Saddam was hung this morning. What difference is that going to make? Will the fighting stop? No, a bomb went off this morning killing 31 people in Baghdad.
Saddam was hung for killing and raping his people. What about Darfur? 400,000 dead, millions displaced, women raped repeatedly and we do nothing. Four years of genocide and the world sits by and does nothing.
Last night on the McGlaughlin Group Lawrence O'Donnell said that Darfur was the most under-reported story of the year. Is it because we just can't bear to hear about it? It's so ugly and horrific we can't look?
We have to look. We are our brother's keepers and our brothers are being slaughtered.
Go here and sign the petition to the UN. Let's have a new year without rape camps in Darfur.
I know all of us are worried sick about the Rosie/Trump bitch fight. (the Donald is a first class bitch.) Or broccoli Spears and Kay Fed or even wondering when - oh when?!! Will Saddam's hanging be on youtube???
But here is some thing that should scare the shit out you - regardless of what Newt Gingrich says - THE BIG MELT IS ON.
Global Warming is real. The conservatives were WRONG AGAIN - and we have lost a lot of time because of the idiot conservatives - who never learn, never shut up, and are never right.
When Bush says he has liberated millions of people in Iraq and Afghanistan do you think he means he's liberated them from their homes?
It began right after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, when many landlords took advantage of the removal of his economic controls and raised rents substantially, forcing out thousands of families who took shelter in abandoned government buildings and military bases. As the chaos in Iraq grew and the ranks of the jobless swelled, even more Iraqis migrated to squalid squatter encampments. Still others constructed crude shantytowns on empty plots where conditions were even worse.
Now, after more than 10 months of brutal sectarian reprisals, many more Iraqis have fled their neighborhoods, only to wind up often in places that are just as wretched in other ways. While 1.8 million Iraqis are living outside the country, 1.6 million more have been displaced within Iraq since the war began. Since February, about 50,000 per month have moved within the country.
Freedom is on the march.
George Bush is a tard. Sorry. I know that isn't a good late 70's "diversity is paramount" word. Screw it. it's true he is a tard. These jackasses started this war in 2003 -based upon lies. It took our military away from the war on the people that actually attacked us.
AND NOW IN DECEMBER OF 2006 LITTLE MR. BUSH "NEEDS MORE TIME" TO FIGURE OUT A STRATEGY. Bullshit. He's stalling. Or retarded.
It seems more and more the W's started this war as a House of Saud protection plan. The bush clan, the house of saud, and the bin Laden's are way too cozy. too many people have made too much money on war and oil in the last 6 years. From salon:
Like Bandar, the bin Laden family epitomized the marriage between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Their huge construction company, the Saudi Binladin Group, banked with Citigroup and invested with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. Over time, the bin Ladens did business with such icons of Western culture as Disney, the Hard Rock Café, Snapple and Porsche. In the mid-1990s, they joined various members of the House of Saud in becoming business associates with former secretary of state James Baker and former president George H.W. Bush by investing in the Carlyle Group,
kinda makes ya wonder whose side they are on....
I hate Bob Woodward.
I thought a reporter was to report, not to inject himself into every story.
What's next for Bob?
James Brown admitted that he wasn't really the hardest working man in show business?
Castro will have admitted to loving Sex and the City?
John Kerry really did mean to mock the troops?
Dick Cheney wears women's clothing?
Would President Ford's comments released in 2004 impacted the election? Would President Kerry have brought our troops home already?
While Bush dicks around we are going to hit the 3000 mark. 3000 soldiers dead while Bush searches for a new strategy.
The idiots are going to push a troop "surge" after the new year. Can anyone stop these bozos? Probably not - why? - because the power center for the Bush Admin actually has two pivot points - Haliburton headquarters and Riyadh. After THE IDIOTS made a mess of the buffer between the Shia hordes in Iran and our current oil supply - which is oddly placed below the sand in Saudi Arabia - we are handing Iraq over to the Shiite majority in name only. The Saudi Royal family must be protected, after all.
