Finding and denouncing criminal behavior in politicians is too easy.

Easier than shooting fish in a barrel.

More like pointing at the fish in a barrel.

Maybe even just pointing at the barrel.


Ente Grillenhaft

WAR:

First, one hopes to win;

Then one expects the enemy to lose;

Then one is satisfied that he too is suffering;

In the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

--Karl Kraus April 28, 1874 – June 12, 1936

2 people defend Bush -- say he ISN'T the devil -- not bright enough or brave enough

Count on Mark Morford to get to the point -- excerpts here -- well worth reading the entire column:


Is Bush Really The Devil?
Satan has better taste in shoes. Is far sexier. Can actually spell 'Venezuela.' I mean, come *on*
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

... George W. Bush is the devil! cried otherwise wonderfully charismatic but also dumbly ham-fisted Hugo Chávez in front of a bank of U.N. microphones. America is the Great Satan! agrees Islamic fundamentalism, as it mindlessly firebombs a few thousand innocent cars and blows up various KFCs in endless examples of idiotic violence that, ironically, makes Allah shrink in humiliation.

It's a delightfully common appraisal, this Bush-is-the-Devil thing, one I hear frequently from my otherwise highly intelligent, liberal brethren. But is George W. Bush really Satan? ...

Truly, Bush's claim to titanic evilness appears irrefutable. The list of atrocities is so obvious as to be dazzling. Hell, can't we all sense his pallid wickedness down in our very bones? Aren't we all more than a little embarrassed by it? Isn't this the real reason everyone's so annoyed with Chávez? Not because he's wrong but because he's just, you know, horribly tactless?

But I am here to tell you, it ain't that easy. I am here to set the record straight. Well, straighter. Because unfortunately, no matter how much we all want to believe it's true, Bush simply cannot be the Devil. He simply doesn't have the chops...

The Devil smells of sulphur and fire. Bush smells of cow pies and stale beer. The Devil is wickedly, tremendously deceptive, bending entire armies of lowly demons to his will. Bush cleverly inflamed armies of lemming-like evangelical Christians to vote for him by way of gay bashing and woman bashing and fear, through the snarling machinations of his very own shiny Moloch, Karl Rove. It's a worthy comparison.

But alas, it is not enough. There is no majesty to Dubya. No real heat, depth, grand intellectual power to his evilness. Bush is to a real Lucifer what a rat terrier is to a werewolf, what Jack Daniel's is to a pure single malt, what a heat lamp is to global warming: A pale wannabe. A weak imitation, trying hard to scorch your soul but only managing a bit of a rug burn.

Sorry Mr. Chávez, but Bush is no Devil: He is not nearly capable enough, sexy enough, charming enough, debauched or gloriously ruined enough. Bush cannot possibly fill the Devil's gorgeous, tragic Prada shoes. He's far more akin to something to be scraped from the bottom of them.

******************

And from Leftist Ecuador:

Ecuador Candidate Calls Bush 'Dimwitted'

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By GONZALO SOLANO Associated Press Writer

September 27,2006 | QUITO, Ecuador -- The leftist presidential front-runner in Ecuador said Wednesday that the devil should be insulted by comparisons to President Bush, whom he called a "dimwitted" leader who has done "great damage" to the world.

Rafael Correa, speaking to Channel 8 television, referred to a U.N. speech last week by his friend, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who caused an uproar in the United States by calling Bush "the devil."

"Calling Bush the devil is offending the devil," said Correa, a U.S.-trained economist who leads 12 other candidates in polls ahead of the Oct. 15 election. He said "the devil is evil, but intelligent."

"I believe Bush is a tremendously dimwitted president who has done great damage to his country and to the world," Correa said.

*************************

So there we have it -- a friend of the Devil would NOT be a friend of Bush -- too much like slumming.

********************

They're all second rate bozo's, but is Beelzebush the worst of the lot?

So now we have the Big Three --

Hugo Chavez, a certifiable international asshole, whose high-ride may last about as long as his namesake, the car.

Iranian Prime Minister Ahmadinejad, basically a religious-fanatic, a Shi'ia verson of Pat Robertson but with a better -- if outdated -- sense of clothing style -- waiting for the return of the 12th Imam and looking forward to some sort of Final Conflict.

And Monkey Boy, our erstwhile leader, whom Internationally renowned asshole Hugo Chavez has denounced as the Devil, or, as my wife tagged him -- "Beelzebush."

