In the dark with Daddy

October 17th, 2006

I have to laugh every time I hear the absurd charge that Liberals hate America … that’s a Pub selling point, in case nobody has accused you of this recently. We hate our country because we’re willing to hold it responsible … to even notice where it errs.

Loving America these days is like adoring your incestuous Daddy — the one who everybody thinks has gone a bit off, lately … well, maybe a bit more than off, maybe darned odd but his wife still smiles and waves, guess it’s ok … and he’s still a crackerjack insurance salesman who adores his perfect little family and plays golf with the boys on Saturday — he’s still a deacon at the church and raises money for the Little League — and who nobody could believe sneaks into your room at night to brutalize and terrorize you, unannounced and unimpeded.

There is a difference between loving the historic America, the promise of America, the great beating heart of America … and the [a]merica that Bush has given us and that his serial abuser friends and colleagues tell us we really really want.

Here’s a collection of Daddy’s diddling — and if we continue to talk it up among ourselves, surely more and more of our neighbors will hear us … and begin to wonder if Daddy isn’t just a sick, sadistic bastard who needs to be taken away in cuffs.

Oh yes — and that little insurance form Daddy signed today, the one that prevents him from being prosecuted for all the things he does in the night? That’s the icing on the cake … there isn’t anybody Daddy won’t f__k now.

Time to let everybody in the neighborhood know … it’s dark in the heart of [a]merica. And somebody needs to come get Daddy or none of us are safe.

Jude

Bush signs terror interrogation law
NEDRA PICKLER, AP
7 minutes ago
http://tinyurl.com/ybn6e9

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday signed legislation authorizing tough interrogation of terror suspects and smoothing the way for trials before military commissions, calling it a “vital tool” in a time of war.

Bush’s plan for treatment of the terror suspects became law just six weeks after he acknowledged that the CIA had been secretly interrogating suspected terrorists overseas and pressed Congress to quickly give authority to try them in military commissions.

“With the bill I’m about to sign, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people will face justice,” Bush said.

Among those the United States hopes to try are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged would-be 9/11 hijacker, and Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a link between
Osama bin Laden and many al-Qaida cells.

“It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill that he knows will save American lives,” Bush said. “I have that privilege this morning.”

Bush signed the bill in the White House East Room, at a table with a sign positioned on the front that said “Protecting America.” He said he signed it in memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush reserves right to name his friend Flicka as FEMA chief
Weldon Berger
Oct 16 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/1826

Undaunted by the fiasco that was Michael Brown, president Bush has told Congress to butt out of the hunt for the next FEMA chief. Brown, the Arabian horse aficionado who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the Katrina disaster, had no previous disaster management experience and Bush says he has the authority to appoint equally unqualified successors.

What Congress did was write a set of minimum qualifications for the position into the budget authorization bill for the Department of Mothership Security. What Bush did was issue a signing statement saying that the bill “purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office.”

In other words, the Congressional demand for someone with the expertise to run the office rules out most of the president’s applicant pool. (This is the same signing statement in which the president asserted the right to edit or suppress Congressionally mandated reports from Homeland Security on the agency’s compliance with privacy rules.)

The president probably does have the right to ignore constraints on whom he can or can’t appoint to any particular position. If he wants to follow Caligula’s example and go himself one better by appointing a horse to the position rather than merely a horse fancier then he can, so long as the horse passes the security check.

At that point it’s up to Congress to exercise some oversight; what apparently spurred the insertion of job qualifications into the budget bill is a lack of trust in themselves to vote Flicka down if Bush appoints her to the position. And who can say them neigh? It isn’t as though Congress has actually functioned as a check on the executive branch since 2001. Recognizing their inability to do so is probably the most rational thing they’ve done in recent years, although they can’t have expected Bush to abide the attempt to do by legislation what they won’t do in hearings.

The requirement Bush finds so troublesome? Congress wants the next FEMA chief to have five years of related experience under his or her belt before saddling up to run the front-line agency tasked with handling major US disasters.

In other words, they don’t want someone who, like the president, is all hat and no horse. But with this administration you got to be careful what you wish for.

Iraq war despair is not an option
Situation is dire, but work must continue to make this failed war the last
Molly Ivins
10.17.06
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=21515

AUSTIN, Texas — One reason despair is not an option is because things can always get worse, and then what’ll we do? I was actually trying to figure that out when I came across a remarkable article written for the The Nation magazine (known for its liberalism for 141 years) by Richard J. Whalen — a conservative in good standing, a former Nixon staffer. Whalen has undertaken the singularly valuable task of talking to dissenting generals about the war in Iraq.

I suppose one could argue, and I am sure someone will, that these are mostly retired generals. Some, like Lt. Gen. William Odom, are calling Iraq “the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States.” And they are retired precisely because of their opposition to Iraq.

