If At First You Don’t Succeed

If At Second You Don’t Succeed…

If At Ninth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Eleventh You Don’t Succeed…

If At Sweet Sixteenth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Twenty First You Don’t Succeed…

If At Twenty Ninth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Thirty Three and a Third You Don’t Succeed…

If At Thirty Ninth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Thirty Ninth but really Fortysomethingth You Don’t Succeed

If At Forty Eighth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Fiddy You Don’t Succeed…

If At Fifty Fifth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Sixtieth…which is the new Fortieth anyway You Don’t Succeed…

If At Sixty Twoest You Don’t Succeed…

If At Sixty Fifth You Aren’t Ready to Retire…

If At Three Score and Tenth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Mission Accomplished You Don’t Succeed…

If At Seventy Second You Don’t Succeed…

If At Seventy ‘Leventh You Don’t Succeed…

If At The Big Eight Oheth You Don’t Succeed…

If At The Bigger Eight Fifth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Four Score and Seventh You Don’t Succeed…

If At Hundredth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Thousandth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Two Thousandth You Don’t Succeed…

If At Three Thousandth You Don’t Succeed…

If At God Damned 3,468th You Don’t Succeed...

..Just keep moving that fucking target until Commander Cuckoo Bananas, can drunk-dive into his own shitkickers


and call it a victory parade.



From the Los Angeles Times (emphasis added)

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ: U.S.-IRAN TALKS; U.S. OBJECTIVES; DEADLY ATTACKS
Iraq likely to miss goals set by U.S.

Military officers doubt top objectives -- sharing of oil revenue, provincial elections and integration of Sunni Arabs -- will be achieved before a September report to Congress.
By Julian E. Barnes
Times Staff Writer

May 29, 2007

WASHINGTON — U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success.
…

Again

In September, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, is scheduled to present Congress with an assessment of progress in Iraq. Military officers in Baghdad and outside advisors working with Petraeus doubt that the three major goals set by U.S. officials for the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki will be achieved by then.

Enactment of a new law to share Iraq's oil revenue among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions is the only goal they think might be achieved in time, and even that is considered a long shot. The two other key benchmarks are provincial elections and a deal to allow more Sunni Arabs into government jobs.

With overhauls by the central government stalled and with security in Baghdad still a distant goal, Petraeus' advisors hope to focus on smaller achievements that they see as signs of progress, including local deals among Iraq's rival factions to establish areas of peace in some provincial cities.

…

Military officers said they understood that any report that key goals had not been met would add to congressional Democrats' skepticism. But some counterinsurgency advisors to Petraeus have said it was never realistic to expect that Iraqis would reach agreement on some of their most divisive issues after just a few months of the American troop buildup.

Screw the “few months of the American troop buildup.”

What about the two-and-a-half long, bloody, happytalk filled years since the government of Iraq was handed over to the Iraqis?

What about the three long, bloody, happytalk filled years since “Purple Fingers”?

What about the four long, bloody, happytalk filled years since “Mission Accomplished”?

Just ask Lil’ Freddy Kagan, discredited Neocon chickenhawk thinkster, and sibling of Robert “Mr. PNAC” Kagan.

He'll tell you.

...
"I think the political progress will be mostly of this local variety," said Kagan, who recently visited Iraq and met with American commanders.

Over the last six months, military leaders have pointed to the success of Army Col. Sean MacFarland in negotiating with tribal leaders in Ramadi to bring relatives into the local security forces and win their support against Al Qaeda insurgents in Al Anbar province.
…

The push for smaller, local deals represents a significant shift for the Bush administration, which has emphasized that security in Baghdad has to be the top priority to allow the central government to make progress toward national political reconciliation. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have pressured Iraqi political leaders to reach key agreements by the end of summer.

But Gates said last week that U.S. officials may have over-emphasized the importance of Iraq's central government.

"One of the concerns that I've had," Gates said, "was whether we had focused too much on central government construction in both Iraq and Afghanistan and not enough on the cultural and historical, provincial, tribal and other entities that have played an important role in the history of both countries."

The new command has realized that there will be no quick national-level deal on the key issues, said the senior military officer in Baghdad.

"You are talking about Sunnis who had power and Shiites who have power forgetting about what happened over the last 30 years," the officer said. "How easy is that going to be?"

It actually sounds pretty fucking hard to me, but what do I know? I’m no Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizard.

But then again, isn’t that exactly the sort of thing you keep all those Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizards around to dope out? To have the details shit meticulously and comprehensively calculated to a thousand significant digits before we decapitated Iraq and let the place go from a prosperous, secular country with a brutal dictator to something out of the third reel of “The Road Warrior”?

To at least come up with an exit strategy that wouldn’t make a Ralph Kramden get-rich-quick scheme look like the plans for D-Day by comparison?

I mean any shitwhistle dangling off of a barstool on Air Force One can boldly declare "We are gonna land a man on the friggin Sun!" but isn't the whole reason you keep Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizards on tap (other than their legendary taint lavings and mojitos) so they can work out little details like "How do we get anywhere near the Sun without getting incinerated?"

("We will, of course, go at night, Tim," Dick Cheney states confidently on, "Meet the Press", March 2008. "I truly believe we will be greeted as refrigerators.")

Isn’t this why Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizards are incessantly rammed down our throats? Because they are Very Serious Experts who talk about Complicated Grown-Up Stuff with Very, Very Serious Pundists?

Because the wisdom Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizards shines like the light of a million suns?

Because the old womanish and treasonous warnings and trepidations and cautions and pleas of “Oh for God’s sake,please don’t drive this country off the cliff” of the Dirty Hippies are as dust beneath the chariot wheels of the omniscient brilliance of the Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizards?

Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizards like Kagan. Or Cheney. Or Feith. Or the smaller, auxilary Kagan. Or Wolfie. Or Perle. Or Kristol.

Oh wait a minute, I forgot that The Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizards did figure this all out!

And they deigned to share it with all of us little, stupid non-Great Throbbing Neocon Brain Wizards:

There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."

~William Kristol,
April 4th, 2003

And in case you need a translation, this

"...The push for smaller, local deals represents a significant shift for the Bush administration, which has emphasized that security in Baghdad has to be the top priority to allow the central government to make progress toward national political reconciliation."

means our newest strategy will be to focus in on mediating the disputes of the Uncle Yusufs and al Aver Wendel Douglases of Iraqi's Hootervilles and Petticoat Junctions, while letting Metropolis burn.

Steal This Schnook

Dubya's Extreme Makeover

Years ago, the elder sages of Left Blogylvania predicted that once the full, breathtaking, pandimensional scope of Dubya’s serial crimes, treasons and fuckups began to swim into focus, the Conservatives would find themselves in a terrible bind.

First, they have made Saint Ronnie the Ur-Conservative. Have made it an article of faith that the closer one moves to perfect Gipperhood, the closer one moves to a pure, noumenal Conservative form.

But when you air the room out of all the smoke from Peggy Noonan’s ideological hookah and get down to Reagan’s Legacy as defined by its results, you find the following:

1. A reckless foreign adventurism in the name of that Manifest Shining City Jebus Pax Americana thingie they all believe in…as long as it is other people’s kids who spill their blood.

2. A penchant for first manufacturing tyrants and terrorists and then feigning shock when they behave like tyrants and terrorists.

3. Proudly presiding over the transfer of as much wealth and power as possible into as few hands as possible.

4. A contempt for the Poor and the Middle Class, and an evil enthusiasm for pitting one against the other to consolidate their power.

5. A contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law.

6. A barefaced reliance on lies and propaganda, and a converse contempt for a free and aggressive press.

7. A firm belief that government which helps people is Evil, while intrusive government which sides with corporate and fundamentalist interests against individuals and helps punish people from their workplace to their bedroom is Good. Government that punishes people in the name of Jebus is Extra Super Good.

8. A reflexive answer of “More tax cuts for rich people” to every problem. If the problems persist – if the tax cuts themselves are what has blown a hole below the waterline of the Ship of State -- you need to drill a bigger hole!

9. A giddy eagerness to give and get electoral reacharounds from the scum of the Segregationist South and the Religious Right.