(Remember -- Chavez is Sud Amer Catholic, a different breed -- lots of liberation theology down there where people believe Jesus appeared on Earth to free people, not to make people have to follow orders from an old fart wearing a dress.

They seem to feel toward the Pope sort of the way West Coast acid heads felt towards Tim Leary -- "We think you're a great man, Tim, but since, as you say, acid lets us explore OUR OWN inner universes, why'nt you just shut the fuck up and let us have our own trips?")

Meanwhile, back with the Big Three media champs from UN Open Mike day and "Beelzebush"--

-- Because one is into demagoguery, and one is into power-mongery, but only one of the Big Three -- Beelzebush -- is killing people at an alarming rate and insisting on his right to take people already captured, identifying anyone in custody as a "terrorist" and thereby having the right to inflict pain and humiliation on them through torture not identified as such.

Do the words: "By your works shall ye be known" register?

I have no doubt the other two are capable of such behavior, but only Beelzebush is insisting that the chicken shits in the Senate endorse his position that it's a good and noble thing to do.

Maybe that's the way they think in Hell.

Worth re-posting -- from November 15, 2005

In the last year for which statistics are readily available (2000), there were 88,000 - 89,000 SUBSTANTIATED cases of sexual abuse of a child. That's about 240 a day or 10 every hour or one every six minutes.

So how sick is it to ask the woman you're fucking -- as they do in movies and TV shows --

"Who's your daddy?"

So, OK, fine, now we know what it looks like from Hugo Chavez's perspective

But so what?

That's him.

It's not anti-American (of me) to say, "So maybe he has a point."

Our Stars and Stripes have waved over a lot of uninvited "boot-in-the-face" action down south.

Regardless of the validity or invalidity or somewhere in the middle-idity of Senor Chavez's remarks -- and I have to say that he's wrong on at least one point -- that whiff of sulfur seems to trail behind Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld -- but Bush-Baby makes such a wonderful front man because - -while's he's certainly stupid and vindictive enough to belong in that crowd-- he not only does NOT stink of that particular cologne of the Unholy One, he doesn't seem to even recognize it on his hench-demons -- although I may be wrong -- it's a characteristic, according to believers, that the Prince of Lies is always making you think someone else is the bad guy...

Regardless -- our job (as Americans) is to clean up our own act and often, the rest will relieve itself.

Monkey Boy and his coven of Mega-assholes revised the rules (see below) so they can't really complain when a foreign president talks like our president or Vice President or our UN Ambassador. (Would you call Dr. Frankenstein's monster, Adam, given the neck-metal, a Bolt-On?)

The tragedy to us citizens is that none of the Bush-Mob seem to recognize that they are the same guys as Venezuela's Chavez and North Korea's Ill Sick Fuck and Iran's Disco-dressing Ahmadinejad -- the same megalomaniacal "I am the world" guys, except that, in Chavez's and Ahmadinejad's case, they were actually elected by the people of his country.

So...

From Salon.com's War Room

"Certain points regarding Hugo Chavez's speech at the United Nations on Wednesday ought to be beyond real dispute. For instance, most people should be able readily to agree that for a head of state to call another head of state the "devil" and say that he leaves behind a whiff of sulfur falls short of the ideal model of diplomatic decorum. But one can legitimately question the extent to which the United States is in a position to invoke and enforce such precepts of diplomatic propriety...

President Bush, of course, famously labeled Iran, Iraq and North Korea part of the "Axis of Evil" and recently began using the term "Islamic fascists" in campaign speeches to describe America's enemies. Meanwhile, Bush officials and their supporters have been repeatedly invoking the now-standard rhetorical tactic of comparing America's enemies, including other heads of state, to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi threat."

HUH?

Bush's September 11th Oval Office speech included this sentence:


"Do we have the confidence to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers accomplished in Europe and Asia? "


What? HIS grandfathers -- both of them -- financed the Nazi's EVEN AFTER WE WERE AT WAR WITH THEM. George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush were finally forced by congress to stop around October of 1942 -- 10 months into the war.

Karl Rove's grandfather -- Herr Roverer -- was one of the engineers who designed Auschwitz-Birkenau -- the portion of Auschwitz with the gas chambers and crematoria?

We know he throws out a lot of code, like Dredd Scott for anti-Choice, so his "special message" to his pinheaded haters can slide below the radar ...

So what's the message here?

Prairie Weather reminds of us a little Cosa Shrub history

"Reminds us about who "made their bones" with the first power grab.

Bolton: "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count."

Those were the words John Bolton yelled as he burst into a Tallahassee library on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, where local election workers were recounting ballots cast in Florida's disputed presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

I'd forgotten about that. In the context of Bolton's close connection to the gang in the White House, given that he's probably a "player" in the Plame outing -- not even to mention his recess appointment to an ambassadorship on neutral territory holding, of course, a diplomatic passport -- you have to wonder why the media (or the Democrats in Congress, for god's sake) don't hang him by his, um, ankles for all to see.

Because they -- the Bushies -- regard the United States of America as THEIR Cosa Nostra

Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 17, 2006; A01

Adapted from "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, copyright Knopf 2006

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans... But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O'Beirne... applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

... Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort...

"We didn't tap... just didn't tap the right people to do this job," said Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy director of the CPA's Washington office. "It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings."

******************

OK? Once again -- to these vermin, governance means splitting up the GNP between their friends and hind tit for everyone else.

***************

"As more and more of O'Beirne's hires arrived in the Green Zone, the CPA's headquarters in Hussein's marble-walled former Republican Palace felt like a campaign war room. Bumper stickers and mouse pads praising President Bush were standard desk decorations. In addition to military uniforms and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" garb, "Bush-Cheney 2004" T-shirts were among the most common pieces of clothing.

"I'm not here for the Iraqis," one staffer noted to a reporter over lunch. "I'm here for George Bush."

***********************

You get it yet?

The proper word for them is THIEVES.

Torturing, sadistic, terrified, Rec-Room patriots and under it all, what is the Mission?

To Steal.

Is THAT enough clarity for you, Monkey Boy?

Once a Nazi, always a Nazi

Tuesday in Germany, Pope Benedict had quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and an educated Persian on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the pope said.

"He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,'" he quoted the emperor as saying.

***************

And the best part?

The pope on Sunday said that he was "deeply sorry" about the angry reaction and said the remarks came from a text that didn't reflect his own opinion.


...No, he just felt obliged to spread that opinion around so the flock could repeat them. Sig heil, schmuck. Why in hell would he say such crap unless HE wanted to add fuel to the Holy War fire?

Scratch this Pope's white ball gown and the brown shirt shows through from underneath.

al-Qaida Warns Pope He, West Are Doomed, helps GOP in the mid-term elections

by MAAMOUN YOUSSEF Associated Press Writer

September 18,2006 | CAIRO, Egypt -- Al-Qaida in Iraq and its allies warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that he and the West were "doomed" and proclaimed that the holy war would continue until Islam dominates the world.

The Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni Arab extremist groups that includes al-Qaida in Iraq, issued a statement on a Web forum about the pope's remarks last week on Islam. The authenticity of the statement could not be immediately independently verified.

"You infidels and despotic, we will continue our jihad (holy war) and never stop until God avails us to chop your necks and raise the fluttering banner of monotheism when God's rule is established governing all people and nations," the statement said.

*****************************


More fuel for conspiracy fires?

More confirmation that the Cheney/Bush/Redrum Axis of Incompetence is the best thing that ever happened to Al-Qaeda, and they really want to sure the Bush-wah loyalists continue to keep their hands on the controls for another two year?

Otherwise, why would they say things like that?

I dunno, since we can all see that Bush is talking out of his ass, where does that put Tony Snow, his mouthpiece.

Snowjob today, commenting on Colin Powell's "Quest-for-the Lost-Balls" statement, says "He's confused."

The only time General Powell was confused, truly confused, was when he believed Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, et al -- they they were were actually telling the truth.

His head is pretty clear now.

Tainted Spinach Traced to California

September 15,2006 | WASHINGTON -- Federal heath officials said Friday that they have traced a nationwide E. coli outbreak to a California company, which has agreed to recall its bagged spinach products.

One person has died and nearly 100 people others became ill in the outbreak, which has spread to about 20 states.

The Food and Drug Administration said late Friday that the outbreak had been linked to bagged spinach products distributed by Natural Selection Foods, based in San Juan Bautista, Calif.

*****************

"My life it is finished

Cuz I ate their spinach

I'm Popeye the sailor.....arrrgghhhh"

Oh -- add "thieving and plundering parasitic vermin" the the descriptives in the article below

Interior Dept. blasted for ethics breaches
Agency officials accused of ignoring cover-ups, cronyism
- Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times
Thursday, September 14, 2006

(09-14) 04:00 PDT Washington -- The Interior Department's chief official responsible for investigating abuses and overseeing operations accused the top officials at the agency on Wednesday of tolerating widespread ethical failures, from cronyism to cover-ups of incompetence.

"Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior," charged Earl Devaney, the Interior Department's inspector general, at a hearing of the House Government Reform subcommittee on energy.

"I have observed one instance after another when the good work of my office has been disregarded by the department," he continued. "Ethics failures on the part of senior department officials -- taking the form of appearances of impropriety, favoritism and bias -- have been routinely dismissed with a promise 'not to do it again.' ''

The blistering attack was part of Devaney's report on what he called the Interior Department's "bureaucratic bungling" of oil and gas leases signed in the late 1990s, mistakes that are now expected to cost the government billions of dollars but were covered up for six years. While these leases were the specific focus of the hearing, Devaney directed most of his criticism at what he called a broader organizational culture at the Interior Department of denial and "defending the indefensible."

***********

Read the complete article here at the SF Chronicle Online

Does the phrase "lying, vicious, insane, out-of-contol scumbags" cover them?

Iraq, Iran and here we go again

In a letter to House Intelligence Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra, the senior director of the International Atomic Energy Agency says a recent report out of Hoekstra's committee contained "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements" about Iran's nuclear plans and the IAEA's efforts to track them.

As the Washington Post reports, the IAEA says the committee report incorrectly stated that Iran was producing weapons-grade uranium at a plant in Natanz; falsely claimed that the IAEA's Nobel Peace Prize-winning executive director had removed a senior inspector from the Iran probe in retaliation for raising concerns about alleged Iranian deception, when, in fact, the inspector hadn't been removed at all; and made the "outrageous and dishonest" claim the IAEA has an "unstated" policy that bars inspectors from telling the truth about Iran.

"Privately," the Post says, "several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate."

The IAEA's letter comes as Senate Republicans continue to stall an investigation into allegations that the Bush administration misused intelligence on Iraq and as somebody -- the "intelligence community" or the White House? -- is blocking public disclosure of information about that much-hyped Mohammed Atta meeting that seems never to have occurred.

What? Izzit true? Colin Powell finds his balls where he left them? In the back of his underwear drawer? On top of the bandwagon?

Powell Says Bush Plan To Authorize Torture ‘Would Put Troops At Risk’

Gen. Colin Powell issued a letter today sharply criticizing President Bush’s new legislation that would establish a system of military commissions to try suspected terrorists.

Bush’s proposal would “liberalize the definition of what is torture” by amending the War Crimes Act to “permit use of hypothermia, threats of violence to the detainee and his family, stress positions, ‘long-time standing,’ prolonged sleep deprivation, and possibly waterboarding.”

Here it is:

Dear Senator McCain,

I just returned to town and learned about the debate taking place in Congress to redefine Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. I do not support such a step and believe it would be inconsistent with the McCain amendment on torture which I supported last year.

I have read the powerful and eloquent letter sent to you by one my [sic] distinguished predecessors as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Jack Vessey. I fully endorse in tone and tint his powerful argument. The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.

I am as familiar with The Armed Forces Officer as is Jack Vessey. It was written after all the horrors of World War II and General George C. Marshall, then Secretary of Defense, used it to tell the world and to remind our soldiers of our moral obligations with respect to those in our custody.

Sincerely,

*******************

Can you actually get the originals back?

Or do you have to settle for a set of plastic implants, the kind they give to neutered dogs
to help improve their self-esteem? (Don't really do anything, but they look sproty in the locker room.)

Voting -- let's solve the problem the way NASA solved the "pen-in-zero-gravity" problem -- use a pencil and paper

Princeton study comes to a scary conclusion: Diebold voting machines are EASILY hacked to alter vote counts.

Abstract

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

************

But no candidates running for office would do anything like that, would they?

The Bad News and the Good News

Arctic Ice Melting Rapidly, Study Says

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer

September 13,2006 | -- Arctic sea ice in winter is melting far faster than before, two new NASA studies reported Wednesday, a new and alarming trend that researchers say threatens the ocean's delicate ecosystem.

Scientists point to the sudden and rapid melting as a sure sign of man-made global warming.

"It has never occurred before in the past," said NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso in a phone interview. "It is alarming... This winter ice provides the kind of evidence that it is indeed associated with the greenhouse effect."

Scientists have long worried about melting Arcticsea ice in the summer, but they had not seen a big winter drop in sea ice, even though they expected it.