Also - expect the "surge" to help precipitate a "Persian Gulf of Tonkin" resolution. The house of Saud wants the Iran problem taken care of. And their lapdogs in D.C. will find a way to do it.
Mr. Bush had a plan for "Clean Air" which would allow more pollution. A Federal Appeals Court struck down his plan.
Circuit Judge Judith Rogers, writing for the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, said "EPA has failed to heed the restrictions on its discretion set forth in the Act." The court ordered the agency to come up with a new enforcement plan.
Tougher standards for ground-level ozone and fine soot were ordered by the Clinton administration in 1997 after it determined that levels set in 1979 didn't adequately protect children, the elderly and people with respiratory ailments. The Supreme Court in 2001 upheld the tougher standards after they were challenged by industry. Now all we have to do is roll back Mr. Bush's domestic spying program, restore Habeas Corpus, reinstate the Geneva Conventions, take away the tax breaks for the rich and we should be ok. Except for the pesky war in Iraq, of course.
I no longer believe they are as stupid as they seem: the Bushies' 6 year idiotic spectacular has got to be planned incompetence. The goal of Bush and Cheney must be to wreck the United States. Nothing else makes sense.
"No one expected the levees to be breached"
"No one expected them to use airplanes as weapons"
A lot of people of average, low, and high intelligence expected both of these things. And said so.
For crust's sake, Condo Rice said this in an AP interview yesterday: "the United States can win in Iraq, although the war so far has been longer and more difficult than she had expected..."
WHAT THE F&*^K IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?
Listen Bitch, EVERYONE with a brain expected it to turn out just like this. Colin Powell for starters. Anyone to the Left of Rush Limpbough said it would turn out to be a long hard war. Every General except Franks and Sanchez knew the Rummy/Wolfwitz plan was failing almost as soon as Baghdad fell. 4 years later W's new plan is a"surge"in troops. Idiotic. The only way this can be done in the short term is to draft men and women, or the scoop up a lot more of the national guard - neither will be tolerated by the public. Someone needs to surge these G.O.P. nuts out of D.C.
There is no explanation for how stupid and arrogant the Bushies seem to be - except that a lot of rich people are getting a lot richer.
No President has ever been this incompetent for this long. Jesus, this Christmas, save us from George W. Bush.
I love Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip* so I am hooking up the recent rants of Steven Weber here. He plays the president of NBC...er, I mean NBS. Turns out he is a good actor AND a clear thinker.
* I am a great defender of Hollywood. (This town WOULD make better shows/movies if people in the rest of the country wanted to see them. Check out the Saw III profits - who has issues Hollywood or the American public? ) I have worked on a zillion TV shows and movies since I got out of college, and the large majority of "Hollywood types" are good, hardworking people - still the characters on Studio 60 have a kind of relentless integrity that is shocking.
So what.
Studio 60 is a blast to watch. And the acting is great.
So, the Bush administration is going to ease burdens. Of course, it's on companies that pollute.
The Environmental Protection Agency approved new rules today that will quadruple the amount of some toxic pollutants that companies can release before they have to reveal the amounts to the public.
Federal officials originally proposed a 10-fold increase in the trigger for public reports on most chemicals covered by the the 20-year-old “Toxic Release Inventory” program. EPA Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock said the revised limits will ease regulatory burdens on industry while giving companies an incentive to recycle or better manage toxic compounds.
Isn't that special? Apparently allowing companies to pollute more is going to transform them into better environmental stewards.
Bush treats the presidency and our country like a rental. Keep the air clean? Hey, it's a rental. Uphold the Constitution? It's a rental.
The Democrats are saying they will roll back the regulations once they get back into power. Let's hope so.
Matt Damon politely said things about the war I agree with - however I am past polite. Send the bitches in these pictures to Iraq. And all the college republicans. And Ann Coulter. And that wart ass Rush Lumbago. That would end the war. Quickly.
SEND THE BUSH TWINS TO IRAQ NOW!!!!