“The only question is whether a war serves the national interest,” one retired three-star told Whalen. “Iraq does not.”

Whalen writes: “The dissenting retired generals are bent on making Iraq this nation’s last strategically failed war — that is, one doggedly waged by civilian officials largely to avoid personal accountability for their bad decisions. A failed war causes mounting human and other costs, damaging or entirely destroying the national interest it was supposed to serve.”

During Vietnam, senior soldiers kept quiet. But after it ended, officers, including Colin Powell, “vowed it would never happen again.” But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the other civilians in charge overruled the military minds and ignored the possible consequences.

Some of Whalen’s and the generals’ clearest points come from breaking the silent ban against comparing Iraq to the Vietnam War. Don’t know if you noticed this, but from the beginning anyone who spoke right up and said, “This is just like Vietnam,” had the experience of right-wingers landing on them, screeching: “This is not like Vietnam. This Is Not Like Vietnam. THIS IS NOT LIKE VIETNAM.” Of course it is. We just haven’t wasted 57,000 American lives yet.

Odom tells Whalen that “our objectives in Vietnam passed through three phases to defeat. These were (1) 1961-65, ‘containing’ China; (2) 1965-68, obsession with U.S. tactics, leading to ‘Americanization’ of the war and (3) 1968-75, phony diplomacy and self-deluding ‘Vietnamization.’ Iraq has now completed two similar phases and is entering the third.”

In late September, it was reported that the National Intelligence Estimate for April said the war in Iraq is creating more terrorists: “A large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists … are increasing in both number and in geographic distribution. If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.”

The administration has released three pages of the 30-page report. We may see the rest of it, but not until after the election.

It’s difficult to argue this war with people who look straight at you and say: “Stay the course. Don’t cut and run.” We can’t even get reasonable discourse on the report, the work of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and signed by Bush’s man, John Negroponte.

Meanwhile, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health now estimates about 655,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in this war. All the work in the study fell to a knee-jerk response from conservatives, “Oh, that can’t be right.” Yet the methodology employed is the same as is used by the federal government to decide how to spend millions of dollars every year. It is, as they say, the industry standard.

Speaking of money, though ’tis a pittance compared to lives, we are also wasting billions, as the new “showcase” Iraq police academy demonstrates. It seems we are trying to create a police force in Iraq loyal to the state by housing them in a place with water and feces running down the walls. Further, we’re going to have to spend millions and millions to investigate how we frittered away billions and billions.

Are Evangelicals Over?
Alan Wolfe, Comment Is Free
October 17, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/43092/

With the recent revelations that Bush aides mocked members of their Christian base, it has become increasingly clear to many evangelicals that their alliance with the Republicans is not paying off.

American elections in which no president is chosen are usually hum-drum affairs interesting only to policy wonks. Not 2006. Though not on any ballot, the question voters will be answering is: Has the religious right peaked?

Barring some miracle, it has. I am just back from a two-day visit to Regent University, founded by the evangelist Pat Robertson, a key figure in the religious right. “What you need to understand,” a Robertson supporter told me, “is that Pat opposed the war in Iraq from the start.” I responded that according to the Lancet, some 600,000 Iraqis have died since the war began. If Robertson had publicly opposed the war, I told them, his influential voice might have spared those lives. “But,” one of them answered back, “Pat is a Republican who would not openly oppose the president.”

And there, I submit, is why the religious right is in trouble. Since the emergence of a politically active version of conservative Protestantism in the 1980s, it has never been clear whether America’s shift to the right took place because deeply religious people became political or because deeply conservative people became religious. I learned at Regent what I have long suspected: For some of the most visible leaders in the religious right, politics trumps religion every time.

But this is not true at all among many of the religious right’s followers. Many conservative evangelicals are deeply persuaded that their society has descended into shameless immorality and that their task — or, as they would say, their purpose — is to restore the country to its senses. For them, abortion, gay marriage, and stem cells are signs of such moral decadence. One can accuse them of cherry-picking their issues; surely torture or economic inequality should be concerns of people who try to live by the teachings of Jesus. But there is no doubting their sincerity.

Historically, evangelicals believed that religion and politics should be separate: one was holy, the other Satan’s domain. But they put those convictions aside in the hopes that the Republican Party would change America’s moral climate. It has not, and they are not happy.

It is precisely because conservative evangelicals pay more attention to issues involving sexuality than they do to economics or foreign policy that the Foley affair has become so important. It has become increasingly clear to many evangelicals that their alliance with the Republicans is not paying off: Abortion is still legal (if more restricted); gays can still marry in one state, and civil unions are spreading elsewhere; and opposition to stem cell research is a losing cause.

