TW3

June 4th, 2008

That Was The Week That Was … a bewildering amount of “he said, she said.” Makes yer head explode … like McCain’s speech, for cripes sake!!!

[And Hillary's too, for that matter. Grrrrrrrr!]

More on that tomorrow … although I’m sending a big CyberKiss to Jeff Toobin on CNN, who, moments after hearing McRib’s speech, burst out with, “That was awful! That was pathetic!” I couldn’t quit smiling. Here are other smile-worthy comments on the Old Coot’s performance.

And here’s a little bonus — an Ann Telnaes ‘toon on the press defending itself against McLellon’s charges. Pretty good.

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
June 3, 2008

Scott McClellan published a memoir about his stint as
President George W. Bush’s press secretary from July 2003
to April 2006. In the book, McClellan says that he does
not believe that the Bush Administration “deliberately or
consciously sought to deceive the American people” when it
dispensed with “honesty and candor” in favor of launching
a “political propaganda campaign” to justify the Iraq
War. He also asserts that the media became the
administration’s “complicit enablers” and that the
president said that he did not remember whether he had
ever tried cocaine at “some pretty wild parties back in
the day.” Senator Bob Dole responded in a note to
McClellan: “There are miserable creatures like you in
every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up
or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or
colleagues.” Ari Fleischer, Bush’s previous press
secretary, suggested McClellan had been manipulated by his
liberal editors. In Baghdad, a car bomb in a parking lot
near the Iranian Embassy killed two civilians and wounded
five others, and west of the city, in the town of Hit, a
suicide bomber killed ten people and wounded twelve at a
police checkpoint. Franz Kunstler, the last surviving
veteran of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s forces in World
War I, died at the age of 107, and Dianne Odell, a polio
victim in Tennessee, died at the age of 61, after 58 years
in an iron lung. Australia pulled its 550 combat troops
out of Iraq, declaring their mission a success.

The Democratic National Committee determined that
delegates from Michigan and Florida will be allowed
half-votes at the party’s convention. “At least slaves
were counted as 3/5ths a Citizen,” read a sign at a
protest by supporters of Hillary Clinton outside the
Washington hotel where the decision was made. Demonstrator
Larry Sinclair, a Minnesotan who has posted videos on
YouTube alleging that he took drugs and had oral sex with
Barack Obama in 1999 but failed a polygraph test about his
allegations, handed out a pamphlet titled “Obama’s DIRTY
LITTLE SECRETS: Murder, Drugs, Gay Sex.” Obama broke his
ties with Chicago’s Trinity Church, Clinton won the Puerto
Rico primary, and it was reported that Obama had offered
Clinton a “negotiated surrender” that included a possible
post as health secretary in an Obama administration. A
human-rights organization accused the Bush Administration
of operating “floating prisons” by holding suspected
terrorists on ships and of continuing its policy of
extraordinary rendition, a practice it claimed to have
discontinued in 2006. John McCain shifted a fund-raiser
attended by Bush from the Phoenix Convention Center to a
private home, confining his on-camera public appearance
with the president to 25 seconds at an airport. McCain’s
campaign manager, former lobbyist Rick Davis, was slowly
and quietly purging lobbyists from the campaign’s
ranks. Monkeys were able to move a robot arm with their
thoughts.

At a literary festival in Wales, British columnist George
Monbiot attempted a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton,
former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on charges
of war crimes, but was obstructed by security
guards. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier
resigned shortly before his ex-girlfriend Julie Couillard
told a television interviewer that Bernier had left
classified NATO documents about Afghanistan in her
apartment and had encouraged her to wear a low-cut blouse
to his swearing-in in order to attract media attention. It
subsequently came to light that Couillard, a former model,
had lived with one member of the Quebec Hell’s Angels (who
was arrested for possession of submachine guns and
marijuana, then turned police informant, and was found
dead in a ditch), married and divorced another, and was
marked for death by the head Angel, a man named “Mom.” “I
don’t care about her cleavage,” said MP Michael Ignatieff,
deputy leader of the Liberal opposition. “But this stuff
is not only my business, it is the business of all
Canadians.” Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative,
rejected calls for an investigation into the
scandal. British archaeologists discovered that Stonehenge
was a cemetery for the elite, La Scala announced that it
will produce Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as an
opera, and structures built for the 2004 Athens Olympics
were falling into ruin.

– Christian Lorentzen
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/WeeklyReview2008-06-03

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves