play ball, you’ll get only one eye blackened. If you fight back, you’ll get both of them blackened and then be coerced into saying that you fell down a flight of stairs. And all this is done with a blind eye to their own soul-crippling hypocrisy.
Take Dick Cheney: For all his Go Fuck Yourself bravado, about as far left as Cheney has the courage to venture is Wolf “Well (gulp), I thought it was a fair question” Blitzer and CNN, which is hardly a bastion of liberal journalism. More often than not, bottled human spiders like Cheney, Malkin and Coulter find themselves on Fox taking one ignorant, unchallenged potshot at liberals and Democrats after another.
So when the Nevada Democrats finally woke up from their collective slumber after being screamed at over 265,000 times by Moveon’s supporters and saw the stick propping up the orange crate and the rope attached to the stick and Roger Ailes holding the rope with a snicker, they wouldn’t bite. How dare they? That just about makes up for them being stupid and naïve enough to sign on for this trap in the first place.
Let’s move on to Moveon.org and how they “own” the Democratic Party. To my knowledge, they never publicly said that they own them. And even if the Democratic Party was owned by Moveon.org, I’d still be more comfortable with that than Fox “News” being owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the GOP and acting as mere stenographers and mediums for every right wing rumor, smear and lie that oozes its way down the Beltway.
Let’s also not forget how George W. Bush got “elected” President in the first place. After the dinosaur networks had declared Al Gore the winner in Florida, hence in the presidential election, George and Jeb Bush cousin John Ellis, hired by Fox “News” as a freelance political “advisor”, called the election in favor of his cousin.
Yes, Fox followed the lead of a temp worker because he was related to one of the candidates and the governor of a pivotal state. And everyone else fell in line.
The other networks, fearful of being scooped and embarrassed by an upstart piece of shit network like Fox, took a gamble and fell in line and political history wasn’t written as much as sloppily erased and revised, a tragic, blood-stained palimpsest scrawled over what should’ve been and it was the beginning of the Oceanic rise of the White House’s Propaganda Ministry, aka Fox News.
And, perfectly in harmony, pitch and tune with the Republican party that’s screwing itself into the ground with furious frustration over the last election results that even John Ellis couldn’t call, Fox is screaming itself hoarse at the highest corporate levels for being shown up and skeeved for the lying, partisan right wing hacks that they truly are.
Finally, I turn the mic over to Howard Beale, who used to be Fox’s most trusted newsman (you’ll seriously want to watch the entire video, on the off chance that Beale’s/Paddy Chayefsky’s words don’t entrance you.) :
And, yes, the choice of French subtitles is a deliberate dig in the flabby sides of Ailes and every other windbag in the Network/Church of Howard Beale.
As we all know, pResident George W. Bush and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela are both on speaking tours of Latin America right now. For his part Chavez is blaming US policy for the poverty and inequality in Latin America, and he is being well received.
On Friday night, Chavez led a two-hour anti-Bush rally attended by nearly 20,000 people at a soccer stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He called Bush a "political cadaver" and said he was on his way to becoming "cosmic dust." "I believe the chief objective of the Bush trip is to try to scrub clean the face of the empire in Latin America. But it's too late," Chavez said on Argentine state television before the rally.
Bush is delivering quite the opposite message.
"I would call our diplomacy quiet and effective diplomacy," Bush said.
Ignoring Chavez in favor of a focus on U.S. compassion for the region is Bush's persistent tack on his five-nation tour, which also includes visits to Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil.
"My message to the people in our neighborhood is that we care about the human condition and that we believe the human condition can be improved in a variety of ways," the president said.
The thing is, the people of Latin America aren't buying it. Chavez is being greeted enthusiastically and hosting large and popular anti-Bush rallies. Bush is being greeted with, well, popular anti-Bush rallies. I can only imagine the expensive security necessary to keep his worthless skin intact.
Why do you suppose the people of Latin America are so skeptical about Bush's pronouncements about compassion and regard for the human condition? Perhaps they're all reading Rolling Stone, particularly this must-read piece by Paul Krugman;
In a recent poll, only a minority of Americans rated the economy as "excellent" or "good," while most consider it no better than "fair" or "poor."
Are people just ungrateful? Is the administration failing to get its message out? Are the news media, as conservatives darkly suggest, deliberately failing to report the good news?
None of the above. The reason most Americans think the economy is fair to poor is simple: For most Americans, it really is fair to poor. Wages have failed to keep up with rising prices. Even in 2005, a year in which the economy grew quite fast, the income of most non-elderly families lagged behind inflation. The number of Americans in poverty has risen even in the face of an official economic recovery, as has the number of Americans without health insurance. Most Americans are little, if any, better off than they were last year and definitely worse off than they were in 2000.
So, what is Bush's response to this apparently quite successful attack on his credibility? Does he come up with facts and figures to prove his point? Does he rally support for his position with lofty Churchillian rhetoric? Not quite.
Following his usual practice, Bush refused to utter Chavez' name during a news conference with the president of Uruguay — or even explain why he wouldn't.. ..Bush said he favors a more tranquil form of engagement with his neighbors to the south.
"I would call our diplomacy quiet and effective diplomacy," Bush said. [...] White House press secretary Tony Snow said Thursday that while it is tough to ignore Chavez' verbal jousts, Bush was concentrating on his meetings with more like-minded counterparts.
"I know you want to make this trip about Chavez," Snow told reporters aboard Air Force One as it flew to Uruguay. "It's not."
Yeah, right Tony. Ignoring your detractors instead of responding to them is a really mature way of governing. Not to mention that Bush's 'more tranquil form of engagement' has already included attempted coups against Chavez of the type that replaced Chile's Salvador Allende with the brutal Augusto Pinochet during the Nixon administration.
I say it's time to change Chimpy's diapers, give him a pacifier, put him down for a nap, and put the adults in charge.
President Bush says that if the Congress voted for a withdrawal, he would simply veto it.
From AFP:
US President George W. Bush would veto legislation, crafted by Democrats, calling for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by late 2008, the White House said Thursday.
"Obviously, the administration would vehemently oppose and ultimately veto any legislation that looks like what was described today," senior Bush adviser Dan Bartlett told reporters as the president traveled to Brazil.
Earlier, Democrats directly challenged Bush on the strategy for the war, outlining a plan to pull US troops out by late 2008 or much sooner if progress is not made in the violence-wracked country.
Nancy Pelosi, when asked for comment, said, "I say to my colleagues never confine your best work, your hopes, your dreams, the aspiration of the American people to what will be signed by George W. Bush because that is too limiting a factor."
While Nancy works hard to maintain that positive, can-do attitude, let's take a puke at...
...The Iraq News:
Unindicted co-conspirator Karl Rove thinks that some day we'll all really dig on pre-emptive war. You know, the way he does. When the day comes that everyone in the United States has to get a nose-picking, brain dead, son of a marginal-at-best former President, we'll see the upside of pre-emptive war (you know, genocide by war plane).
VIDEO: Petraeus on BBC. VIDEO: Peter Jennings on the forgeries that led to the outing of Valerie Plame. More on that (from me) here. This video (blurry) is from June 2003.
His parents originally fled Iran to Canada for political asylum in 1995, where they sought but were denied refugee status. Consequently, the family, which now included Canadian-born Kevin, was deported and returned to Iran, where Kevin's father was subsequently detained, beaten, and tortured over a period of three months. Not the worst treatment in history, but not a party, either.
Kevin's family attempted to return to Canada, but unanticipated events caused their airplane to land in Puerto Rico, and then on U.S. soil. And now the family has been "detained" in the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center, the United States' kinder, gentlerdetention center for children families, for four weeks. Human rights groups have called the U.S. government to shut the center down.
About 170 children, including 9-year old Kevin, are currently detained in this former maximum security prison deep in the heart of Texas where they enjoy:
An eight-metre-high chain-link fence
Uniformed guards
Cameras
Metal detectors
Lasers
A single hour of school instruction per day
Canned beans
15 minutes per meal
Inadequate medical care
Lack of privacy
3 head counts per day, which require an hour of cell time apiece
Ongoing threat of separation of children and parents
Exemption from teacher licensing requirements
Exemption from child care licensing requirements
Forced separation of parents and children at night
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. ~Dostoyevsky (1821-81)
Kevin's family is in International Limbo because of the politics of Nationality.
"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors." -- George Herbert Walker Bush, 1999.
Was George Herbert Walker Bush unknowingly referring to Dick Cheney when he said these words in 1999? Hey, don't ask us, we're the guys with a picture of a guillotine on our site. Of course we think he did. In fact, I would be shocked if anyone on the blogrolls of the entire Unruly Mob believed that Dick Cheney did not deliberately out CIA agent Valerie Plame in order to help his cause--getting us into Iraq.
But here's some news for the independents who may be joining the grim reality of the Bush reign of terror--have you heard the one about the politically motivated purge of several U.S. attorneys?--in progress: Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald believes there's a "cloud" over the actions of our Vice President.
From The Washington Post:
Fitzgerald's summation explained, in part, why he brought charges based on imperfect evidence against Libby, even though Libby was not a source for Robert D. Novak, the author of the July 14, 2003, newspaper column that outed Plame as a CIA employee.
The jury's verdict addresses Fitzgerald's first conclusion -- that Libby lied deliberately and did not misspeak from faulty memory. But the trial showed that the prosecutor finished his investigation with his mind made up that Libby's account was meant to hide his own involvement as well as to conceal the potential involvement of the vice president.
At the trial's close, Fitzgerald expressed his concern in unusually blunt terms. After Libby's lawyers complained that he was trying to put a "cloud" over Cheney without evidence to back it up, Fitzgerald told the jury on Feb. 20, "We'll talk straight."
There was, he said, "a cloud over what the vice president did" during the period before Novak's column was published, and it was created by testimony about Cheney directing Libby and others at the White House to disseminate information on Wilson and Wilson's criticisms.
The White House still will not talk about this case, despite the fact that all along they ducked taking questions on the Plame saga because they didn't want to violate the sanctity of an ongoing investigation. Now they refuse to talk about it because Libby's appeals are pending. Lame. Even Scott McClellen says it's time to answer questions.