David Kuo, former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has just come out with a book, “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction,” showing what suckers conservative voters have been; in private, he writes, Republicans in the Bush administration wanted their votes and had no interest in leading a new Great Awakening. The fact that a key Republican in Congress was gay, involved himself in the lives of teenagers, and, despite some knowledge of these things, was allowed to continue in office by Republican leaders, has now made clear to even larger numbers of evangelicals how little the administration they loved so much returns their passion.

Americans love God and hate politics. If the people who presume to speak for God, like Pat Robertson, are political activists in religious garb, why become involved with something you hate, especially if it corrupts what you love? Conservative evangelicals are unlikely to vote in large numbers for Democrats. But if even small numbers of them choose not to vote at all, Republicans will be unable to mobilize their base as they did in 2000 and 2004. That alone would constitute sufficient evidence that the religious right’s political influence has begun to wane.

Bush is a symptom of the “Republican Disease”
W. Christopher Epler
Oct 17 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/1866

George Bush may be a smirking puppet, but we shouldn’t forget that what really counts is the hand inside the puppet.

And that hand is who or what? That’s easy; it’s our Republican neighbors, in-laws, and colleagues! And the danger is that if we’re not very clear about this, we’ll keep treating the symptom and not the disease.

Which is just what the core Republicans want. What could be better than to have G. Duhbya for a front man? He annoys everyone (just like Bolton!) and thus becomes the quintessential lightening rod — the appendix in the Republican gut.

Is this pure chance? Of course not. He focuses the outrage of the country (and world) away from this irrational and immoral army.

Leo Tolstoy warned the world not to glorify Napoleon by assuming one individual can dominate world events. He pointed out that if it hadn’t been Napoleon it would have been someone else. Napoleon was a “symptom” (like George), not a cause. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The world was “ripe” for Napoleon.

Exactly the same thing is true for G. Duybya. Get serious, are we really supposed to believe that this pseudo Texan with a Daddy Degree from Yale and the conscience (and attention span) of a grasshopper is “dominating” world events?

No, no, no, he’s merely the front man, a symptom of our country’s values at their worst. “Republicans” have been with us since the beginning of recorded history, with their limitless greed, Pharisee hypocrisies, and righteous violence. Bush is simply the visible boil.

The problem with treating symptoms is that you never get at the causal disease. Band-Aids on cancer don’t do much.

So what are we to conclude from this? We should realize that what’s happening now in America has little or nothing to do with politics as usual and that it’s profoundly to the advantage of Republicans to convince us that it does.

This is a conflict between good and evil. Evil is a tricky word, certainly, but what other shoe fits Bush’s indifference to New Orleans and a presidency of nonstop, pathological lying?

Let’s face it; America’s pig rich are eating the rest of us alive. We’re losing (or have lost!) our heath care, our retirements, our medical research, and our God given wilderness. The Republican energy bill is literally PAYING the corporate cronies of the Bush Family (don’t forget Daddy!) to rape Mother Nature at will. How much money are you making off of $3.00 gasoline? Iraq has turned out to be all about oil after all (paid for with our childrenís blood), and the extremist Evangelical supporters of Bush are busy replacing our sacred American Constitution with their sitcom version of the Bible.

And if all that doesn’t add up to some kind of “evil”, what does? We shouldn’t forget that the only time Jesus “lost his cool” was when we whipped the money changers out of the temple. One wonders what he would do to Halliburton!

May we think about it like this? Imagine that your home is being attacked by a gang of scum bags and one of them, dressed like a clown, and is yelling obscenities at your family from the front yard. Not too hard to figure out who the clown is, is it? Talk about type casting!

Anyway, while you’re being distracted by the clown, the vermin are pouring though the back door and goodbye home and family. This is a little like what happened to Odysseus when he came home from his travels to discover that his home and family had been invaded by sleazy, rapacious suitors of Penelope and his kingdom was being eating alive (sound familiar?).

What’s interesting about this story is that when Odysseus started his ferocious cleanup of the “suitors”, one of them asked him why he was so filled with fury. Remember his answer? His answer was, “Because you were trying to steal my world.”

That’s the definition of a Republican: someone who’s trying to steal your world, your kingdom, your children and the very heart and soul of your life.

Is money your God? Do you think it’s ok to sacrifice other people’s children to fatten the coffers of companies like Halliburn? Do you think Mother Nature is an insignificant motel for the salvation/damnation antics of Evangelicals? Do you think the pitiful and terrified residents of New Orleans deserved their fate because they weren’t members of a George Bush country club?

If your answer is no to any of the above, then you’re not a Republican. So no illusions, please. G. W. Bush is merely the smirking tip of this loathsome and heartless iceberg.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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