And the Erosion Continues ...

This should nor surprise anyone who's had their eyes open over the past five years. The American Taliban's assault on our Constitution continues.

From Our "Oh, Bitter Irony!" Department:

GOP Congressman Mark Foley, of Florida's 16th District, has tendered his resignation from the House today. This action came scant hours after ABC News started sniffing around Foley's emails and internet messages concerning sexual innuendos and such directed at Congressional pages under 18 years old.

And the Irony?

This unutterably stupid man (who's also a sterling example of how sexually repressed GOP lawmakers are actually seething cauldrons of perverted lusts) was the Chairman of the House Caucus for Missing and Exploited Children.

Triumph of the Will (redux)

This article from CNN was a teensy bit of an eye-opener for me. According to Watergate journalist turned Bush White House shill Bob Woodward, Bush and Cheney are getting advice on Iraq from none other than the slack-jawed, rheumy-eyed Cold Warrior, "Dr." Henry Kissinger.

Yes, you heard me.

He's one of the nattering nabobs urging the "stay the course" non-policy because he's convinced that we lost Vietnam because of a lack of will. So this war is his way of vindicating himself and rehabilitating his currently shoddy place in the annals of history.

Well, in my opinion, Kissinger's barking up the wrong tree.

In Vietnam we might have lost our will to carry on, but we certainly didn't lack the means. After all, we dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than were dropped on all of Europe in the Second World war, and we still didn't destroy the will of the North Vietnamese. In Iraq, the situation is reversed - we have the will, but lack the means. The Army and Marines are rapidly depleting their resources, broken vehicles and equipment are stacking up at repair and refurbishment facilities, and without a draft (oops! I said the dreaded D-word) we are lacking the manpower we need for the Rumsfeldesque "long war" that is the fevered wet dream of the Bombs and Jesus crowd.

Requiescat in Pace

United States of America

1789 - 2006

Rumsfeld Checks His Zipper

to make sure that his True Face is not revealed:

Rant Time

I would have posted sooner than this (it's been a full week since I wrote anything to this blog), but I was at a management seminar all last week. Friday my business' promotion list came out, and for the 11th time in 11 years my name wasn't on it.

You might think that someone who works hard, gets a good education, is enthusiastic about working for a company, has unquestioned administrative skills and has been a loyal employee for 20 Godsdamned years would be a welcome addition to management.

But apparently not.

So I didn't write anything over the weekend, as I sorted through my mind and got off the depression that always follows such news.

But enough about me - how was YOUR week?

It's been a bit of a weird week for Dear Leader. First he gets a lukewarm reception at the UN while two leaders excoriate him publicly (and it was not at all surprising to see how many in the General Assembly applauded Hugo Chavez's calling Bush a devil), then his three biggest GOP critics on his torture legislation cave in and agree to be sodomized once again on the Altar of Party Unity. The GOP's Altar of Party Unity is built like a row of stocks, designed to take and hold up to one entire Senate full of Republican sycophants and Democrat bootlickers so that Bush can fuck them all in the ass, one by one.

So it's been sort of a roller coaster week for El Presidente.

The slow downward plunge of our once great nation into a political and economic basket case continues, with a record trade deficit, jobs being outsourced to China and India, and the housing market starting to cave in like a Titanic made of old Kleenex boxes.

Osama bin Laden might be dead, or then again he might not be - no one in Washington really cares anymore, since MacTerrorists, Inc. has now metastasized into an ever-widening franchise of global extremist groups. A recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate has revealed that almost everyone but the Bush Crime Family already knew, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has made the terrorist situation worse, not better.

The death of public discourse in this country continues apace, with High Priest of the GOP Death God Moloch (Praised be His Fires) Jerry Falwell actually saying out loud that Hilary Clinton running for President would be worse than if Satan was running. Got news for you, Jerry.

Satan's already in the White House; he's masquerading as Dick Cheney.

Okay, I'm done for now.

Negotiations

As I'm sure you know, the Big Talk in Washington and among the pundits these days is all about Torture - how to, when to, where to, and who to do it to.

Now, the US Army will tell you that torture doesn't get you any information worth having, and after a while it becomes self-defeating. And there are several Federal laws that bind us to international treaties that, simply put, say "Thou shalt not torture."

But the Bush Administration wants to torture people for information, citing the fantasy world scenario of the ticking clock: If you KNOW, beyond all doubt, that A has crucial data that could stop a bomb from going off in 24 hours, how far will you go to get A to give up that data?

The current talk and negotiations between the Rubber-Stamp Congress and the Dear Leader about torture remind me of this classic scenario:

Say A comes up to B and asks, "If I asked you to perform oral sex on a man for ten dollars, would you do it?"
"No," B replies.
"How about a million dollars?" A asks.
"Hmm. Okay," B says.
What we've just done is establish that B is a whore, with an upper limit on how much money it will take to induce him to perform oral sex on A. Now that the upper and lower limits have been set, negotiations can begin.

Kind of like with the torture negotiations. The President has set the limits, and is now discussing exactly how much it'll take for the Congress to get down on their knees to him again.

Just like your common garden variety grade Z crack whore.

A Rumination

A thought occured to me a little while ago, and after mulling it over I've decided to share it with people.

Iran will not nuke Israel.

Let me tell you why.

Centrally located in east central Israel is the city of Jerusalem, and in that city is the site of the Jewish Temple. But to Muslims, Jerusalem is the home of the Noble Sanctuary, the Haram al-Sharif. It is the third holiest site in all of Islam - whether you're Sunni, Shia, Wahhabi, Alawite, etc., the Haram al-Sharif ranks below Medina and Makka itself.