Farewell, Dense Prince
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
James Baker ran after W. with a butterfly net for a while, but it is now clear that the inmates are still running the asylum.
The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika of wayward warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power ties. W., Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick-draw confidence that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.
Far from being run out of town, the defense czar who rivals Robert McNamara for deadly incompetence has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington. Yesterday's tribute had full military honors, a color guard, a 19-gun salute, an Old Guard performance with marching musicians - including piccolo players - in Revolutionary War costumes, John Philip Sousa music and the chuckleheaded neocons and ex-Rummy deputies who helped screw up the occupation, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, cheering in the audience.
It was surreal: the septuagenarian who arrogantly dismissed initial advice to send more troops to secure Iraq, being praised as "the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had" by his pal, the vice president, even as a desperate White House drafted ways to reinvade Iraq by sending more troops in a grasping-at-straws effort to reverse the chaos caused by Rummy's mistakes.
Just imagine the send-off a defense secretary would have gotten who hadn't sabotaged the Army, Iraq, global security, our chance to get Osama, our moral credibility, the deficit and American military confidence.
Even Joyce Rumsfeld got a Distinguished Public Service Award ribbon placed around her neck. The grandiose ceremony featured everything but the gold-plated matching set of pistols Tommy Franks, another failed warrior, and his wife, Cathy, recently received from a weapons manufacturer. (His had four stars and diamonds; hers, rubies and their marriage date.)
W. never seems as alarmed about the devastation in Iraq as he should be. He told People magazine, "I must tell you, I'm sleeping a lot better than people would assume," and he told Brit Hume that his presidency was "a joyful experience."
He slacked off on his slacker effort to form a new Iraq plan. (Can't these guys ever order pizzas and pull some all-nighters?) Mr. Bush was busy this week hosting Christmas parties for a press corps he disdains; convening a malaria conference at the National Geographic with Dr. Burke of "Grey's Anatomy," Isaiah Washington; and presiding over a hero's departure for the defense secretary he actually dumped, not because of incompetence but for political expediency.
The Rummy hoopla was a way for W. to signal his decision to shred the Baker-Hamilton study, after reportedly denouncing it as a flaming cow pie. Condi Rice signaled the same, telling The Washington Post that she did not want to negotiate with Syria and Iran, as the Iraq Study Group had proposed, because "the compensation" might be too high.
The Democrats thought that when they had won the election, they won the debate on the war and they had W. cornered. But the president is leaning toward surging over the Democrats, voters, Baker and the Bush 41 crowd and some of his own commanders.
W. seems gratified by the idea that rather than having his ears boxed by his father’s best friend, he's going to go down swinging, or double down, in the metaphor du jour, on his macho bet in Iraq. He's reading about Harry Truman and casting himself as a feisty Truman, but he's heading toward late L.B.J. The White House budget office is studying how much it will cost to finance The Surge, an infusion of 20,000 to 50,000 troops into Baghdad to make one last try at "victory." The policy would devolve from "We stand down as they stand up" to "We stand up more and maybe someday they will, too."
Some serving commanders are not in favor of The Surge because they fret that it will infantilize Iraqis even more about assuming responsibility for their own security. They also fear that the insurgents, who have nowhere to go, will outwait our troops.
But W. would rather take a risk in Iraq than risk being a wimp. So he continued to wrap himself in muscular delusions, asserting that on Rummy's watch, "the United States military helped the Iraqi people establish a constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a watershed event in the story of freedom."
Dick Cheney offered this praise to his friend: "On the professional side, I would not be where I am today but for the confidence that Don first placed in me those many years ago."
Alas, we wouldn’t be where we are today, either.
Still time to spend money and/or donate it before Christmas here, here, and here.
MSNBC calls Rummy "tragic" here. However Rumsfeld is not tragic. He is the cause of tragedy...
Rumsfeld is a deluded, tired, arrogant, old man who destroyed thousands of lives based on lies and distortions. He and Cheney and the boy president are an American disaster story. They are, no doubt, criminals as well. Progressives, liberals, and many moderates knew Rummy was wrong all along. And said so. But the media refused air anything but the White House bullshit.