For more than 25 years Arctic sea ice has slowly diminished in winter by about 1.5 percent per decade. But in the past two years the melting has occurred at rates 10 to 15 times faster. From 2004 to 2005, the amount of ice dropped 2.3 percent; and over the past year, it's declined by another 1.9 percent, according to Comiso.

*************

The Bad News? We're really truly sincerely and inexorably fucked.

The Good News? The Northwest passage -- that imaginary shipping lane originally created in a 16th century novel, then assumed to be true -- might actually appear. Get your jet skis out, folks, and you can zip straight through from Newfoundland to Osaka.

(It's not Monkey Boy's fault. His moronic greed probably saved us from spending immense amounts of energy and money to little or no avail. How wise of him and the people with their hand up his open end to have just given it to their rich friends instead, eh?)

Film-maker's star on the rise -- he knows how to give us -- the public -- what we want to see

Film depicts fictional killing of Bush

British movie to debut at Toronto filmfest

A controversial mock documentary showing the imagined assassination of U.S. President George W. Bush will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival next week and be aired on a British television channel next month.

The British film, Death of a President, which the festival refers to as D.O.A.P., mixes archival footage and computer-generated imagery to give a chillingly realistic representation of a killing.

In the film, the president makes a speech to business leaders in Chicago and faces a massive anti-war demonstration. He is shot by a sniper as he leaves the venue, and the investigation into his killing focuses on a Syrian-born man.

The 93-minute film acts as an investigative documentary made years after the 2007 killing and features protesters outside the Chicago hotel, suspects in the shooting, the Secret Service men who failed to protect their charge, the press and an array of experts.

***************************

One viewer discussed the film as "after that (the shooting) the film becomes a standard police procedural, like a Law and Order episode. What a combination of elements of proven popular appeal!

**********************

From the same story:

A White House spokesperson told Entertainment Tonight Canada that the film "doesn't dignify a response."

OK -- back to White House Remedial English -- either:

(1) you don't want to DIGNIFY THE FILM with a response, or

(2) Responding would be BENEATH YOUR DIGNITY.

But "the film doesn't dignify a response"?

Actually, given the ramping up for the mid-term elections, #2 is pure imagination -- there ain't NOTHING beneath their dignity.


Various articles on the film:

Scotsman.com

Sean Penn on Canada.com, at the film festival for his own filmAll the King's Men commenting on Bush: "So that's the level of politician I think he's good at. So out of context, he's Beelzebub - and a dumb one."

The Toronto Sun's article (you have to pay to see the whole article), includes this quote from well-known social ethicist and opiate addict Rush Limbaugh: "Isn't it a crime to talk about killing the president?"

And a variety of other clips as well as some relevant commentary on the online "Surviving Ourselves Magazine"

So why do we keep insisting this is Vietnam Redux?

Different terrain, different humidity, Muslims against Christians instead of Buddhists and Commie Rat Bastards (altho the Diem family's Catholicism played a large part in the famous baby-buggering devil in a red dress -- Cardinal Spellman -- leaning on Truman and Eisenhower to make commitments to a family nearly as vile as Saddam Hussein's, or maybe it was the number of Catholic voters in New York State Spellman could direct).

But the same swaggering, cocky hubristic piece of Texas crap that walks like a man (actually he prances in those high-heel sneakers he wears) thinking he's so tough (difference -- in LBJ's case, he WAS tough and it wasn't daddy's money from Hitler and Saddam that made people go along with him).

Same -- lies to get us in, lies to keep us going, nasty bullying insistence that anyone who points out the emperor is not only naked but circling the toilet bowl is a traitor. Using the words of men and women in uniform and still under his command who are legally bound by the UCMJ to NOT publicly criticize the Commander-in-Chief.

And denouncing any retired military, no longer in the chain of command, who point out that Iraq is the la Brea Tar Pits for the dinosaurs who fight holy wars, saying they're "disgruntled ex-officers."

Got to hand it to Karl Rove -- his ability to lower his level BELOW the gutter and to lie and lie and lie and lie and say anything that comes into his mind -- fuck -- he outdoes Goebbels (an old pal of his family, remember -- gramps designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau)

Does anyone beside me find it interesting how many Republicans are 2d or 3d generation Nazi families? Bush, Rove, Schwarzenegger, the Kennedies, et al.

And by the way, that "gentlemanly" father of his, who all through the Reagan years was the one who met with the former Nazi's in Germany, who had nearly a dozen former SS men running his "ethnic campaign -- they being supervised by Monkey Boy who finally had to can them as the word was getting out -- And that so-called gentleman "niggerized" Dukakis in the presidential campaign with the vicious racism of the Willie Horton commericals.