So, will Dick Cheney--currently also at the center of the deep vein thrombosis hysteria and petty Bill Maher controversy--be forced to resign?
Lifted from a wingnut site. You can tell by the misspelling.
George W. Bush may be the only person in human history who actually says on his deathbed, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
And the MVP (Most Vacationed Preznit) ever cannot reconcile the volume of down time with the momentous events and upheavals that have taken place during his time in office both here and abroad. Imagine if John F. Kennedy was sailing in Hyannisport or playing touch football at the family compound during the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis or the US Steel strike.
The cancerous cells that were radical Republicans like Goldwater, who wanted to nuke Vietnam, would have probably metastasized to the point of virtually replacing the host body sooner than it had.
And the CPAC conference that took place last week in our nation’s capitol represented the very best (read: worst) that this virulent strain of conservatism had to offer. Sen. John McCain, slowly reliving his failing momentum of 2000, didn’t even bother showing up, it was so intolerably conservative.
McCain, an ordinarily affable but unforgivably calculating guy, is very well aware of the small but growing movement in his home state of Arizona that’s working like coolies with guns to their heads to keep him off the GOP presidential ballot. He must’ve known there would be more of the same awaiting him in DC.
The neocon repudiation of George W. Bush and his pork-packed budgets over the last six years and bloating the size of the government past the size that it was under the Clinton administration on the face of it sounded reasonable and justified. Conservatives like Schlafly traditionally champion ideals such as smaller government, greater states rights to govern themselves, less taxes, less spending.
However, we weren’t seeing moderate conservatives railing against Bush and his neocons. We were seeing neocons railing against a George Bush whom they think has abandoned neoconservative ideals on issues ranging from government spending to immigration (perhaps Bush’s sole true attempt at appeasing both sides of the aisle). And it showed an emerging Uber-Republican party struggling to rise from the ashes of Iraq.
If you were to take Richard Viguerie’s skewed poll as to what hamstrung the GOP in the ’06 elections, you’d see a conservative grassroots that seems to be more in touch with what toppled the Republican party from power (Bush himself, GOP leaders remaining silent when they became the party of big government, scandals, etc.).
If you ask maniacs like Newt Gingrich, it’s the Democrats’ fault that the Republican party was repudiated by the voters. As Gingrich wrote in a mass email last week, it was our impatience with them for not doing something about that damned welfare state that the Democrats had bequeathed to them (although they had twelve years in the House and still couldn’t do shit. I guess that’s our fault, too.).
This position isn’t very far from what Viguerie said in claiming that the Republicans allowed themselves to become as corrupt as the Democrats, which is a real hoot, since moral rot, as far as I know, isn’t communicable, and since every corruption scandal for the last several years save for one has involved at least one Republican, two of whom former Congressmen going to prison.
What was notable, aside from the glaringly obvious fact that recruiters seem to have forgotten about the annual conference that regularly promises thousands of college kids of prime recruiting age, was that the very same politicians who’d embarrassed the GOP over the last several years were loudly absent. Gone were longtime CPAC fixtures like Tom DeLay (although, to be fair to Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney, they had a good excuse not to be there) and George Allen.
So you see, it’s all our fault for corrupting them there pure-hearted conservative civil servants who discovered that Washington, DC wasn’t the sewer that they came to clean up but “a hot tub” (Inserting snide Tom DeLay reference in… three… two… one… Now.).
If you thought that the 1992 Republican National Convention was a viper pit of nastiness, the CPAC conference was at least five times as venomous. The Republicans, they were saying, just aren’t Republican enough.
This coming on the heels of six consecutive deficits that were nonexistent for several years before 2001, a rising debt approaching nine trillion, neverending tax breaks that are breaking the bank, literally, in a time of war. A corrupt, unwinnable quagmire in Iraq with Afghanistan beginning to circle the drain. A spy outed simply out of retribution for her husband threatening to discredit an administration that lied us into war, an outing that (sort of) resulted in a conviction.
Throw in illegal, extra-FISA warrantless wiretapping, financial datamining, a USA PATRIOT Act that allows the FBI to seize book purchase receipts and library records to see what we’re reading, a signing statement authorizing Bush to read our mail, our Internet activities reported to the feds by search engines, tens of thousands of American citizens put on No Fly Watch Lists and international terrorist alerts for no apparent reason.
Extraordinary rendition where people disappear into literal black holes, detainee torture, rape, murder and maiming of Iraqi and Afghani civilians. Huge detention centers built by Kellogg, Brown and Root. A starved and neglected city in the Gulf coast. The repeal of clean air and water standards and outrageous tax breaks for the benefit of petroleum cartels during a time of record profits.
A cutting of funds for the VA and countless social service programs. The Walter Reed scandal. Rampant cronyism that actually resulted in the deaths of thousands, malfeasance of Iraqi oil revenue and taxpayer dollars. The list of high crimes and misdemeanors is almost literally endless.
And the problem? The neocons aren’t conservative enough.