So, second, by mapping these results-based-Reaganometrics over the record of the Crawford Dauphin, any idiot can see that Dubya has embraced each and every one of these core tenets of Modern Conservativism with a bloody vengeance.

That Dubya is, in fact, the Greatest Fucking Conservative Evah!

Third, the Right has spent most of its ink, bandwidth and lung capacity for six straight years ferociously defending their Dear Leader against any hint that he might be anything short of All Knowing, All Wise and All Benevolent. Anyone who takes sides against The Family gets thrown under the bus. Anyone who whispers a discouraging word gets the Full Rove. Anyone who simply points out that what the Dear Leader said last year is in direct contradiction to what he says now is a Liberal America Hater.

Anyone who dissents is a Traitor.

So after six years of relentlessly vicious slander against anyone who even respectfully disputed the Bicycle Chief Brilliance and his Mad Conservative Skillz, I laughed to myself at the suggestion by the sages of Left Blogylvania that the Conservatives would try to claw their way out of their intractable bind by attempting to distance themselves from Bush.

By actually resorting to disavowing him using the same universal epithet they use to hex away All Evilness Everywhere: by declaring him "Liberal".

Nah, I thought. They’ve gone all-in on their Dear Leader and, I thought, there just is no way they can back down now.

But of course I forgot to factor in the fact that the core of the GOP is now almost entirely composed of the reprogrammable golem of the 27%.

And the 27% are congenitally incapable of even entertaining the idea that their dogma can possibly fail. Dogma trumps blood. Trumps the Constitution. Trumps causality. Trumps truth. Trumps Reality itself, because like the Stalinists they so eeriely resemble, burned onto their motherboards is the ineradicably fanatical belief that Conservativism cannot Fail; Conservativism can only Be Failed.

These are junk citizens. Democracy’s Left Behindmost, and if you tell ‘em Dubya is the Second Coming of Reagan on Monday, they’ll cheer until their throats burst.

Then turn right around on Tuesday and tell ‘em he is a Sekrit Liberal, and they’ll boo just as loudly.

Tell ‘em on Wednesday that Dubya never existed and that Democrats are somehow magically to blame for Iraq and they’ll spaz out in wingnut ecstasy, jizz their Underoos, and start speaking in tongues.

Tell ‘em on Thursday that we are at war with Eastasia -- that we have always been at war with Eastasia – and they will march this country into the sea singing “Let The Eagle Soar”.

And so it has been on the Right for months now (example here) but, you might well ask, what Useful “Liberal” Idiot, could possibly be relied on to fall into line with this latest Conservative Lie so that the rest of the scuttlefish Right can stand on their hind legs and howl “You see! Libruls think Dubya’s a Librul too!”?

Why none other that Richard “I know funny and Stephen Colbert is not funny” Cohen.

Let the revisionism begin!

Bush the Neoliberal
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, May 29, 2007; A13
Years ago, someone coined the term "neoliberal." I was never sure what it meant, and it has since fallen into disuse, but whatever the case, I'd like to revive (and mangle) the term and apply it -- brace yourself -- to George W. Bush. He's more liberal than you might think.

You recoil, I know. After all, the conventional wisdom is that Bush is the most conservative of all presidents, an advocate of limited government, minimal taxes and, when it comes to the quintessentially liberal concern with civil liberties, the man who gave us the twin black eyes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It's an appalling record.

But consider this: An overriding principle of conservatism is to limit the role and influence of the federal government.
…

No. It’s not. It used to be a thousand years ago before the GOP was swallowed whole by Christopaths, Corporatists and Segregationists.

To continue to pretend otherwise says vastly more about the incredible intellectual dishonesty of Mr. Cohen than is says about anything having to do with what Liberal or Conservative means in the 21st Century.

Mr. Cohen then waxes rhapsodic about George Bush’s “liberal” attitudes towards education (Since when has a fetish for harshly conformist, uniform, teaching-to-the-test approach to learning been “liberal”?) and immigration, until finally his laserlike vision lands on Dubya’s Iraqi Catastrophe and why his motives were really “liberal”.

Cohen continues...

…
Allow me to make the case that this is also true when it comes to Iraq. I acknowledge that the war is a catastrophic mistake and was incompetently managed. But if you don't think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire, then one reason for our involvement was an attempt to do some good -- rid the world of a really bad guy and make life better for Iraqis and others in the region.

This "liberal" intent may have left Dick Cheney cold and found Don Rumsfeld indifferent, but it appealed to Bush and it showed in his rhetoric and body language.
…

"But if you don't think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire..." ?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Who but the most diehard wingnut believes that we went to war primarily for other, nobler reasons? Who but the most hard-core Bush regime dead-ender could parse the despicable lies we were told to trick us into Iraq and reach any other conclusion?

Cohen then completes this bleat-and-switch by awkwardly swiping the disaster that is Bush Presidency from the Temple of Ronnie,

running like hell, and lobbing the stinking, unequaled failure that is this Administatration’s record into my back yard.

Bush's neoliberal instincts have come a cropper across the board.
…

Fuck you, Cohen.

Nush/Cheney was the proud choice of the Right in 2000. They eagerly rode Dubya's Cornucopial Codpiece to victory in 2002, and knowing exactly who and what he was, they stood loudly and proudly with him in 2004 while he used every filthy scam in Conservative Karl Rove’s capacious witchbag to jam the worst Administration in American history back onto the throne.

And for good measure, Conservatives sent him back to complete his project of destroying the Federal Government with yet another rubber stamp Ultra Conservative Congress to drive the getaway car and act as his loyal footstool and bidet.

Starting with the Southern Strategy, Consertativism in American has long since devolved into nothing but braying, militant Ignorance, Racism and Fear plowing an arrow-straight furrow towards fascism in harness with Christopathic Fanaticism.

Reagan is their God. Dubya is his Prophet.

And, Mr. Cohen, the kindest thing that can be said of anyone who tries to gin up some ridiculous red herring that makes it easier for Conservatives to slip out of the noose they themselves spent 30 years weaving is that he is a blithering idiot.

So many typos

For such a classy paper.

Apparently I must once again bust out the red felt tip and edit copy for hapless NYT.

Gunmen Police Commandos Abduct Westerners in Iraq, Officials Say

By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, May 22 — Gunmen wearing police commando uniforms Police Commandos abducted several western civilians from a Finance Ministry compound in Baghdad today, Iraqi and American officials said, reviving questions about the links between official security forces and criminal gangs and sectarian militias. the use of excursive prose to skirt around the obvious fact that American-trained official security forces by day moonlight as criminal gangs and sectarian militias by night

The United States military also announced today that eight American soldiers died Monday northeast of Baghdad in separate attacks, making May the third deadliest month for American troops since the start of the war four years ago.

And in the capital, two car bombs slashed through congested urban areas, killing at least 27 people and wounding at least 97, according to an Interior Ministry official.

The abductions were conducted in broad daylight by gunmen in police vehicles police in vehicles who entered the fortified compound without firing a shot, according to witnesses, amplifying concerns about whether underscoring the idiocy of continuing the pretend that elements of Iraq’s government are tacitly or are not actively playing a role in attacks on westerners.

In recent weeks, some American military officials in Baghdad have said that a majority of the Iraqi security forces they work with report to militia leaders and cannot be trusted. Commanders in western Baghdad said that several roadside bombs targeting American convoys have recently detonated within view of Iraqi checkpoints.

Initial reports of who was kidnapped have varied and conflicted. An Interior Ministry official said the gunmen police abducted four German technology consultants. Some news outlets have reported that as many as five British citizens, including four security advisors, were among the captives while a witness to the abduction said he recognized an Iraqi policeman and a translator who were taken.

…


Gunmen in commando uniforms Commandos, driving at least four white SUVs, entered the compound without firing a shot, driving past guards and blast walls, according to witnesses and the Interior Ministry official. They then abducted the Westerners and fled.

“There was no resistance,” the Interior Ministry official said, suggesting that Finance Ministry officials either colluded tacitly or explicitly or they were intimidated by what appeared to be an official Iraqi police convoy.