It is time for the media to give liberals an equal share of air time.
Jon Stewart was scathing to Rumsfeld last night. Even though he did it with humor he came close to the indignation that marks an Olbermann special comment.
Basically, you can't describe what is going on in Iraq with words like, golly and gee willickers. It's a fucking nightmare.
The more I think about what I would have said to Bush had I been Jim Webb I would have been arrested. Because it would have been a lot of fuck you's you selfish bastards and how completely arrogant and out of touch are you.
And John (my co-blogger) is absolutely right. How much time does Bush need to figure out that he has lost the war? Obviously he wants to drag it out until he leaves office so he won't be the one to officially lose. But sad face Mr. Bush. You will go down in history as the worst, most incompetent, most criminal president. You will be remembered for "saving Terri Schiavo" and losing an American city. To your credit you lost Osama Bin Laden, Iraq and Afghanistan. A hat-trick! You proved that you learned nothing from history. You spit on the constitution.
Yeah, I would be under arrest for the things I would have said to the President if he had asked me how my boy was doing after my boy had had a close call in Iraq while his girls were partying in Argentina. He really is Marie Antoinette, completely oblivious to the suffering of others.
W "will not be rushed" on Iraq. WHAAAAAAAAAAT???? It is the end of 2006. The war is now longer than WW2. 25,000 American casualties. The idiot declared mission accomplished when Friends was still on the air.
HOW MUCH MORE TIME DOES HE NEED?
Neo-cons are full of neo-bullshit.
Liberals had it right from the gate. Lets save time and money and start listening to liberals.
How come I think we are setting ourselves up for a fall with Obama? I want to get on the bandwagon - badly - but can't yet. He has spent two years in the Senate - largely on book tours. How easy will that be to for McCain to exploit? But W had no real experience you yelp!! Which proves my point. Now if they are smart, the Obama Nation will use Lincoln as the analogy for their man - Abe climbed through the ranks of Illinois politics in a very few years to become President.
Regardless, in 2008 after 8 years of childish stupidity, we will want a grown up. McCain can and will use Obama's short stint in the Senate against him. Oh and for all those who want him because he will take down Clinton. Think again. He will take down Edwards. Hillary will be there when Obama stumbles. And Obama will stumble. (see Howard Dean and that very special scream) All those who want a non Clinton should be doing all they can to get Gore in the race. Gore/Obama. Gore/Tester. Gore/Richardson etc etc etc. Gore/Spitzer even.
We all like the idea of Obama 08, not because of who he is but because of who we want him to be.
Stay tuned.
The Sunshine Boys Can’t Save Iraq
By FRANK RICH
IN America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered.
The report of the 10 Washington elders was rolled out like a heartwarming Hollywood holiday release. There was a feel-good title, "The Way Forward," unfortunately chosen as well by Ford Motor to promote its last-ditch plan to stave off bankruptcy. There was a months-long buildup, with titillating sneak previews to whip up anticipation. There was the gala publicity tour on opening day, starting with a President Bush cameo timed for morning television and building to a "Sunshine Boys" curtain call by James Baker and Lee Hamilton on "Larry King Live."
The wizard behind it all was the public relations giant Edelman, which has lately been recruited by Wal-Mart to put down the populist insurgency threatening its bottom line. Edelman's vice chairman is Michael Deaver, the imagineer extraordinaire of the Reagan presidency, and "The Way Forward" had a nostalgic dash of that old Morning-in-America vibe. In The Washington Post, David Broder gushingly quoted one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that "immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long" might benefit from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra.
Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990's he famously coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. "The Way Forward" is its apotheosis.
This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we're "not winning" in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush's "absolutely, we're winning" of late October, it's hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq.