Apparently the immediate immolation of all gays and illegal aliens is too conciliatory. Maybe the neocons at CPAC couldn’t find it in their black little hearts to forgive the Republican party for not completely disbanding the IRS and putting an end to the NEA, Head Start and Social Security. As if George W. Bush hadn’t destroyed us enough both domestically and abroad, this new, even more fascistic strain represented by Phyllis Schlafly, Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich says they can do better.
Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation actually said that the rich are getting screwed. Yes, he actually said that.
If CPAC 2007 isn’t a ringing endorsement for the Democratic party and a call to arms to keep us in the majority in Congress and to put us back in the White House, then nothing is.
The ironic thing is that both liberal progressives and conservatives of all stripes are in the same position they were in six years ago: Nobody is in sight to lead their party and their nation and both sides are largely cynical if not outright contemptuous of its leading standard bearers.
In the balance, I have to say that the Republicans are even more lost and anarchic than we are, which is saying a fuck of a lot.
In my opinion, the biggest story in the news these past few weeks, and getting less attention than it deserves is the tale of eight US attorneys who have been recently been fired to make way for more pliant Bu$hCo™ appointees. As Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo) opines, "I suspect many of the press lords haven't awoken yet to the potential magnitude of this story." And I'll tell you why I think it's so big.
It marks a further erosion of the Constitution, especially the separation of powers doctrine.
Many of the attorneys who were fired have been prominently involved in corruption cases against GOP insiders, notably Carol Lam of California who prosecuted Randy 'Duke Cunningham.
Many of the replacement appointees are themselves prominent GOP insiders, including J. Timothy Griffin, one of KKKarl Rove's aides.
At least one of the fired attorneys appears to claim that he was fired because he refused to launch investigations into an alleged Democratic kickback scheme just before the midterm elections.
It comes on the heels of recent firings and replacement of federal JUDGES, made possible by a clause inserted into the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act in the middle of the night. It looks like the intent is to make the entire justice department into a wholly owned subsidiary of Bu$hCo™.
"Discussions began in October at the Justice Department about removing prosecutors who were considered flawed or deficient in carrying out administration policy by law enforcement officials, lawmakers and others, several officials said. The White House eventually approved the list and helped notify Republican lawmakers before the Dec. 7 dismissals, officials said.. ..The list of prosecutors who were targets was approved by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and the deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, the day-to-day manager of the Justice Department since he was appointed in the fall of 2005."
Perhaps the most profoundly disturbing case to date is the one involving David Iglesias of New Mexico. From the San Diego Union Tribune: New Mexico Senator Peter Domenici acknowledges he asked David Iglesias about an investigation into an alleged Democratic kickback scheme prior to the 2006 mid-term election. Iglesias "said last week that he was shocked to receive two separate phone calls in mid-October from lawmakers who asked about details of the investigation and seemed eager to see an indictment before the 2006 election" and claims he was also contacted by another Republican legislator, identified as Representative Heather Wilson. Domenici says that he did not pressure or threaten Iglesias, but when things didn't go the way Domenici expected Iglesias' position was terminated. You be the judge, but I call that pressure.
Daniel Bogden of Nevada looked into the reasons for his dismissal, and the answer he received puts the lie to any claim that it was performance related, as reported in The Seattle Times:
"Bogden, who was named the top federal prosecutor in Nevada in 2001 after 11 years of working his way up at the Justice Department, asked an official at the agency's headquarters if the firing was related to his performance or to that of his office. 'That didn't enter into the equation,' he said he was told.
After several more calls, Bogden reached a senior official who offered an answer. 'There is a window of opportunity to put candidates into an office like mine,' Bogden said, recalling the conversation. 'They were attempting to open a slot and bring someone else in.' "
“I and my colleagues are the same people in December of 2006 that we were in 2001,” said one former prosecutor who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “The only thing that has changed is the administration of the Department of Justice. We were making the same arguments and the same points before.” (New York Times, cited above) Clearly the reasons cited for the prosecutors' dismissal is utterly bogus.
This story is going to become MUCH more prominent due to Thursday's AP wire story from the San Jose Mercury News,
"A House committee is compelling four of at least eight U.S. attorneys ousted from office in recent months to tell their stories under oath after one prosecutor said he believes he was fired for political reasons.
Democrats on a House Judiciary subcommittee voted 7-0 Thursday to subpoena fired prosecutors Carol Lam of California, David Iglesias of New Mexico, H.E. "Bud" Cummins of Arkansas and John McKay of Seattle. No Republicans member of the subcommittee attended the session, which lasted less than five minutes.
Democrats said they are troubled that the Bush administration may be punishing prosecutors for being too effective at pursuing political corruption cases."
"It looks as if the four are willing to tell their stories, but only if they are compelled to do so. (It might be interesting to ask them who asked them to keep silent.)"
Last week’s almost completely ignored Assclowns of the Week had a theme: Republicans who provided aid and comfort to al-Qaida. This week, in wake of the annual CPAC conference in which arch neocon George W. Bush (4, 10) was roundly slammed by Phyllis Schlafly to the great delight of the unsatisfied maniacs in the crowd, we’re seeing clearer signs than ever of the spousal abuse syndrome that characterizes the party of conservative compassion.