Similar attacks at government buildings, mainly targeting Iraqis, have come in waves, with many occurring last year. In the most brazen assault, dozens of Iraqi employees of the Ministry of Higher Education were abducted in November from the ministry’s headquarters in Baghdad by militiamen dressed in police commando uniforms police commandos. Many of those victims have never been found.

That same month, men wearing Iraqi police uniforms Iraqi police kidnapped four American security guards and their Austrian colleague from a convoy near the Iraq-Kuwait border.

Jill Carroll, a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor, was also abducted last January — and held for three months — after leaving the office of Adnan Dulaimi, a leading Sunni politician.

The building attacked Tuesday was under Shiite control. The finance minister, Bayan Jabr, is a conservative Shiite frequently accused by Sunnis of encouraging sectarian violence.

It was Mr. Jabr, Iraq’s Interior Minister until last May, who oversaw the rapid growth of the Iraqi security forces. He is a senior member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and was once is also a brigade commander for the party’s militia, the Badr Brigade.
…

There. Isn’t that ever so much clearer?

You’d think that with 11,965 employees and annual revenues of 3.4 billion dollars (2005) the Times could toss a few of those Brooks/Friedman pfennigs around and get someone else to do this for them.

Why balance is bullshit.

Pictured here is Mike Ites and his son, both, serving with the Iowa National Guard in Iraq.

What and how he thinks should scare you.


From 60 Minutes, May 27, 2007 (emphasis added)



(Video here)

VO: Down the road in Wellsburg, at the Ites home, it is a father and son, Mike and Josh, who are shipping out together.

"I feel that God led me to do this job," says Mike Ites, who has been on the job 20 years, and is a fulltime guardsman.

At the time of the interview, Ites was 49 years old and was going on his first combat deployment to Iraq.

"What are your thoughts about the war in Iraq? What does it mean to you?" Pelley asks.

"Well, I believe that I'd rather be in their country keeping them turned down or from coming to America. What they did on 9/11 is a travesty," Mike Ites says.

"You draw a line from 9/11 through Iraq to the present day?" Pelley asks.

"I do," he replies.

Later in the segment (and transcribed by me, so any errors are my own):

VO: Mike Ites and his son Josh used to be on the same page.

Pelley: I have the sense here that you guys don’t see eye-to-eye on the war.

Mike Ites: That would be a true statement.

Pelley: There’s a difference of opinion. Josh, c’mon, tell me what you’re thinking.

Josh: I just feel we will be here a long time. And it’s gonna take a lot more time than what people think back home to fix what’s going on over here. From what I see, they don’t want us here.

Pelley: Mike? You disagree with that?

Mike Ites: Yeah. I believe that we’re supposed to be over here. Progress is being made. If you go back to 9/11 and what the people did there, and when the President asked “Do you want me to go after these people?”, the whole United State stood up in unison and said “Yes we do.” He says “This is going to be long and drawn out. Are you really sure you’re really going to stand with me.” And they said “Yes we will.”

Mike Ites: Well now some aren’t. Because the American People are a Gimme People, and Give it to me Now.

Pelley: You’re a little bit angry that the folks at home have turned against the war.

Mike Ites: You could say that

Pelley: More than a little bit.

Mike Ites: Well as I said, I believe in what we’re doing.

Of course per the Wingnut handbook, being “angry” means that anything Mike Ites says or thinks is automatically not credible.

Or is anger only a bridge too far when it comes to Liberals?

Conservative hypocrites simultaneously invent (Anyone who screamed for Clinton’s blood over trivia was just a Good American who Loved the Rule of Law) and violate (Anyone who even faintly questions any of the myriad grossly illegal, mendacious, sleazy, imbecilic or simply evil things Dear Leader Dubya has done is “deranged” and hates America) so many ridiculous “rules” about who gets to be in the Good American Clubhouse that that its hard to keep track anymore.

Anyway, for those of you kids out there thinking of becoming Big Time Journalists, you might be asking yourself “If I were Scott Pelley, what is the next question I would ask Mr. Ites?"

A friendly, roundabout question, like “Did you take a Big Bus or a Little Bus to Iraq?”

A medical question, like “Have you perhaps sustained head trauma that has severely damaged your higher reasoning centers?”

A blunt question, like “Where in the wide, wide world of sports did you ever get ahold of such a stupid fucking idea?”

None of which Scott Pelley even came close to asking, which is a shame, because there is no room left for polite, stilted, Broderian-fainting-couch reportage on the likes of Mr. Ites anymore.

Which itself is terribly sad because I’m quite sure he’s a churchgoing, family-centric, straight-arrow guy. Raised nice kids. Worked hard his whole life. Good neighbor who’d lend you his chain saw and show you how not to lose a finger using it.

And that he volunteers to stand between me and harm is damned noble.

No kidding, which is why it is so sad that his indefensibly idiotic opinions render all of these good points irrelevant.

2004 was a watershed year for a lot of people I know. Myself included. 2004 didn’t “radicalize” us in any sense – most of the people I’m thinking about haven’t changed their politics much in the last decade or so – but it “volatilized” us.

Or maybe “volumnized”.

We started using the word “fuck” a lot more, and a lot more loudly. As in “What the fuck are these morons thinking? Can’t they fucking read? Can’t they fucking rub two facts together and get anything but baffled? Oh, and who the fuck are these undecided freaks who, three weeks before the most important fucking vote of this generation, cannot make up their fucking minds?”

Like that.

It was when legions of us finally looked the Mike Ites’ of this country square in the face and realized that being polite and forgiving and Christian and tolerant and coolly rational to the generation of Red Staters who learned everything they know from suckling on the Limbaugh/Falwell teat had completely failed.

To borrow 3.5 tasty paragraphs from Christopher Hayes' terrific review of a sinister book entitled "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies" from here: (emphasis added)

For Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, the minimum wage is an iconic example of the economically backwards policies favored by the foolish masses. “In theory,” he writes, “democracy is a bulwark against socially harmful policies, but in practice it gives them safe harbor.” Examining this “paradox” takes up the rest of the book, but his explanation is pretty simple: Voters are crazy.

The Myth of the Rational Voter is best understood in the context of a long-standing academic debate over whether democracy works. It’s a question that has two related, but distinct, sub-components: Do democracies produce optimal policies for its citizens? And do democracies produce policies that accurately reflect the will of the majority?

The most sanguine observers say “yes” on both counts. But given that surveys consistently show that voters are distressingly ignorant about both the rudiments of policy (whether we spend more on foreign aid or social security) and politics (how many senators each state has), it’s a difficult case to make.
…

It’s tempting to dismiss Caplan’s thesis out of hand, because it’s so self-consciously “provocative” and because he’s translating an old discredited anti-democratic argument into the jargon of econocentric elite-speak. But if you support democracy, you must confront the fact that voters can often be stunningly under-informed and that majoritarianism run amok can lead to persecution, hatred and injustice. Reading Caplan’s book, then, is both bracing and necessary because it forces the reader to stare into the abyss—an abyss the author seems only too happy to jump into.

Mike Ites is the abyss into which the election of 2004 made so many of us stare.

Into the eyes of someone whose opinion is wrong. Simply, lethally, utterly wrong. And who is dug into that opinion so deep – who is so morally and psychologically invested in the lies his Dear Leader has told him to dance him off the cliff – that he cannot change his mind.

He dare not change his mind.

Instead he finds an entire, well-financed fascist propaganda infrastructure more than happy to keep spoon feeding him comforting deception.

That the real problem is “…the American People are a Gimme People”.

The real problem that some Americans are not Blindly Loyal enough to the Dear Leader.

The real problem is the Dirty Hippies.

The real problem is the Liberal Press who won’t print all of that Good News from Iraq.

No, Mr. Ites, the Real Problem is that Iraq and the Iraqis had nothing, nothing, nothing to do with 9/11.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Ninguna. Nihilo.

The Real Problem is that your Dear Leader lied to you. Repeatedly. Knowingly. Premeditatedly.

The Real Problem is that your Dear Leader built an entire Bullshit Bridge between the casus belli he got on 9/11 and the war he and his Neocon vultures wanted, and then cold-bloodedly pimped your grief, your fear and your patriotism to stampede you across it.