Oh, also like Vietnam, the president's puppet masters are getting richer richer richer.

And men and women in uniform are geting killed and mutilated.

But most of all, it's Vietnam Redux because it's one big steaming pile of stinking hubris piling dead and maimed bodies higher and higher because the people giving orders are socipaths who think anything they do is legal and fine, and "those people" don't really value their lives like we do. (I think they mean enlistees in the Army and marines as 'those people," since all of them were just too goddamn precious to do it, even when the draft existed -- except for Redrum who was in the navy back when they had sails).


(Yesterday, on 9-11, a woman came into the bookstore I was running, and as she checked out told me that she's started to believe in an afterlife, because "somewhere, sometime, Bush and Cheney and the rest have to get the punishment they deserve."

Interesting -- I'd never seen her before.)

Cheney insists invading iraq was the right thing to do, regardless...

Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet The Press yesterday to answer questions on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the administration's new detainee policy. After being forced to admit that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, the Vice President was asked whether he would still have invaded Iraq knowing that there were no WMDs. Cheney responded:

"The world is better off because Saddam Hussein is in jail instead of in power in Baghdad. It was the right thing to do and if we had it to do over again, we'd do exactly the same thing."

***********

"America must remain strong," he didn't go on, but could have, "and if the world ever learned how much Saddam Hussein kicked-back to Bush 41 when he was veep, it would compromise our position in the world ... even more than this abominable blunder we've mired ourselves in.

"Don't you get it yet? Bush 41 had April Glaspie convince Saddam it was ok to go into Kuwait, then convinced that schmuck in Saudi Arabia that Saddam was planning to invade them. The whole thing was about getting a military base there. Unfortunately, Ms Glaspie died in one of our patented "Single-car accidents." Or she'd confirm that. Which was what we were afraid of when we arranged the oil slick.

"Even Osama coming home, wanting to get financed and armed to take out his blood enemy Saddam, but then vowing vengeance on us when he found out about our base on Sacred Arabian Soil worked out well, since it provoked him to create Al Quaeda and attack the World Trade Center -- twice.

"And the second time ... well, how long do you think junior would have lasted without something like 9-11 to make Americans say, 'Well, shit fuck ok, maybe I should shut up since he's the president."

"Of course, having the prescience to pass laws making it a crime to speak harshly of the president BEFORE 9-11 helped too. No more casual "Someone should shoot that asshole" comments.

"41 got Noriega himself, but he was a piker in terms of how much he kicked back to the Vepp for trans-shipping coke across his patch of land. Saddamm put Billions -- with a B -- into 41's coffers.

"It was all Barb's plan. And you know, NO ONE says "No" to her.

"As to us conspiring to create 9-11? What a laugh. You see how we totally fucked up a simple invasion of an unpopular dictator's home ground? You think we have the chops to pull off a monstrous bit of genius like that mass murder bit? Wish we'd thought of it, but .. well maybe we did, but it took that little Joe Pesci-looking motherfucker, Zawahiri, to pull it off.

"Osama? Fuck him -- he's the George W Bush of the Islamic world. Front man, that's all. The one who gets caught with the goods when it's over."

*************

So I offer my heartfelt grieving sympathy for all the people who died horrible deaths so the Carlyle Group could make more money from the pipeline, from anthrax vaccine, from their interests in Halliburton, and all the rest. They were just going to work. Like all the people in Iraq who have to try to do that every day, 20 to 30 to 50 of them less each day.

You can always spot a company-man moron -- even when he wears a fancy dress with ruby slippers

The clue? There are several.

One if he actually believes in an omni-god but thinks science is somehow ... what? not that god's doing ... maybe he hasn't thought things through.

Two -- he loves the faith of Africans and Asians who are "frightened by a form of rationality" which is pretty logical, since the former Hitler-youth sig-heiler is now the chief exhorter of an invisible friend who embodies and exemplifies love, charity, humility, and forgiveness. I would figure, for a guy like that, "rationality" is the LAST THING he'd want his
sheep to embrace.

Pope Says Not to Reject God for Science

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By DAVID McHUGH Associated Press Writer

September 10,2006 | MUNICH, Germany -- Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday warned modern societies not to let faith in science and technology make them deaf to God's message, and suggested that Asia and Africa could teach the wealthier West something about faith.

In his sermon to some 250,000 pilgrims at an open-air Mass in Munich, Benedict said modern people suffered from "hardness of hearing" when it comes to God.

"Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God -- there are too many different frequencies filling our ears," he said. "What is said about God strikes us as pre-scientific, no longer suited to our age."

"People in Asia and Africa admire our scientific and technical progress, but at the same time they are frightened by a form of rationality which totally excludes God from man's vision, as if this were the highest form of reason."

DAMN -- I hate it when Pat Buchanan makes more sense than putatively sane people

Pat Buchanan -- may be crazy but sure isn't stupid. Or chicken.

I guess, like Al Gore (also not stupid), he knows the reality of
"when you got nothin' you got nothin to lose"

I mean, neither one will ever be able to run for office again, and both have been publicly castrated, meaning they don't have THAT to fear.

Buchanan and Kevin Philips the only "conservatives" who don't follow party lines, except I understand George Will (a sketchily-drawn homunculus who writes about politics but is allowed to live because he loves baseball), wrote a column about the debacle in Iraq that had the White House in terror for 2 days -- when the serfs tell the landlord "fuck you," the Manor is not a happy place -- and when the Number One War Pimp in America tells everyone that this band of Rec Room Warriors are unable to find their plans with both hands, it's topsy-turvy.

Someone pointed out that it may have been the trigger for early-launching of the fall smear offensive (equating critical views of Iraq with either Naizism or appeasement of such).

And that it causes the White House to authorize $20 million to go to any service that can document which news media are repoting "positive" news about Iraq .. so they can relay it to the troops. ($20 million for that after REFUSING $1.7 million to complete research on reducing aftereffects of head wounds to soldiers.)

Anyway -- (he may or may not be crazy, but Mr. Buchanan is not stupid)

Islamo-fascism?

by Patrick J. Buchanan - September 1, 2006



"President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascist Tool."


So ran the New York Times headline on Oct. 26, 1948, after what Dewey
biographer Richard Norton Smith called a "particularly vitriolic attack in
Chicago" by Harry Truman.


What brings this to mind is President Bush's assertion that we are "at war
with Islamic fascism" and "Islamo-fascism."


After the transatlantic bomb plot was smashed, Bush said the plotters "try
to spread their jihadist message I call - it's totalitarian in nature,
Islamic radicalism - Islamic fascism; they try to spread it, as well, by
taking the attack to those of us who love freedom."


What is wrong with the term Islamo-fascism?


First, there is no consensus as to what "fascism" even means. Orwell said
when someone calls Smith a fascist, what he means is "I hate Smith. " By
calling Smith a fascist, you force Smith to deny he's a sympathizer of
Hitler and Mussolini.


As a concept, writes Arnold Beichman of the Hoover Institution, "fascism .
has no intellectual basis at all nor did its founders even pretend to have
any. Hitler's ravings in 'Mein Kampf' . Mussolini's boastful balcony
speeches, all of these can be described, in the words of Roger Scruton, as
an 'amalgam of disparate conceptions.'"


Richard Pipes considers Stalinism and Hilterism to be siblings of the same
birth mother: "Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism."


Since the 1930s, "fascist" has been a term of hate and abuse used by the left against the right, as in the Harry Truman campaign. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. claimed to see in the Goldwater campaign "dangerous signs of Hitlerism." Twin the words "Reagan, fascism" in Google and 1,800,000 references pop up.


Unsurprisingly, it is neoconservatives, whose roots are in the Trotskyist-social Democratic left, who are promoting use of the term. Their goal is to have Bush stuff al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran into the same "Islamo-fascist" kill box, then let Strategic Air Command do the
rest.


But the term represents the same lazy, shallow thinking that got us into Iraq, where Americans were persuaded that by dumping over Saddam, we were avenging 9/11.


But Saddam was about as devout a practitioner of Islam as his hero Stalin was of the Russian Orthodox faith. Saddam was into booze, mistresses, movies, monuments, palaces and dynasty. Bin Laden loathed him and volunteered to fight him in 1991, if Saudi Arabia would only not bring the Americans in to do the fighting Islamic warriors ought to be doing themselves.


And whatever "Islamo-fascism" means, Syria surely is not it. It is a secular dictatorship Bush I bribed into becoming an ally in the Gulf War. The Muslim Brotherhood is outlawed in Syria. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad perpetrated a massacre of the Brotherhood in the city of Hama that was awesome in its magnitude and horror.