That's what Donald Rumsfeld at long last acknowledged, between the lines, as he fled the Pentagon to make way for Mr. Gates. The most revealing passage in his parting memo listing possible options for the war was his suggestion that public expectations for success be downsized so we would "therefore not 'lose.' " By putting the word lose in quotes, Mr. Rumsfeld revealed his hand: the administration must not utter that L word even though lose is exactly what we've done. The illusion of not losing must be preserved no matter what the price in blood.
The Iraq Study Group takes a similarly disingenuous tack. Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a "grave and gathering danger" in September 2002 has devolved into a "grave and deteriorating" catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription.
Its recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional Iraqi troops would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers. And if reconciliation among the country's warring ethnicities could be mandated on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to persuade Iran and Syria to "influence events" for America's benefit. It would also be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas.
The group's coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters, equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse to timelines) or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example: Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more military advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there's no reason to believe they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who came before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities of the existing units are suspect as it is.
By prescribing such placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn't plotting a way forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat. Its real aim is to enact a charade of progress to pacify the public while Washington waits, no doubt in vain, for Mr. Bush to return to the real world. The tip-off to the cynical game can be found in a single sentence: "We agree with the goal of U.S. policy in Iraq, as stated by the president: 'an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.' " This studious group knows that even that modest goal, a radical devaluation of the administration's ambition to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, has long been proven a mirage. The Iraqi government's ability to defend anything is so inoperative that the group's members visited the country but once, with just one (Chuck Robb) daring to leave the Green Zone. The Bush-Maliki rendezvous 10 days ago was at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman.
The only recommendations that might alter that reality, however evanescently, come not from "The Way Forward" but from its critics on the right who want significantly more troops and no withdrawal timetables whatsoever. But a Pentagon review leaked to The Washington Post three weeks ago estimates that a true counterinsurgency campaign would "require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police," not the 20,000 or so envisioned as a short-term booster shot by John McCain.
Since these troops don't exist and there is no public support in either America or Iraq for mobilizing them, the president can't satisfy the hawks even if he chooses to do so. Since he's also dead set against a prompt withdrawal, we already know what his policy will be, no matter how many "reviews" he conducts. He will stay the course, with various fake-outs along the way to keep us from thinking we've "lost," until the whole mess is deposited in the lap of the next president.
But as Chuck Hagel said last week, "The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can't quite calibrate." It is yet another, even more reckless flight from reality to suppose that the world will stand still while we dally. The Iraq Study Group's insistence on dragging out its deliberations until after Election Day for the sake of domestic politics mocked and undermined the urgency of its own mission. Meanwhile the violence metastasized. Eleven more of our soldiers were killed on the day the group finally put on its show. The antagonists in Iraq are not about to take a recess while we celebrate Christmas. The mass exodus of Iraqis, some 100,000 per month, was labeled "the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world" by Refugees International last week and might soon rival Darfur's.
THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war's violence boiled over soon after (Tet)), prompting a downturn in American public opinion. Allies in our coalition of the willing - Thailand, the Philippines, Australia - had balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training of South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on its performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men (from Dean Acheson to Omar Bradley) was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement.
But there the stories of Vietnam and Iraq diverge. Those wise men, unlike the Iraq Study Group, were clear in their verdict. And that Texan president, unlike ours, paid more than lip service to changing course. He abruptly announced he would abjure re-election, restrict American bombing and entertain the idea of peace talks. But as Stanley Karnow recounts in "Vietnam: A History," it was already too late, after some 20,000 casualties and three years of all-out war, for an easy escape: "The frustrating talks were to drag on for another five years. More Americans would be killed in Vietnam than had died there previously. And the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century."
The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.
The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.
CNN is all about who will be Time's Person of the Year.
Let's see.
How about the Iraq Study Group for coming up with what Jack Murtha and the Democrats have been saying for years?
Rahm Emanuel for winning back the house?
Mark Foley for bring down the Republicans?
Mary Cheney for being everything that the right hates?
Jack Abramoff for exposing the corruption that was the Republican Congress?