The Real Problem is that you and millions like you aren’t strong enough to face the truly terrifying truth that most of what you believe about the wider world is bullshit, and the people you trusted to lead your country are liars.

That men you trusted made you a chump.

A heavily-armed patsy, in the wrong country, for the wrong reason, killing the wrong people on the orders of treacherous cowards and thugs who have used you as cannon fodder for their Imperial ambitions, and for whom you no doubt proudly voted.

Twice.

The Real Problem is that, in the name of Holy Balance, journalists treat the patently and dangerously delusional adherents of Cult of Dubya as if their opinions were worthy of discussion.

Except what Mr. Ites still dogmatically believes in this Year of Our Lord 2007 -– that we are in Iraq because “What they did on 9/11 is a travesty" -- is not a matter of opinion, any more than a fanatical insistence on the flatness of the Earth, the falseness of the Holocaust, or a 6,000 B.C. “Born On” date for Creation are matters of opinion.

These are matters of historical and scientific fact, and those who insist otherwise do not have opinions.

They have delusions.

And when one’s delusions have been calculatedly stoked and weaponized by evil men, have been marched into the wrong fucking country, have caused the death of tens of thousands, the mutilation and suffering of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions, at the projected cost of trillions of dollars, then your wingnut fantasies no longer get to be elided over as merely creepy and eccentric.

Because now your delusions come with one of the biggest fucking price tags in American history. One that we will be paying down for generations to come.

Which is why those delusions no longer deserve anyone’s respectful attention, or any cravenly obsequious treatment by journalists in the name of “balance”.

The Real Problem is simply that journalists don’t have the nerve to ask the True Believers of the Cult of Dubya simple questions about their radical, ruinous and unshakable beliefs.

The Real Problem is that people who believe as Mr. Ites does are dangerously irrational, and the people who make a fat living propping up Mr. Ites’ dangerously irrational beliefs are depraved scum.

For the last thirty years many of us on the Left remained politely and tolerantly silent on these subjects we should have been loud and rude and demanded to know why dangerous, stupid, racist or crazy people keep getting treated with deference by the Lords of the Media?

Why people who are always wrong all the time about everything keep getting invited back into the national spotlight to share more of their idiotic insights, and people who have a track record of actually getting it right about Bush, Iraq and a hundred other thing are treated like kooks?

Why, when your country has been handed over to perverts and fascists by imbeciles and Christopaths, your press has collapsed into a pile of toadying hair, you treasury has been pissed away by criminals and your military hobbled by cowards and fanatics, it is somehow beyond the fucking pale to get angry about it?

The reason we are in Iraq, Mr. Ites, isn’t that it was necessary to “be in their country keeping them turned down or from coming to America”.

No one in Iraq had any intention of attacking us.

The reason we are in Iraq, Mr. Ites, is because of millions of ignorant, fear-addled, Gospel-According-To-Rush, revenge-hungry, Bush-worshipping fools and the media that caters to them.

In other words, the reason we are in Iraq, Mr. Ites, is you.

And what 2004 changed is that, no matter what, you can forget about us ever politely skirting around that ugly fact again.

Into the Mac vs. PC Wars

Ann Summers drops the Big One.

From Monsters and Critics

Apple not reaching iGasm climax
By Stevie Smith
May 25, 2007, 15:08 GMT

Leading UK-based adult retailer Ann Summers is facing accusatory finger pointing from the lawyers of electronics giant Apple Inc. this week concerning the appearance of an adult product and an accompanying commercial campaign that would appear to borrow rather heavily from the influence carved by Apple’s hugely popular iPod and iTunes brand.

Specifically, Ann Summers has released an iPod-compatible vibrating sex aid, the iGasm, which, while certainly questionable in terms of naming, is employing an advertising campaign that closely resembles the dancing silhouette commercials used so successfully by Apple’s iconic iPod. In the case of the iGasm, one ad image shows a white trailing lead from the iGasm clearly disappearing beneath the invisible underwear line of a provocatively silhouetted female, while another lead runs to a pair of head phones. It’s all VERY iPod.

...

And just in time for this venerated national month of festive celebration.

"Or what?

“You'll release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths, and when they bark they shoot bees at you?"

Apparently, yes.

From the AP

Swarm of bees forces passenger plane to land

Fri May 25, 10:34 AM ET

A passenger plane was forced to land after flying into a swarm of British bees Thursday.

The Palmair Boeing 737, with 90 passengers on board, had to return to Bournemouth Airport in southern England shortly after take-off following an engine surge.

The pilot decided to abort the flight to Faro in Portugal and returned for safety checks. The plane's engine was thought to have become clogged with bees, the company said Friday.

Huge clouds of bees have been seen around Bournemouth over the past few days, a spokeswoman said.

Mewl – Part 2

pilfered from Allen Ginsberg and
abused by driftglass

...

fascist solidities of war eternal,
synthetic poteen pity drizzled over unfilmed closed-casket military cemetery dawns,
Seven league boot powerdrunk leapfrogging over habeas corpus,
stormfront blogs of meatmush neoconnunism acolytes
straffing the truth to aspic, while fallen angels of falwell's pit
shred the sun and moon and tree to fit a little broken book;
teevee vibrations nurse roasted spectral dusts
that still grope the alleys of our subconscious Brooklyn,
where Murrow stood, now ashcan rantings
and a child king of sloshy liquid sadist mind,
who chained themselves to madmen for the endless
ride from lynchburg to pennsylvania avenue on benzedrine
until the noise of slaughter and parboiled rights brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of evil clever
in the drear subpoena light,
who drank all night with the father of lies on a fake ranch
swaggered across a steel deck lied through thirty years to alcohol;
high noon for the freaks, opening the crack of doom for empire and a better ROI,
who lied continuously sixty months from florida to
nyc to the Iraqi national museum to ohio to the Tigris Bridge,
ghosts of wasted battalions waved away with cocktail weenies
asphyxiated by air-thieving teevee conversationalists
conjuring memories of humans jumping off fire escapes
off windowsills
off the towers of the Empire State
out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering spin
to keep us stupid afraid sleepy hiding from the parade
of shock of limbless and hellfire and wars,
whole verities disgorged in complete detail every day
verifying in stone fact and blood and unimpeachable history
the crimes of the pernicious men
with the rodent eyes,
meat for their offering to Mars cast on the pavement,
budging the tiny thoughts of the wretched not a millimeter
for whom past vanishes into Hate Radio nowhere Zen leaving a
trail of oxidizing yellow ribbon spoor from triumphal ape screams
to shutupshutupshutup you dirty, dirty hippy,
suffering the sweat of the dead wrong standing eye-deep in the dying
turning Rush up louderlouderlouder to bone-grind-ing amplitudes,
migraines of morons under hate-withdrawal in mommy’s bleak furnished basement,
who wander around and around at midnight in the
junkyard of right blogistan wondering where to go, what to think,
leaving broken men, crushed children, violated nations
…

For Dylan's Birthday

And the dark days we are living through


...
We sit here stranded,

though we're all doin' our best to deny it


And Louise holds a handful of rain,

temptin' you to defy it


Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft

But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

...



She's delicate and seems like the mirror

But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
...