So, depending on which way the wind's blowing, the fallout from an Iranian strike against Tell Aviv would contaminate the Noble Sanctuary. And nevermind the furor raised by nuking Jerusalem itself.

I'm not certain that the Islamic Republic of Iran is that eager to wipe out Israel that it would risk putting the entire Dar-u-l'islam against it.

The Apparatchik's March

The radio correspondent William L. Shirer wrote a book titled Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, recounting the history of Nazism in Germany and detailing his own experiences in that country until his departure in 1941.

One of the items he described in his book was that the Nazis' ideological purging had resulted in many people being appointed to positions for which they were completely unsuitable. One example is a veterinarian being made the Minister of Education. In other words, they were good Party members, but they were piss-poor when it came to the business, industrial or educational posts to which they were appointed.

Fast forward a few decades.

This diary on DailyKos caught my eye (with a tip of the hat to georgia10) not because of the example of Administration misfeasance - although it's glaringly obvious - but because of the amazing historical parallel between the circumstances and Shirer's book.

Here's the original article from the Washington Post, by the way.

So we have bright young Republicans who slavishly follow everything Bush tells them to do, who probably are quite intelligent in their own milieu - but are literal fish out of water running things in Iraq. Two of these "good Party members" had NO experience in either economics or administration, yet were making decisions regarding the outlay of billions of dollars IN MY TAX MONEY.

I honestly don't think that the damage inflicted on America by this government will be erased in my lifetime.

Which Threat is Greater?

Foreign terrorism?

Destruction of our economy?

Or our own government?

Desecrating the Dead

This is the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States. Approximately 2900 people died in those attacks. A small number in the Scheme of Things, but each and every one of them were loved by at least one other person, and each had a universe within them. So their loss is felt.

So far, approximately 2800 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. This should balance the karmic books, or at least make Dick Cheney and the neocons very happy.

Our government, whose leader swore to hunt down Osama bin Laden and "bring him to justice," allowed him to escape by becoming distracted by his administration's fixation on Iraq as the fount of all evil. So we turned away from completing the job in Tora Bora and devoted our precious troops and our treasure to assaulting and occupying Iraq.

Now, five years later:

We have vomited up our most sacred values in the name of illusory secutity;

We have turned our backs upon the rule of law;

We have allowed the current Party in power to trample the Constitution;

We have al Qaeda still in existence;

We have Osama bin Laden still alive and free;

We have a bleeding wound that is Iraq;

We have the Taliban resurgent in Afghanistan; and

We have not made ourselves safer.

So when the President and his android wife visited the site of the World Trade Center (I refuse to refer to it as Ground Zero, as no nuclear weapons were used) to lay wreaths, I consider it a desecration of the dead. Bush's presence there after five years of mismanagement and hubris was nothing but a slap in the face to each and every one of the people who died there, Washington and Pennsylvania.

It is a slap in the face of each and every one of those who survived.

It is a slap in the face of all the loved ones and family members.

And it is a slap in the face of all the American troops who have died in a wasted endeavor.

Imprisoning Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld for their mismanagement, malfeasance and misfeasance is not enough. They should be put in cages, and poked at with sharp sticks by small children on Sundays.

One by One ...

The lumps of poo that have been flung about indiscriminately by the Bush White House are striking the high-speed fan of reality and rebounding on this putrid excuse for an administration.

- The President was forced to acknowledge today what everyone else already knew - that we've been running a network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, and have held people there without charges or access to any whiff of legal system for years. And these new "military tribunals?" Let's all start hopping, because it's Kangaroo Court Time, boys and girls!

- The speaker of Iraq's Parliament has announced that if the factions currently dyeing the streets of Iraq red with blood don't reconcile, Iraq will collapse in "three to four months." Sobering news indeed, because it puts Our Troops in the middle of a very uncomfortable position.

- Pakistan has concluded a truce with the tribes up in North Waziristan, and part of the agreement is supposed to restrict fighters from crossing the border into Afghanistan. Yeah, I'm sure that'll work.

- Speaking of Afghanistan, it's now statistically as dangerous to be an American soldier there as it is in Iraq (according to the New York Times). The Taliban is back, and worse than ever because now they're better-armed and media-savvy. Think Son of Taliban, leaner, meaner and with steam coming out of their ears.

- The economy is starting to slide. Real wages are not keeping up with inflation, the middle class is getting smaller and our trade deficit is gigantic. It is said that Nixon once remraked, "As long as the economy's good, any jackass can get elected President."

The present jackass in the White House, spattered with feces of his own production, is now being avoided like a leper by members of his own Party, since they've realized that he is the Worse Thing to Associate With.

Appeasement

1938 ....


... and 1983.


Any questions?

Opening Bid?

This is the flag of the Autonomous Kurdish Region of the Republic of Iraq. The Kurds are not Arabs or Persians, and their ethnic area extends from Syria through Turkey and Iraq to Iran (all of whom, save Iraq, have banned public display of the flag).

The news yesterday included a tiny footnote: The President of the region had the Iraqi flag removed from all government buildings and replaced with the flag you see above. I am reasonably certain that the next step for the Kurds will be the proclamation of a Kurdish Republic.

What will happen next?

Well, Turkey has already said that the establishment of an independent Kurdistan would be regarded as a less than friendly act. Its army would likely invade, headed by a hard-liner who was recently appointed Chief of the General Staff. While this would have them butting heads with their fellow NATO member (the United States), I think the Turks are prepared to go that route, and nevermind the EU membership.

And the proclamation of independence just might precipitate a complete and formal declaration of civil war. I think that the signal for this would be the schism of the armed forces, and the collapse of the al-Maliki government.

Better brace yourselves.