I'm voting for Keith Olbermann. His special comments are biting and needed. His ratings are proof that people are ready for a real change. He covers the stories that the other guys miss and is willing to fight for what our country is supposed to be.
Keith for Person of the Year. Listen up Time.
Woke up to an article in the L.A. Times about a new "manly" Christian movement. Here's a bit: Eric Miller, a construction worker, admits his wife is none too pleased when he takes off, alone, on a weekend camping trip a few weeks after the GodMen conference this fall."She was a little bit leery of it, as we have an infant," he reports. "She said, 'I need your help around here.' Miller, 26, refuses to yield: "I am supposed to be the leader of the family."He's pretty sure his wife will come around once she recognizes he's modeling his life after Jesus'
No Mr. Miler, you are not modeling your life after Jesus. Jesus never married, never had kids - therefore never bolted on the wife and kids to go on a camping trip. There is nothing "manly" about leaving your infant and wife to go camping. To state the obvious: Jesus was not a householder. You are. The fact is Jesus asked his followers to give up EVERYTHING and go with Him. You are not following Jesus, you are ignoring Him. If you want to go camping go camping. But don't blame Jesus for leaving your infant all weekend. Here's an idea - stay home and read the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus stood up for peace, justice, forgiveness, radical inclusion and upending the power structures. A surface reading of the synoptic gospels and one would have to call Jesus a liberal by modern standards. A deeper reading and one sees he is a radical.
Replacing a Donnie Osmond Jesus with a Ted Nugent Jesus is not progress. Conservatives need to stop trying to make Jesus into something they are comfortable with. CHRISTIANITY SHOULD CAUSE CONSISTENT DISCOMFORT. Being saved and being comfortable are not synonymous.
Cindy Sheehan is closer to emulating the Jesus who upended those who defile the temple than this latest fad with "born again" men. FYI: returning to your guns and foul language is not "born again" - it is regression.
Real Christian men oppose war. Real Christian men defend the weak and oppressed. Real Christian men stand up to authority when it is wrong. Real Christian men and women strive everyday to reconcile their turbulent human hearts with the astounding message of peace Jesus brought to fruition.
You and I are being asked to bear (and trancend) our crosses - not bear our arms for sport. Sorry guys, you don't get to change Jesus's message because it doesn't hold your attention like an X-Box.
MY God - 10 more dead Americans today in Iraq and President Idiot had to be told by a "study group" that his policies are a catastrophe....Something liberals have been saying for years. But - hey - if old white guys from previous GOP admins say what liberals and other sane people have been saying all along - I guess it becomes credible.
The old white guys are now saying BUSH sucks! Welcome aboard the "Left is always right Express", -boys! Next time:
Save Time! Listen to the Liberals first!
OK - is it just me or is anyone else already sick of talking about 2008? Chris Matthews is obsessed with 2008. Why don't we focus on right now? We have a couple of wars that need some obsessing over. A genocide in Darfur that has spread to neighboring Chad could use some attention. The ridiculous cost of healthcare in our fine country should be protested in the streets. The lack of a raise in minimum wage, the lack of money spent on New Orleans, the lack of funds for our wounded soldiers, the price of oil, the loss of our rights, the loss of habeas corpus, there's a whole lot to report about and yet we're stuck on 2008.
We just had an election last month, the new Congress hasn't been sworn in yet. Let's stay focused on the present.
Please.
This man was not charged with anything. He was not allowed a lawyer for 21 months. Read this article and tell me Bush is a Christian. Read this article and tell me we are a "Christian nation". We are fast becoming a nation of devils because of the Right wing, evangelical and conservative money grubbing, lying, war profiteers. Whatever Jose Padillia did or did not do - what our government has done to him is clearly terrorism. George W. Bush has completed one job: the terrorists have won. Bush, Cheney and the right wing have sold our collective souls to the Devil.
JESUS FINDS GEORGE W. BUSH'S AMERICA DISGUSTING. READ THE BIBLE!!!