As with Gadhafi, whom Bush let out of the penalty box after he agreed to pay $10 million to the family of each victim of Pan Am 103 and give up his nuclear program, America can deal with Syria as Israel did after the Yom Kippur War - for an armistice on the Golan that has stuck, as both sides have kept the deal.


America faces a variety of adversaries, enemies and evils. But the Bombs-Away Caucus, as Iraq and Lebanon reveal, does not always have the right formula. Al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran all present separate challenges calling forth different responses.


Al-Qaida appears to exist for one purpose: Plot and perpetrate mass murder to terrorize Americans and Europeans into getting out of the Islamic world. Contrary to what Bush believes, the 9/11 killers and London and Madrid bombers were not out to repeal the Bill of Rights, if any ever read it. They are out to kill us, and we have to get them first*.


Hamas and Hezbollah have used terrorism, but, like Begin's Irgun and Mandela's ANC, they have social and political agendas that require state power to implement. And once a guerrilla-terrorist movement takes over a state, it acquires state assets and interests that are then vulnerable to U.S. military and economic power.


Why did the ayatollah let the American hostages go as Reagan raised his right hand to take the oath of office? Why did Syria not rush to the rescue of Hezbollah? What did Ahmadinejad not rocket Tel Aviv in solidarity with his embattled allies in Lebanon? Res ipse loquitor. The thing speaks for itself. They don't want war with Israel, and they don't want war with the United States.


"Islamo-fascism" should be jettisoned from Bush's vocabulary. It yokes the faith of a billion people with an odious ideology. Imagine how Christians would have reacted, had FDR taken to declaring Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy "Christo-fascist."


If Bush does not want a war of civilizations, he will drop these propaganda terms that are designed to inflame passions rather than inform the public of the nature of the war we are in, and the war we are not in.

SOURCE: Creators Syndicate



* 'Dat ole crazyman pops up again. He gets it right again -- they are OUT TO GET US -- OUT OF THEIR COUNTRIES" so the idea that we have to get them first IS THE ONLY RESPONSE and getting our asses out of their faces isn't even an option to consider, seems to fall into that deep dark crevasse of fanaticism.

Bush disputes Pentagon's Warning of Civil War in Iraq

Bush: Iraq Has Not Fallen Into Civil War
The Associated Press

Saturday 02 September 2006

Washington - A day after a Pentagon report described spreading sectarian violence and increasingly complex security problems in Iraq, President Bush painted a rosier picture. "Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, while the overwhelming majority want peace and a normal life in a unified country."

The president acknowledged "a bloody campaign of sectarian violence" and the "difficult and dangerous" work of trying to end it.

On Friday, the Pentagon reported that death squads increasingly targeting mainly Iraqi civilians heighten the risk of civil war. The report, the latest in a series required by Congress, also said the Sunni-led insurgency "remains potent and viable."

"Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, specifically in and around Baghdad, and concern about civil war within the Iraqi civilian population has increased in recent months," the report said.

****************************

Right -- because his VAST military experience means he knows more than the people who actually do this stuff for a living.



George Bush has changed -- he's gone from being the doofus know-nothing front man in the oval office to become an simple but unpleasant walking talking popcorn fart.

It just doesn't matter WHO is president -- they all play along with the international drug trade...

Whether it was Eisenhower protecting Chiang Kai-Shek while he controlled the world opium trade out of the GoldenTriangle or LBJ and Nixon protecting that same source, but later, when Madame Nhu was running the operation, or Reagan supervising the amazing coke deal that financed the Contras, or Bush Pere up to his eyeballs in the CIA/contra coke deals while Prez (the specifics always negotiated in Dan Quayle's office) or the CIA heroin duing Air America daze, or Clinton finding a need to take military action in Kosovo, the primary trans-shipment route for Afghani Opium, or Bush Fils just happening to take the action and then the inaction that has brought about the situation in the news report below, they ALL ALWAYS seem to end up doing things that increase the power and profit of the international drug lords.

Freedom? Dictatorship? Democracy? Totalitatarism?
All just sounds like farts on the wind.

The appropriate words are NARCO-BILLIONS.
One hell of a coincidence, eh?

Coincidence?

It's the closest thing to a continuing foregin/domestic policy we've have since WWII.

(Oh, JFK? Well poppa was a bootlegger, and the Cutty Sark -- Harvard Boy's joke -- using the name and image of the fastest Opium Runner on the seas during tall mast ship days...)

*************

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 2 — Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.

He described the figures as “alarming” and “very bad news” for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001.

He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations.

“This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium — a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent,” Mr. Costa said at a news briefing.

**************

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

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