We’d heard Condoleezza Rice (5) say on ABC a week ago that Congress should abdicate its role as a co-equal branch of government and not get in the way of George Bush’s “enormous successes” in Iraq; The US Army (2) assign blame for the Walter Reed scandal squarely where it belonged: On the wounded troops they victimize; The Bush administration and American Enterprise Institute (1) for fervently applauding a Lebanese psychopath who fervently applauds the killing of US troops and Ann Coulter (8) who was likewise fervently applauded by the very crowd that she’d insulted.
So, obviously, spousal abuse works both ways in the Republican party. So, before we go on, let’s bow our heads in gratitude that Dick Cheney escaped the bomb blast in Bagram early this week because you-know-who is one heartbeat away from the Presidency.
10 George Bush
Sometimes it’s hard to see progress when you’re living close to the scene. I guess the New Orleans Saints football team represents to me what’s happening in this part of the state — a resurgence, there’s a renewal. Even though there’s a lot of work to do, the spirit of the people down here is strong.
In a nation of neocon hypocrites, Lonnie Latham, a former member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, stands head and shoulders above the rest. Or he would be if he wasn’t on his knees so often. And it’s not enough that a year ago this clown did essentially the same thing as Ted Haggard in soliciting for gay sex while foaming at the mouth from behind his pulpit every Sunday about how “sinful and destructive” homosexuality is.
No, it was virtually mandated (no pun intended, no really) that Lonnie’s defense would be that he didn’t do anything illegal, which may be true enough, and that any God-fearing Republican hypocrite ought to be free to solicit for gay sex. And to add that extra little ironic twist, the Oklahoma chapter of the ACLU, those wicked liberal shysters, are taking up his cause, filing a brief that claims his right to free speech was impinged upon.
All of which, I’m sure, will subsequently be profusely appreciated. That is, after Pastor Ted gets his online Masters in psychology and passes on the miracle of his three week-long therapeutic regimen.
And while we’re in the subject of “faggots…”
8) Ann Cunter
Some of the most intriguing mysteries of our time:
How come the 23rd century Captain Kirk’s communicator can’t take pictures or videos like our 21st century cell phones?
Why does Brazil play hockey but not baseball like the rest of South America?
And why does CPAC, year after year, keep inviting long-legged bile duct Ann Coulter when she’s guaranteed to embarrass the Republican party and insult the guests, appearances that inevitably result in chagrined silences to calls to Republicans’ offices?
Yep, leave it to good old Adam’s Apple Annie to stick to the salient political issues. At this week’s annual CPAC conference in which every Republican presidential candidate save for Mad Jack McCain sucked up to the Dark Side to prove how properly evil they were to be President, Ann Coulter closed her remarks by saying on CSPAN, “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I -- so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”
This was at least as offensive as her remarks at last year’s CPAC in which Coulter referred to Muslims as “ragheads.” This time, as with last year, the mainstream media almost completely ignored her homophobic rant. The New York Times and the Washington Post did eventually get around to covering Coulter’s anti-gay remarks but only after the initial shock value was wasted.
And, as last year, the titillated audience appeared shocked then fervently applauded her bile retching because, well, it was aimed at a pretty boy Democrat so who cares? This doesn’t surprise me, that the Dark Side would support and cheer on such a hateful wouldbe standup comedian in much the same manner that the MSM pitches woo over neocon nutjob bloggers who plainly despise them while heaping scorn on liberal bloggers to prove their conservative chops to the right wingers. Because the neocon movement is merely a segment of a national population and a media that pulls a full blown nutty whenever Kanye West speaks the truth by saying that George Bush doesn’t like black people, two feminists attached to the Edwards campaign speak the truth about the sexist and misogynistic RCC and John Kerry says uneducated kids get sent to Iraq.
But if Ann Coulter wants to dive into the mud wrestling pit to call John Edwards a faggot and to complain that using the word faggot is unjustly politically incorrect, it’s entertainment or harmless fun.
Except this time even noted conservative bloggers like Captain Ed and Michelle Malkin have no stomach for this kind of “political discourse,” even though Coulter wrote Adam Nagourney, “C’mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean.”
Because, after all, the word “faggot is just a naughty name.” So I guess you won’t be offended, Annie, if I call you a “tranny cunt with Tourette’s.”
I’d like to propose right here and now that we get the Parsons Group back in Basra so they can finish building that childrens’ cancer hospital so we can get Pickles off the talking head circuit and get her to shut her cigarette hole on grownup matters.
You see, according to the First Lady of cluelessness, while there are several bombs that go off a day in Iraq, there’s only one a day that really bothers people.
So, who would these people be: Americans who have loved ones that are all too often in the blast radius or the Iraqis who are victimized by such attacks 240 times a day? What’s there to get upset about if your child or mother was torn to shreds in a blast that may’ve only killed a couple of more when al-Qaida-aided Sunni insurgents can kill 40, 50, 60 or more once a day? And I guess we should blame the liberal MSM for paying attention to that one attack and one attack a day that upsets everyone so much?
And far be it for Pickles to ask Hubby in between Heimlichs whose fault it is for catalyzing these attacks that kill over 100 Iraqis a day and for being unable to stop them (especially since he and the Saudis are directly and indirectly funding al-Qaida).
It was interesting that Larry King would’ve said, “This war has not asked people to sacrifice very much” just after asking about the twins.
6) The Bush Administration
“Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see… visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities.” - George W. Bush, January 10, 2007
After $4,200,000,000 and four years, you’d think the Iraqi people would have at least as much electricity now as they did in the Saddam era. But they don’t. While megawatt generation is comparable to pre-invasion figures (3,958 megawatts per month before US occupation as opposed to 3,640 megawatts as of last month), the average amount of electricity “enjoyed” by the average Baghdad resident was 4.4 hours per day last January. According to this USAID report, they’d reached a peak of 4584 megawatts by July of 2004. And despite the backslide due to terrorist and insurgent attacks and corrupt, lazy and inefficient American contractors like Bechtel, we hope to reach those glorious heights again, comrades!
But that’s just the beginning of the good news, comrades! For Baghdad and all of gloriously free and democratic Iraq will have power ’round the clock… a decade after the glorious invasion.
That’s right, according to “Army Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, the senior U.S. military officer overseeing reconstruction efforts… the Iraq government plans to increase power generation ‘to catch up with demand’ for electric power by 2013, ‘somewhere in around that area.’”
Shades of Rumsfeld! With exact prognostications like that, what could go wrong? The good news, comrades, is that four of those years have passed already and there’s just six short years to go!
And yet more good news, comrades! Consumption of electrical doodads has increased by 70% even if consumption of electricity has plummeted! We bet you’re dying, literally dying, to start using those blenders, pasta makers and espresso machines, aren’t you, comrades? Huzzah!
Or rather, that was the gist of what she said to George Stephanopolous: "Then you're going to have the worst of micromanagement of military affairs. And it's always served us badly in the past." More and more, we’re seeing various senior administration officials coming out of the woodwork in what can only be described as batterer’s syndrome.
It doesn’t matter how compliant and accommodating Congress has been in the past in voting in massive tax cuts in a time of war that they’d also authorized, not to mention hundreds of billions to fund those wars, a PATRIOT Act, several renewals, military tribunal bills, assclown neocon judicial appointments, you name it.
But the minute wifey starts whispering a protest, the Bush White House slips on the wife beater shirt and goes into brass knuckle mode, screaming, “Fuck you and shut up! Now where’s the money you’ve been hiding in the sugar bowl? The guys are outside waiting!”
Of course, Condi never mentioned how Cheney huffed and puffed his way into Langley five years ago and pimpsticking the analysts to tell him what he wanted to hear: flawed intelligence that was part of a massive failure that, praised be God, still turned into enormous successes!
Likewise hubby’s micromanaging of Congress and his meddlesome and wearying insistence that they hurry up and rubber-stamp his every Jim Beam-influenced idea.
4) George Bush and Sam Fox
527 Things I Hate About You.
Bush has placed enough foxes to mind the henhouse, so why not send a Fox to Belgium?
If you put together enough assholes who have been nominated by George W. Bush, it paints a pretty compelling picture of back-scratching cronyism and slimy thank you’s for a job well done. This was memorably exemplified in the Senate confirmation hearings of Sam Fox, Bush’s nominee for ambassador to Belgium.
To give it that fillip that seems peculiar to politics of late, one of the senators on the Foreign Relations Committee was none other than my homie John Kerry, who asked Fox a series of rapid fire questions regarding his $50,000 contribution to the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth that helped derail his 2004 presidential campaign.
After the usual niceties, Kerry then threw Fox one curveball after another, asking him about the politics of personal destruction and his $50,000 contribution to the dirtiest 527 group ever assembled. What followed was a true testament to and an enduring profile of Republican courage.
After changing his pants and slipping into his kneepads, Fox sounded positively liberal in his vilification of 527 groups and somehow was heard, over the rising chorus of choked-back guffaws, telling Kerry that he was “a hero.”
Fox must’ve really wanted that job in Brussels or wants to get the fuck out of St. Louis bad.
While Ann Coulter was captured on CSPAN calling John Edwards a faggot to the disinterest of the mainstream media, said fourth estate was going wild over the revelation that Al Gore has a huge carbon footprint, courtesy of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. Who’s the Tennessee Center for Policy Research? Well, they’re a nonpartisan organization that’s interested only finding out the truth about…
Oh, who the fuck are they kidding? They’re the next Swiftboat Veterans for Truth who went into spin mode the minute Al Gore & Co. won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for An Inconvenient Truth. You see, by “proving” that Al Gore uses more electricity in a day than most homes do in a month, that somehow proves that global warming is a myth, after all, an irony whose bones were jumped by every right-thinking neocon out there. Bloggers, incidentally, who couldn’t be concerned with trifling matters like the Walter Reed outpatient scandal, the Bush administration’s bungled case for Iran’s complicity in Iraq and Bush’s secretly funneling money to at least three al-Qaida-backed Sunni insurgent groups.
Thank Dave Johnson and James Boyce at the Huff Po for keeping track of the verminous horde of liars and for exposing the TCPR’s real agenda. It won’t be any surprise to find out who funds them. (Hint: Their president Drew Johnson oozed out of the Exxon-subsidized American Enterprise Institute, which set up mosh pits earlier this week in Walid Jumblatt’s honor.).
2) The US Army
General Weightman’s former mansion, which is right across the street from Building 18. Opulence and decrepitude juxtaposed.
In a followup article, Dana Priest and Anne Hull found out that Walter Reed senior staff “heard a stream of complaints about outpatient treatment over the past several years.” This, after CO For a Day Kiley claiming that the problems of Building 18 were few and minor and “were not emblematic” of any neglect of their patients.
Kiley, incidentally, lives literally across the street from Building 18, so he’s either the biggest fucking liar or the stupidest and least observant man on earth, even after “sensing sessions“ in 2005 that are town hall meetings to address problems to senior Walter Reed staff. To give yourself an idea of how closely the Army closes ranks to any kind of questioning or criticism, check out these three paragraphs:
Last October, Joyce Rumsfeld, the wife of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was taken to Walter Reed by a friend concerned about outpatient treatment. She attended a weekly meeting, called Girls Time Out, at which wives, girlfriends and mothers of soldiers exchange stories and offer support.
According to three people who attended the gathering, Rumsfeld listened quietly. Some of the women did not know who she was. At the end of the meeting, Rumsfeld asked one of the staff members whether she thought that the soldiers her husband was meeting on his visits had been handpicked to paint a rosy picture of their time there. The answer was yes.
When Walter Reed officials found out that Rumsfeld had visited, they told the friend who brought her -- a woman who had volunteered there many times -- that she was no longer welcome on the grounds.
This kind of defensive reprisal has survived to this day since the Army Times reports that soldiers are being punished, being made to wake up at six and to muster for daily inspections at seven. I guess these are the people whom Robert Gates wants to “hold accountable.”
George Bush has promised to start up a bipartisan panel investigating the debacle that happened right under his gin-blossomed nose, a debacle that’s a deadly combination of outsourcing, apathy and self-serving defensiveness. Let’s hope that this bipartisan panel is more interested in getting to the truth than the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and the ISG.
Now, if you still have any doubts as to how committed Bush and the far right wing is to the troops…
1) George Bush and the AEI
Politics makes strange bedfellows. Or, in this case, diseased fuck buddies.
Can somebody please tell me how an anti-semitic maniac who’d gotten his diplomatic visa revoked over three years ago for wishing out loud that Paul Wolfowitz had been killed in a rocket attack and that the killing of US troops in Iraq was “legitimate and obligatory” would wind up meeting with George W. Bush on the 26th and speaking to fervent applause at the American Enterprise Institute?
Incredible as it sounds, Walid Jumblatt, an anti-American, anti-Zionist, anti-Iran and anti-Syria radical member of the Lebanese parliament who’s calling for regime change in Syria just as loudly as the Far Right is for regime change in Iran, which Jumblatt is also throwing in for good measure, has the politically tin ear of the Bush administration.
Questions:
Gee, that couldn’t be why he was speaking at the neocon AEI think tank, because they have a common perceived enemy in Iran, could it? The Druze leader wouldn’t be using the new anti-Iranian sentiment to achieve his own nefarious aims, would he?
And how could Bush, whose meeting with Jumblatt was kept on the QT with no comment, maintain with a straight face that he still supports the troops after the Walter Reed mess and meeting with this nut job while refusing to see Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was one of the soldiers whose death Jumblatt celebrated as “legitimate and obligatory”?
I wonder if Jumblatt also considers “legitimate and obligatory” the slaughter of his own people last July at the hands of the Israelis while allies Bush and Rice twiddled their thumbs and refused to call for a cease-fire?
If you can get past the hideous irony of the US Army thinking that they could literally whitewash over the problems at Building 18, you’d still bend your nose walking into the realization that the Army bent over backwards (to the point of changing the costs of patient care to favor the bidders) to outsource patient care contracts to a former Halliburton executive named Al Neffgen who runs a band of fuckups called IAG Worldwide Services (which boasts, if you want to boast about such a thing, Dan Quayle on their board of directors). (3 page .PDF file)
Neffgen, you may or may not recall, was called to testify before Congress back in July of ’04 about Halliburton’s/KBR’s gouging the taxpayer to the tune of tens of millions in fuel distribution costs. IAG, you may also recall, was given a fat contract to deliver ice to survivors of Hurricane Katrina, which was yet another job they completely fucked up.
If you feel like being outraged, read Congressman Henry Waxman’s letter to George W. Weightman (6 page .PDF file). I’m a political junkie who reads congressional reports and letters, especially if they’re written by my most righteous dude Waxman, like entertainment people read Variety. However, if you have an aversion to Congressionalese, let me break it down to the most damning and infuriating abstracts:
When IAG put in a bid to take over support operations for Walter Reed Hospital, the Army decided that the defense department could do the job more cheaply. IAG, their Republican sensibilities appalled and outraged, squealed at the injustice of being left out in the cold. The Army, on hearing their complaints, then raised their own bid by $7,000,000, thereby making it look by conspicuous relief as if the civilian contractor was putting in the lower bid!
When the people already doing the job at Walter Reed protested, they found that that the A-76 program that goes back to Al Gore prevented them from appealing the decision.
At the time the obligatory cost-plus contract was handed out to Neffgen’s cronies, there were 300 capable people on staff at Walter Reed facilitating outpatient care in a variety of support services. By the time IAG took over (less than a month ago or a year after they were awarded the $120,000,000 contract), only 60 remained. When IAG took over, they shitcanned the remaining 60 and replaced them with only 50 of their own unprepared people.
Bottom line: There are now 50 ill-trained and clueless people doing the work of 300, which begins to explain why male outpatients are getting gynecological records and otherwise have fallen through the cracks in the system.
So who does the Army punish? The wounded troops who dared seek catharsis and sympathy for their execrable plight by talking to the press (more on that in this weekend‘s Assclowns of the Week). True, they fired Weightman, then Army Secretary Fran Harvey himself got shitcanned by Defense Secretary Gates for replacing Weightman with a clown like Gen. Kiley, a guy who to this day blows off the charges of neglect as nothing to worry about. Kiley’s very temporary installment as Walter Reed’s chief showed that the Army, as with this massively indifferent administration, thinks defensively first and doing the right thing last.
Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, a former hematologist, is now the chief at Walter Reed, so kudos to Dr. Gates for firing Harvey (although that, too, could’ve been done for political expediency, a way of amputating the rot before it got to Gates’ office at the Pentagon. If Gates really wants to impress me, he could stop stonewalling and allow Weightman to answer Waxman's congressional subpeona to testify).
Although the shocking neglect of our troops is rightfully turning into one of the biggest Bush administration scandals and ought to remain on the front burner as a campaign issue (civilians aren’t the only ones in desperate need of adequate health care, it turns out), the Republican disease of outsourcing (or “privatizing”) has gotten so completely out of control, has corrupted the system so utterly and completely, that it threatens to undermine our very economic infrastructure.
Go back to the link on Dan Quayle’s name. Click on it, please. It’s an article originally published in the Washington Post in October 2005 about how corrupt the outsourcing trend has gotten. What was championed by Al Gore as a way for the private sector to compete with the Defense Department in a free market society has turned into a tiny clubhouse with a very few, very fat kids and the smaller kids are told in no uncertain terms that they’re not welcome.
Thank the Small Business Association for that, the one headed up, thanks to crony George Bush, by Steven Preston, a former executive at a large corporation who‘s been nothing but hostile toward small business. And thank Preston’s gang, also, for rewriting the rules and allowing corporations that employ 10,000 or more and boast over a billion in annual revenue to still qualify as small businesses so they can vulture contracts like the ones on the post-Katrina Gulf Coast.
Vice President Al Gore may or may not have had the right idea when he allowed private corporations to compete with the military for contracts. However, it didn’t require a crystal ball to predict that the Republican party would subvert this “free market competition” and turn it into a feeding trough for their buddies.
The Walter Reed Horror Show, especially in the now-closed down Building 18, just puts a new face on this trend that prizes cost plus, no-bid contracts and making of money, money, money and places competency at the bottom of their list of priorities. Whether it’s the complex and labor-intensive job of providing outpatient support services to hundreds of wounded soldiers, turning on the power in Baghdad, building clinics and hospitals in Iraq, feeding our troops and giving them potable water or merely delivering ice to flood victims, it’s a guaranteed given that if you hire a Republican-run company affiliated with the Bush administration, they can and will completely fuck everything up beyond all recognition.
AND WE’RE PAYING THROUGH THE FUCKING NOSE FOR IT.
So why do we continue standing for it, especially when even the troops who come back wounded and barely alive for protecting Halliburton’s stake in Iraq, are getting shortchanged and even being punished for speaking out about their ongoing victimization?
Barry Bonds says he's getting death threats. As he closes in on Hank Aaron's home run record--Bonds needs 22 home runs to catch Aaron--people seem pissed off at him for some reason. Could it be because at the age of 42, his power is manufactured in a laboratory?
People, death threats? That seem like an extreme response to someone achieving a high position in American life based on lies. Come on guys. Calm down and settle for something more fitting--like impeachment followed by removal from office, a trial at the world court after which he can spend the rest of his life in jail.
Wait... wrong post.
Anyway, there's more trouble with the roids, and this time, the spotsholes have company from the celebrities. Turds of a feather...
From Reuters:
ORLANDO, Florida - Authorities broke up a suspected steroid ring in Florida on Tuesday that is accused of distributing anti-aging treatments to celebrities and muscle-building drugs to professional athletes.
At least eight people were arrested in Florida, New York and Texas and up to 24 people face felony arrests following a year-long investigation led by the district attorney of Albany County, New York, officials said.
"There are celebrities involved in the case as consumers," Albany District Attorney David Soares told reporters in Orlando.
Officials also confirmed a report in Albany Times Union that the investigation could expose steroid use by current and former Major League Baseball players, National Football League players, bodybuilders and college and high school athletes.