(all that we know about Jesus's 3 years of ministry suggests the above statement is true. In an odd way - if REAL Christians - i.e. liberal Christians - take Jesus back from the Right wingers - the Left can also take America back from the devilish ideology now in charge. Modern American liberalism and the teaching of Jesus go hand in hand.)
One wonders if torture victim John McCain will get his balls back and confront Bush on his amoral administration. - Or will he continue to auction off his own soul bit by bit to Jesus haters like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson.
Lynne says it all below. Frankly, reading the WAPO pieces today and this - I am wondering - not if we should impeach Bush and Cheney soon - but, after they are removed and imprisoned, how do we explain what these people did in our name to future generations of freedom loving Americans? How did we allow so many people to get killed and maimed over a fantasy game of Risk that powerful idiots and greedy sadists were playing with our kids and money? Bush created the war in Iraq. Bush planned and fought the war in Iraq. Bush lost the war in Iraq. Smart people knew all along the whole thing was a potential disaster. The media did almost nothing to give those people, and therefore the American people, a hearing.
And now we se that Rummy wrote a an "ooops" memo - then did what all GOPs do when the going gets tough. He left his mess for someone else to clean up.
There are two op-eds in the Washington Post today that say the same thing - Bush is the Worst President Ever.
From Douglas Brinkley:
The problem for Bush is that certitude is only a virtue if the policy enacted is proven correct.
So Bush's legacy hinges on Iraq, which is an unmitigated disaster. Instead of being forgiven, like Polk and McKinley, for his phony pretext for war (WMD and al-Qaeda operatives in Baghdad), he stands to be lambasted by future scholars. What once were his two best sound bites -- "Wanted dead or alive" and "Mission accomplished" -- will be used like billy clubs to shatter his legacy every time it gets a revisionist lift. The left will keep battering him for warmongering while the right will remember its outrage that he didn't send enough battalions to Iraq.
From Eric Foner:
Bush has taken this disdain for law even further (than Nixon). He has sought to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta in Anglo-American jurisprudence: trial by impartial jury, access to lawyers and knowledge of evidence against them. In dozens of statements when signing legislation, he has asserted the right to ignore the parts of laws with which he disagrees. His administration has adopted policies regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that have disgraced the nation and alienated virtually the entire world. Usually, during wartime, the Supreme Court has refrained from passing judgment on presidential actions related to national defense. The court's unprecedented rebukes of Bush's policies on detainees indicate how far the administration has strayed from the rule of law.
I think someone will be canceling his subscription!
Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction.
"In my view it is time for a major adjustment," wrote Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. "Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough."
Nor did Mr. Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course, he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations.
"Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis," he wrote. "This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.' "
"Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) - go minimalist," he added. The memo suggests frustration with the pace of turning over responsibility to the Iraqi authorities; in fact, the memo calls for examination of ideas that roughly parallel troop withdrawal proposals presented by some of the White House's sharpest Democratic critics.
You have to wonder if this is why he was fired, that he actually entered the reality based world that the rest of us live in. Mr. Bush must have been shocked to have someone say - hey - we suck - this just isn't working and maybe the Democrats (GASP!) are right. Maybe we need to listen to Jack Murtha.
Clearly, he had to go.
What really bothers me, and should bother all of us, is that our men and women dying and being injured on the battlefield should not be political. Everything this administration does is political. When do we release the study group's findings? After the election. How do we fight this war - by "limiting political fallout."
I don't care what your political affiliation - that should make you angry.
When President Bush asked Jim Webb how his boy was doing perhaps the better response by Mr. Webb would have been, "How are your girls doing?"
We're supposed to be fighting the long war and your girls are partying in La Argentina. I thought they were going to get jobs after they graduated college. Wasn't one of them going to teach poor kids in Harlem? Instead they are trying to surpass the Hilton girls for "Heiress of the Month".
Mr. Bush asks military families to continue to sacrifice because he's not leaving until the job is done. Maybe someday, he'll actually define the job. He doesn't bother to go to one funeral and his girls are living the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
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