Mewl

pilfered from Allen Ginsberg and
abused by driftglass

Part 1
I saw the pundits of my generation destroyed by
madness, bloated mendacious, pwned,
dragging themselves through the Sunday Mouse Circus at dawn
looking for a vituperative liberal to blame,
flatheaded ideological dumpsters

burning for the ancient, glorious Clintonian connection to the rejuvenating hatred that electrifies the machinery of the Right,
who seriousness and the tattered remnants of grandeur fled
now hollow-eyed and high on the vidal sassoon whiff
of their unnaturally symmetrical hair
sitting and soaking in the false superluminous dawn of
hot studio lights slashing drivel unrebutted into the hearts of homes
contemplating Rove,
who made their brains portions for Fox News,
threw them off the rim of a flat earth,
in trade for Mohammedan bogeymen a-slither in every unpatriotic shadow,
osmoting secret diseases through universities with mysterious Taliban Jaffar Sorcery
that is the mesmerizing hallucination of every Christopath in Arkansas and Hitchens-light tragedy
among the bloggers of war,
who were laughed out from the academies for their Creationist twitter &
publishing bilious twaddle for millions courtesy Regnery Press,
who cowered in stale Cheetoh reeking underwear,
burning their money on warporn and listening
to the Terror through the Hate Radio Glory Hole,
who got are getting busted in their recorded lies,
crawling forever back from secret expeditions to the grave of Mussolini
hiding out in a suit stitched from the flesh of perished New York
who were full of borrowed drunken fire and “kill ‘em’ all”
and “Bring ‘em on” so long at it was other men
dispatched down narrow, incarnadine Paradise Alley,
to traverse the desolate, slaying miles between a bubble-wrapped d.c.
and the melancholy House of Usher,
so long as others were sent in whole and fished out as torsos
night after night
heir to dreams of fire, drugs, and waking nightmares --
the incomparable blindness of the Right sees none of this;
the streets of their Baghdad shudder with merry merchants and cherubs
chin-deep in gratitude and studies of civil rights
cheery little sabu thieves steer flotillas of magic freedom carpets
pestering the desert clouds, while liberty lightning
leaps from province to heart to refinery
illuminating all the motionless world of Time
frozen on September twelfth, thawed, reheated, then tupperwared away for future tyrants to invoke
swaddled in cheerful bunting proclamations by the captains of video
that some nameless mission had been accomplished
…

This is Effing Brilliant

(Massive h/t to John at Crooks & Liars)

Dubya's a pimp.

He never coulda outfought Santino.

But I didn't know until this day, that it was...Cheney all along.

Dems Declare

“Peace Pretty Soon!”

This is nauseating.

Democrats call it quits on a troop withdrawal plan

WASHINGTON - In grudging concessions to President Bush, congressional Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops -- and shorn of billions of dollars in pork-barrel spending on extraneous domestic programs, officials said Monday.
By David Espo, Associated Press

Last update: May 21, 2007 – 9:37 PM
WASHINGTON - In grudging concessions to President Bush, congressional Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops -- and shorn of billions of dollars in pork-barrel spending on extraneous domestic programs, officials said Monday.

However, the legislation would include the first federal minimum wage increase in more than a decade, a top priority for the Democrats who took control of Congress in January, the officials added.

While details remain sketchy, the measure is designed to close the books by Friday on a bruising veto fight between the president and the Democratic-controlled Congress over the war. It would provide funds for military operations in Iraq through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
…

Stranding our men and women on the Iraqi killing floor with no exit in sight to provide rear guard cover for the Dear Leader’s bloated ego is inexcusable: I take comfort only in the fact that this latest blank check handed over to the reckless idiot running the country will run out in four months.

And as anyone who is familiar with the Summer of 1974 knows, four months equals ten-thousand years in a slow-roasting purgatory for a White House that is drowning in scandal and failure and rot and to whom the opposition -- that'd be you and me -- lobs anvils.

Day

after day

after day.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Part One of Two

The “Where’s Bunko?” edition.



No good reason to invoke Don Karleone except to note that when Rove goes off the grid for more than a few days it usually turns out he’s either about to be served some very unkind paper, or he’s off doing something unnatural with an ibex, a framing hammer, a rood made from the still-alcohol-sodden tibias of Joe McCarthy and a thousand pints of gecko blood to sate the unspeakable appetites of the dark and nameless GOP BeastGod of Clout.

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mitch McConnell

Meh. Slim picking here, except you know the GOP is being flushed down the Lo-Flow toilet of history when you hear Mitch McConnell say:

Compromise is how the legislative process works.

On Fox News Sunday Senator Charles Schumer, Senator Lindsey Graham, followed by Sandra Day O'Connor, former Supreme Court justice, batting cleanup.

Here, Schumer and Graham talk immigration



driftglass: FYI, there are still many good jobs in many, many industries that go unfilled every year due to a lack of qualified candidates. And every year we graduate legions of kids from high schools that can’t do basic math, pass basic literacy tests, and have had no career counseling whatsoever and so are simply unqualified to fill those jobs.

Anybody else see a connection here?

Yes, some of those jobs many not be next door, or may require some extra/ongoing training, but speaking as the grandson of a man who crossed the country at the height of the Depression – well before there was anything resembling a highway system – on the promise of a decent job that would support his family, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for anyone not willing to make a fraction of that effort.

Just as I have no patience whatsoever with any bullshit from anyone – parents, teachers, administrators, politicians – about why its just too fucking hard to make sure that every child in America gets a decent education that prepares them to compete in the 21st Century.

We are in a leaky lifeboat, kids, and a fierce and competitive future is bearing down on us, and anyone who says it’s just too hard to bail water or bend an oar needs to be put over the side yesterday.

On the Department of Justice:

Schumer: Gonzo’s gotta go.

Graham: The Congress is at 29% because we’re playin’ gotcha games with the Attorney General.

Schumer: Fuck you. It’s about the rule of law.

On Iraq.

Schumer: The Republicans and the White House are slowly moving our direction.

Graham: The Congress is at 29% because we want to insure defeat in Iraq and empower the enemy!

Graham: We’ve got to win in Iraq!

Graham: The Congress is at 29% because the won’t wear Dick Cheney’s soiled underoos on their head anymore and pretend it’s a perky fez.

Graham: The Congress is at 29% because the evil Democrats won’t continue the six-year string of spineless capitulation to every DT whim of a Preznit who is at 27%,

driftglass: The Congress is at 29% because the Republicans have been running the joint into the ground at relativistic speeds for the last six years, and mewling apologists for GOP perfidy and failure like Graham are just about all they have left in their talk show speaker’s bureau..

Then on to -->

Sandra Day O’Connor: I do not remember a time when there was such a broad and widespread criticism of judges.

Wallace: But you have to know that when courts, the Supremes, rule on deeply held issues people are gonna get twitchy.

The OC: Sure. But when it goes further – when it goes so far as legislators calling for tar and feathers – it should not be allowed to cross over into threats and intimidation.

The OC: In congress there were bills of impeach judges for deciding wrong on Terri Schiavo. To punish judges for specific decisions. That’s effing crazy

The OC: In many schools, Civics classes are no longer required. You don’t inherit that knowledge through the gene pool. It is very, very important to teach children about Civics.

driftglass: This is the root of our differences with the Right. They either do not know how this country is actually supposed to be run. Or they don’t care. Or, as I suspect, they actively despise the system our Founders put in place and are desperate to see it sunk to the bottom of the ocean and replaced with a nice, tidy, White Xian Police State.

Our very own Saudi Arabia 2.0, except with Nascar, the WWF and shitty beer.

Wallace: But some would say…

The OC: Its fine to say whatever the hell you just said, but moving to punish judges who don’t decide the way you like goes way beyond what the Constitution intended.

driftglass: Notice how, during this entire exchange, neither OC nor Wallace deigned to mention that this War on the Justice System is entirely a manifestation of the Right. It has always the dream of the Tom DeLay/Newt Gingrich/James Dobson mob that they and their Dear Leader could finally, simply rule by fiat.

That after being "elected", an utterly gelded Congress, a majority Fundy and minority terrorized judiciary, and a DOJ gutted and restaffed by Dubya’s Golem would declare all statutory, constitutional and institutional limitations on the Dear Leader’s unlimited power null and void.

And the fact that they came this close to succeeding is not the most frightening aspect of this tragedy; the worst part of it all is that millions and millions of American citizens loudly cheered on this attempted evisceration of our Democracy.

There were no Democratic “Justice Sundays” featuring leading Democratic leaders standing check-by-jowl with the scum of the Conservative Christian Right all but demanding the liquidation of offending judges in the name of Jebus.

There were no Democratic officials who grabbed the microphone after judges were threatened or attacked to suggest that it was likely because they were “activists” and that’s why some sociopath tried to off them.

Because however flawed they are, Democrats would never sink that low into the filth to make that cheap political point. That lightless trench at the bottom of the rhetorical cesspit is the exclusive province of the Wingnut Reich.

And the 27% love it.

Wallace: What stands out in your memory about Ronald Reagan?

The OC: Well he was so clean. And well-spoken.



Meet the Press with Punkin’ Haid Russert. Senator Chris Dodd, Disgraced loser Newt Gingrich, Then Douglas Brinkley, Michael Deaver and Ed Meese appear as a “Frankie Goes to Hollywood” cover band..

There is no need to reprint or comment on Newt’s blather. He has always been a weasel, a thug and a liar, and is currently marketing a massive, Maginot Line of bullshit misrepresentations of history to justify this Party’s deranged and ruinous Iraq policy. insistence that American Revolution and WWII are exact parallels to Iraq.

Newt: Well what would you say if you were a Frenchy in the 18th century and the Americans were losing here, there and everywhere. Would you abandon them? Hmmm.

So in the American Revolution, America was…a foreign occupier? America was the most powerful military on Earth? That had invaded and conquered….America? And was holding it using means that made…Americans?…think it was OK to kill….Americans?…using, what, suicide horse-bombs?

WTF?

The fact that Newt has read history is unremarkable. The fact that he writes bad history and worse fiction is both icky and funny.

However the fact that he deliberately inverts, distorts and debases history to rationalize the toxic and deranged ideologies of the Neocon Right Wing – an ideology that has been consistently, arrogantly and fatally wrong about every single thing – is truly despicable and dangerous.

It give the fatheads in the 27% another man in a suit who knows a lot of impressive words someone to point to and say “See! We was too right all along about The Eyerack and the Ayrabs!” Which is why they wuuuuv him.

Newt: The way to judge how poorly our Congress is doing is by listening to the enemy. If they say that leaving Iraq is a victory for them, then we should believe every word they say!

This bids fair to be one of the most cancerous lies Newt has every foisted on the public: that we should tailor our foreign policy and sacrifice the lives of our men and women under terms set out by people who are trying to kill us.

So the way to judge how effectively we were doing in WWII was to heed the words of Lord Haw Haw? Axis Sally?

What was really going on in North Korea based on the broadcasts of Seoul City Sue?

The way we should have determined what was really going on in prewar Iraq was to listen credulously to Baghdad Bob?

Iraq never attacked us.

Iraq never was a threat to us.

And our continued presence in Iraq as a hated occupier continues hand to the Bad Guys a greater recruiting bonanza than they could have conceived of in their wildest dreams on a silver platter.

It really is not much more complicated than that, and the fact that Newt keeps getting asked uncritically to the Big Media Dance to mutilate history in order to provide cover fire for the ruin his Party has caused says more about how what utterly debased eunuchs we have in front of our nation’s cameras than I could write in a lifetime.


End Part One

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Part Two of Two


Wherein Meet the Press continues with episode number 12,322 of Old Conservative White Guys talking reverently about Dead Conservative White Guys.

This Very Special Episode featured Punkin’ Haid Russert reading extended homilies from the Reagan Hymnal while Michael Deaver, Ed Meese and Douglas Brinkley daven freakishly as they uncritically celebrate all things Reagan (including Goodwife Nancy, who was a helpmate that never, ever got involved in policy) and reverentially intoned “The Gipper” in the round:

Gipper! Gipper! burning bright
In the pea brains of the Right,
What clever spinners of wingnut lie
Could’ve made up this Reagan Guy?

What perversion of Jesus gone awry
Burnt the fire of thine eye?
On Falwell’s wings he did aspire.
With Klansmen’s help he seized the fire.

…

Reagan! Reagan! burning still
In the heart of every wingnut shill,
What immoral Rightwing ho’
Will run as Reagan 2.0?

Brinkley: It was almost mystical. The way he didn’t wear his good watch the day he was shot.

Deaver: He missed his wife. He missed going to church.

Meese: On the third day he arose from the dead and kicked Stalin’s ass!

Russert: His continual references to God are giving me a pleasant erection.

Brinkley: His diaries prove that was greater than even the greaty greatness that we knew about.

Russert: Rushmore is not big enough to frame his vastness. Perhaps we can reshape the coastline of South America...

...to better give God and passing space aliens a good look at the profile of the greatest human being who ever lived.

Meese: He had an almost photographic memory. So if you fed him too many facts he would get confused. It was better when he was “natural”

Helpful driftglass translation: Reagan was at his best when he was free to just make shit up out of thin air to “prove” his point.

From the Reagan Diaries: The media are bastards for giving me shit over visiting an SS cemetery. Fuck them.

From the Reagan Diaries: The press sucks. They are all evil, backstabbing Commies.

Russert: Sounds like he doesn’t like the press.

Deaver: He liked people. He got mad when they got the facts wrong from is point of view. (

Helpful driftglass translation: Reagan got cranky and confused when the press called him out on the shit he made up out of thin air. Fortunately for him, the 80’s saw the extinction of anything resembling an aggressive, civic-minded press national corps and heralded the Rise of the Deferential Broderites.

Record deficit maker.

Union buster.

Arch polluter.

Maker of savage war on the poor.

Maker of tiny, boutique, media-friendly shooting wars on wee nations.

Enabler of Falwell, Schlafly and the entire degenerate Christopath Right.

Killer of the Fairness Doctrine.

King of the Southern Strategy and friend to Segregationists everywhere.

Treater with terrorist regimes for political gain.

Trader of weapons to terrorists for hostages.

Funder of a wholly illegal war.

He who stranded 700 Marines to die in an indefensible position as surely as if they had been goats staked out as lion-bait at a watering hole.

The first President to lose an entire spacecraft – the flagship of the American space fleet -- and every soul aboard because his people wanted it launched to meet political timetables.

But hey, nice hair, quick with a joke and could well up a tear up on cue.

Russert: Just the sound of his name makes my Falklands tingle and my Tierra del Reagan throb.

Gotta love that Liberal Media Bias.


Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer. Senator Arlen Specter, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Fred Kagan, discredited Neocon military historian and retired General Paul Eaton.

On the DOJ

Feinstein: The DOJ is in the toilet.

Specter: Gonzo is not credible, and the Comey testimony about trying to force a sick man on his hospital bed to sign off on their illegal shit was striking.


On the upcoming No Confidence vote:

Specter: It is a very forceful, historical statement. I would think Gonzo would like to avoid having it on his resume.


Schieffer: So you won’t call for Gonzo’s resignation, but you will say that he in an incompetent pinhead who – like Brownie, and Bremmer, and Rummy (Oh my!) has ruined his department, and that the nation would be better of with him quitting and opening up an internet café somewhere,

Specter: I don’t want to tell the Preznit what to do, This is his decision.

The immigration debate here was relatively calm and thoughtful. Seriously, if you watch any of the Sunday Mouse Circus, Face the Nation is a good choice, proving that it is possible to have a mature conversation about vital issues without George Will or Brit Hume or Bill Kristol or Tim Russert butt-scooting their stank all over it.

Paul Eaton and the long-ago-thoroughly-discredited-Iraq-war-proponent Fred Kagan (American Enterprise Institute)

Kagan: The enemy is heinous! This is war! There are more markets open! More Freedom Rugs!

Eaton: The “surge” is really just a modest reinforcement. This Administration has not grown the military. And this President doesn’t “surge” diplomatic or economic.

Kagan: We need to grow the Iraqi Army and arm them. They’re very impressive…all 14 of them.

Funny how I can remember the Presidential Debates of 2004 (going on three years ago now) where Dubya flatly and smirkily asserted that we had already trained hundreds of thousands of police and military.

That they were all doing their final calf and ham stretches just before they were gonna stand up, and we were gonna bow out.

It went a little something like this…

On September 30, 2004

Dubya:

Of course we're after Saddam Hussein -- I mean bin Laden.
...

We will succeed. We've got a plan to do so. And the main reason we'll succeed is because the Iraqis want to be free.

I had the honor of visiting with Prime Minister Allawi. He's a strong, courageous leader. He believes in the freedom of the Iraqi people.

He doesn't want U.S. leadership, however, to send mixed signals, to not stand with the Iraqi people.

He believes, like I believe, that the Iraqis are ready to fight for their own freedom. They just need the help to be trained. There will be elections in January. We're spending reconstruction money. And our alliance is strong.

That's the plan for victory.

And when Iraq is free, America will be more secure.

…

Eerily familiar question for Dubya:

What criteria would you use to determine when to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq?

Eerily familiar bullshit answer from Dubya:

Let me first tell you that the best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job.

And that's what we're doing. We've got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year. That is the best way. We'll never succeed in Iraq if the Iraqi citizens do not want to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves. I believe they want to. Prime Minister Allawi believes they want to.

And so the best indication about when we can bring our troops home -- which I really want to do, but I don't want to do so for the sake of bringing them home; I want to do so because we've achieved an objective -- is to see the Iraqis perform and to see the Iraqis step up and take responsibility.

…

Prime Minister Who?


Dubya:

There are 100,000 troops trained, police, guard, special units, border patrol. There's going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year. Yes, we're getting the job done. It's hard work. Everybody knows it's hard work, because there's a determined enemy that's trying to defeat us.

---

Then again, on October 14, 2004


Dubya:

The best way to take the pressure off our troops is to succeed in Iraq, is to train Iraqis so they can do the hard work of democracy, is to give them a chance to defend their country, which is precisely what we're doing. We'll have 125,000 troops trained by the end of this year.

And yet, on Meet the Press this very day…

MR. RUSSERT: Another, I think, concern Americans have is that four years into the war, there are only 6,000 Iraqi troops...

MR. GINGRICH: Ready to fight.

MR. RUSSERT: ...who are fully trained...

MR. GINGRICH: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: ...independent outside of American support. And people question why is that? Why are the Iraqis apparently unwilling to step up and shed blood...

Of course Newt goes onto assert that there are many more Iraqi troops – over 100,000 – who can basically do ride-alongs with the Americans but cannot or will not fight without us.

In other words, however many other troops there are in theory, unless that are the Standee-Upee kind, who give a shit?

So let’s be very, very clear about this.

Almost three years ago, the Dear Leader swore that there would be 125,000 troops trained by the end of that year, or almost exactly the number as we allegedly have trained now.

Iraqi troops which, whatever their virtues, almost three years later are unable to “Stand Up” so we can “Stand Down”.

At the same time, the Dear Leader swore that there would be 200,000 troops trained by the end of 2005. It is now nearing the middle of 2007 and we have nowhere near that number trained, and only 6,000 trained well enough to allow them to relieve our men and women serving in Iraq.

In other words, when you factor out the myriad lies the President has told this country about what is really going on in Iraq (difficult I know because of their sheer number), it has taken us four years to train a cadre of 6,000 Iraqi troops capable of standing up on their own and therefore, theoretically, allowing a like number of American troops to stand down.

The current troops level in Iraq is around 160,000 – far short of what any rational person is willing to argue is necessary, but you defend the Dear Leader’s catastrophes with the army you have left, and not the army you would have had, had the Dear Leader not crippled it.

So it took four years to train 6,000 Iraqi Stand Up Troops. Well, presumably we’re getting better at it, so lets be extra generous and say that it will only take two years to train the next cadre of 6,000 Stand Ups.

And two years to train the next.

Which means that we will be able to completely replace our 160,000 troop military footprint in Iraq with Stand Up Iraqi troops in approximately 2060.

53 years from now.

Or right about when the Neocon Theory of History predicts future generations will finally come around to recognizing George W. Bush as a Foreign Policy Jeenyus! and the Greatest Preznit Evah!

End part Two of Two

Science at your doorstep

But why did I choose this picture?

Reason 42,977,354 why science rules and Creationists who vote need to be shot en masse into the sun.

From LiveScience.com via Yahoo News:

Cave Near Chicago Full of Ancient Wonders

Corey Binns
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com Fri May 18, 6:30 PM ET

North America's oldest conifer tree and some ancient scorpion parts are among the fossil treasures found in a newly discovered cave in Illinois.

The new discovery also unearthed fossils of plants that may be new to science and revealed evidence of prehistoric forest fires.

Scientists date the specimens to nearly 315 million years ago, according to initial findings presented last month at the regional meeting of the Geological Society of America in Lawrence, Kan.

"I've never seen anything like this before," said Roy Plotnick, a paleontologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who discovered the cave with students on a field trip to a site two hours outside of Chicago. "The limestone that forms the cave is 450 million years old, but that's not the interesting part of the cave. The preservation inside the cave is what's fascinating."

What is of interest to Plotnick and his colleagues are the well-preserved bits of plants and insects that have been cushioned in the cave and protected from the elements.

…

Plotnick's cave is one of two recent sightings of ancient plants in Illinois. A coal mine near Danville, detailed in the May issue of the journal Geology, houses a 300-million-year-old fossilized forest. While the mine is filled with evidence of ancient wetlands, the cave also holds biological deposits from dryer environments that appear to be about 3 million years older than the plant fossils found in the mine.

"Their discovery, and ours, show how much there still is to find in supposedly well-known places like Illinois," Plotnick told LiveScience.

Rumors that the fossilized remains of a viable Two Party system in Chicago were also discovered in the cave are, as yet, unconfirmed.

When this is the headline

The parody just writes itself.

There is the legit story…

Scientists Try to Lure Whales to Ocean

WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Biologists tried unsuccessfully Thursday to use recorded siren songs of humpback whales to lure an injured female and her wounded calf from a shipping channel and back toward the Pacific Ocean 90 miles away…

And then there's what came gushing out of my temporal lobes about five seconds after I read it…

Candidates try to lure voters to GOP




WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Party of God candidates tried unsuccessfully Thursday to use recorded siren songs of Saint Ronald Reagan to lure dimwitted, xenophobic voters up off their huge asses and back toward Republican Party voting rolls.

However when the candidates played the Gipper recordings from the stage of the Republican Party debate, all but the 27% swam away from the sound rather than toward it.

Hours later, the voters were still running like hell from the Party of Feckless O’Drydrunk and his Evil Regent, where they have been for the last two years. Party propagandists then decided to turn the crazy up even louder, believing the background noise of Realty laughing its ass off at the “War is Peacenick” imbeciles running in ever-tightening circles and screaming their heads off like a legion of crack-rabid, one-legged midgets may have interfered with the soothing pings and whistles of Saint Ronnie’s recorded mating call.

The voters have in the past migrated back to the GOP camp after repeated, breathless announcements about the “Mission” being “Accomplished”, various corners being turned, the insurgency being in its last throes, and dire warnings that anyone who didn’t clap loud enough for Dubya’s dying Tinkerbellicose was a traitor...but have now turned back and continued their inexorable progression the hell away from this Party of loser, liars and cowards.

It could take month to get the voters whipped back into the fearfully obedient crouch where they belong, spin doctors said. Still, hundreds of poo-flingers lined the rim of the Saint Ronnie Reagan Salad Toss to watch the progress.

The procedure worked in 2004 with “moderates” that wandered away the GOP Freak Show before being terrorize back into silent consent.

But Party said the latest situation is more complicated: It involves multiple, humiliating outrages against the Constitution rather than a single, monstrous fuckup that can be muted with enough lies and Mealworm Media dropping slathered over it. Also aspects of the Bush Clusterfuck hit much closer to home and with much greater frequency than the goings on in faraway Iraq.

The loss of One Party control over the entire government adds another dimension, because observers note that over the last six year the GOP has developed what they refer to as “Chronic Oversight Immunodeficiency Disorder” and no longer know how to cope with a Congress that demands that they actually be hel accountable for their behavior.

"In the past, it was just the war and you could lie convincingly enough in enough venues to squeak past. It was like trying to spin dogshit into gold; difficult but possible,” said a fictional GOP mole-rat groomer whose name just happens to be Frank Luntz. “Now the entire Party and Movement has imploded and is hemorrhaging stoopid everywhere. It’s Iraq, of course, which has gone so completely south that there is no way to cover up the massive fraud and failure of it anymore.

“But now it’s also Katrina. And Dubai ports. Illegal domestic spying. Torture. Attorney General scandals growing faster than yeast in Paris Hilton’s cooter. Massive voter fraud. Jack Abramoff. The disappearance of billions and billions and billions of reconstruction dollars down the Iraq rabbit hole. Valerie Plame. Terri Schiavo.

“Now the only thing than knocks a huge, stinking Republican scandal off the front page is another, huger, stinkier Republican scandal.

“Now we’d be thrilled is we could spin this hatful of Hantavirus into dogshit.”

Fixing those typos

This from the Irish Times, with the typos fixed.

See how much clearer it reads with the errata cleaned up.

Iraqi gunmen soldiers attack village killing 15.

Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms Iraqi Army regulars entered a village east of Baghdad early today, removed families from their homes and opened fire on the men, killing 15 of them, an Iraqi general and a Kurdish political party said.

The victims were Kurdish Shias, according to a statement posted on the website of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The gunmen Iraqi soldiers entered the village of Hamid Shifi, about 60 miles from Baghdad and forced families from their homes, said Brig. Gen. Nazim Sherif.

The assailants Iraqi soldiers then separated the women and children, ordered the men to stand in a single file and gunned them down, he said. Sherif said villagers had received no threats before the attack, which he blamed on al-Qaeda. The village is in Diyala province, an area northeast of Baghdad where violence has violent skirmishes in the Iraq Civil War have risen sharply in the past six months.

Meanwhile five US soldiers were killed in four separate attacks by insurgents Iraqi soldiers dressed as civilians in Iraq yesterday and today, taking to eight the number of American soldiers killed in the past 48 hours, the US military said.
…

In one of the worst attacks, a roadside bomb followed by gunfire killed two soldiers and wounded two others in northeastern Baghdad yesterday, the military said in a statement today.

Another soldier was killed in western Anbar province, a stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency side of the Iraq Civil War, and a fourth was shot dead near Baghdad, also yesterday.
…

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we are training and arming the people who are killing each other and us Tuesdays, Thursdays, weekends and evenings.

Dear Democrats; Bush has walled up our soldiers in the Valley of Death and will fucking well keep them there until we’re all broke and they’re all dead or damaged for life. They need to be rescue from Bush’s Iraqi Fiasco as surely as New Orleans residents needed to be rescued from Bush’s Katrina Catastrophe.

On this point the landslides of 2006 made the will of the American people unambiguously clearly.

Your most vital civic duty is to save our military from their involuntary participation in an Iraq Civil War that is killing them for no damned good reason, and from the cowardly Republican sociopaths here at home that are holding them hostage to George Bush's ego.

Captain Obvious

Goes bucking for Commodore.

Every now and then as I run barefoot over the burning shores of the NYT, I catch a glint of Tom Friedman talking about, say, energy policy. Like a shiny nickel washed up along a great swath of poo, catching the light just so.

And I nod and I say “Good on you” and then scamper away, because man, the reek at high tide’d knock a dung beetle out of Fred Phelps’ mouth. And for, oh, about a minute I indulge the notion that one of the most highly paid, highly regarded, highly quoted, best selling, A-listed op-ed columnists for America’s paper of record is not a vulgar and irredeemable idiot.

That maybe he doesn’t deserve to be cast into ignoble oblivion. Reduced to writing, say, lunch menu specials at IHOP (“A cab driver in Bangalore assured me that these pecan waffles in a peach compote are genuinely Vishnulicious!”) or ghosting the “Turn Ons/Turn Offs” for “Ass Fancier” centerfolds.

And then I read something like this (Behind the NYT blast wall, a snip if which is transcribed here) and I get cranky all over again.

…
They actually thought they could unite Iraq, while dividing America.

Whenever Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had a choice between seeking political advantage at home or acting in a bipartisan fashion to buy more unity, time and space to do all the heavy lifting needed in Iraq, they opted for political advantage.

When Franklin Roosevelt fought World War II, he made a conservative Republican, Henry Stimson, his secretary of war and did all he could to hold the country together. The Bush- Cheney team, by contrast, summoned us to D-Day and then treated it like it was just another political wedge issue, whenever it suited them.

It has not worked. As Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, put it:

“You cannot govern like Winston Churchill some of the time and like Grover Norquist most of the time.”

First my mind wanders momentarily away from Captain Obvious to contemplating his employers and I wonder what kind of feeble-minded, inbred, tasteless Peter Keatings must be running the place?

Seriously, it is one of those questions that just nags at me: In a world quite literally overflowing with talented, literate, pungent writers, how in the world do utterly talentless, debased hacks like Friedman and Brooks find themselves at the very pinnacle of the mediaverse?

I know the general answer -- Market forces compacting competent journalism into the ever more Procrustean Bed of Entertaining InfoHappyBytes. The rise of the Hatekrieg Xian Right blasting away at the press for 30 year, shellshocking them into giving the out lame, the crazy and the outright liars ever more column inches and prime time space in the name of Holy “Balance”. The deliberate murder of the Fairness Doctrine by Reagan, Bork and Scalia (That was just for you, Ivory Bill Woodpecker). -- but I still think the particular, specific answers would be interesting.

I still dream of going full Patrick McGoohan on NYT Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., President and CEO Janet L. Robinson, Executive Editor Bill Keller and Editorial Page Editor Andrew M. Rosenthal.

Muse that whisking them off to The Village

for some fun, frolic and Pentathol would yield some remarkable and gag-inducing results.

And then my mind wanders back the fact of Captain Obvious and I just want to wish him into the cornfield.

Preferably just before the threshers roll in so that the Captain can be reaped and processed into something useful.

Like, say, ethanol.

There would be something satisfyingly poetic about that.

Because, Tom, how in the fuck dare you be surprised? How dare you?

For thirty years the GOP has campaigned and governed on a deep and abiding hatred for government generally, and those who believe in using government as a sword and a shield against the excesses of both unfettered capitalism and theocracy specifically.

For thirty years the GOP has plainly tattooed “Welcome All Loonies” on its ass in forty-foot-high Day-Glo letters, bent over and grabbed its ankles and beckoned the scum of the nation to take a jolly electoral rump-tango with the Party of Lincoln. It has openly, sluttishly enticed the Dobsons, the Gingrichs and the Coulters into it’s “Big Tent”, while driving out the Goldwaters, the Deans and the Phillipses.

It has not just practiced a hyperMcCarthesque politics of rend and rule, it is fucking proud of it.

It has been a little over 80 years since Adolph Hitler publish “Mein Kampf” in which he explained in some detail what he intended to do: He intended to conquer Europe, kill 20 million Russians, and exterminate the Jews. He was very clear about all of this and methodically set out to check each atrocity off of his "To Do" list while a chorus of the Tom Friedman’s of the age said, over and over again until it was far too late, “Well he can’t really mean it.

"He won’t really do it.”

It cost civilization a bloody world war in which millions died and whole nations were destroyed to stop the planet from being tipped mechanized Dark Ages from which is may never have recovered. And one of the casualties that perished in rubble of the Third Reich was the excuse that, when evil people tell you what they plan to do, they don’t really mean it.

Of course they mean it. In fact they say it extra loud and clear to recruit others to their depraved cause.

And so now live in a nation where a portrait of Karl Rove ripping the Constitution in half and then taking a dump on, rampant on field of Klansmen it practically the GOP Family Crest…and yet here we find Captain Obvious actually putting pen to paper to express how Shocked!Shocked! he is to discover that the GOP actually means what it says.

And then offering this bit of helpful advice to Democrats:

...
“Democrats need to be careful, though, that they don’t let their rage with the hypocrisy of Mr. Bush make them totally crazy, and blind them to the fact that they — we — still need a credible plan to deal with the very real threat to open societies posed by Islamist terrorism.”
...

Fuck you, Tom. I take back what I said: no IHOP job for you.

In a sane world anyone who exhibits this dizzying combination of blithering obliviousness and effrontery to such an extent that they:

A) Actually say out loud that they’re stunned that the GOP is acting exactly as they said they would and have for the last 30 years and,

B) Urgently council the only people in a credible position to oppose their rising fascist tide to pull their punches…

would never be allowed near a pen again.

Unless their intention is to commit honorable, Mont Blanc seppuku.

In which case, Tom,

c’mon and belly up to the bar.