Blah Blah Blog

I will be opening for John Powhida International Airport at Toad in Cambridge Thursday evening.

And getting my ass handed to me, no doubt.

As the man said: "Fasten your sickbags."

As the other man said: "If 4 any reason there is a loss in cabin pressure
I will automatically drop down 2 apply more."

(Dig Pow-Pow's new tunes - fantastic, as always.)

From CNN this morning:

Sen. John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said Thursday that a pullout was needed to spur Iraqi leaders to action. He has recommended Bush announce the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal in mid-September, after a report is released from the top U.S. officials in Iraq, and that those troops should be back in the United States by Christmas...

In Texas, where Bush is on vacation, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the White House appreciated Warner's advice. But he said the president would wait for the recommendations of Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, and the American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, before making any decisions.

Stop right there. It's common knowledge that the White House is actually writing the report.

So why perpetuate the fiction that the president is going to "wait" for a report when he's the one dictating the content?

All it takes is an extra sentence. Something like:

"Administration officials speaking off the record have said the general's report will actually be written by the White House, with input from officials throughout the government."

It took me two seconds to paraphrase/steal the sentence that was buried in the Los Angeles Times piece last week.

You don't even need loaded terms like "dissembling" or "spin" or "misleading" or "liarhead."

One simple sentence. That's all it takes.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's not that Karl Rove was some super genius for President Bush, manipulating the masses with his evil magic.

It's that so many people who should have known better took everything he was saying at face value.

It's one thing to have been following along blindly a few years ago - out of respect for the office, out of so-called patriotism, or whatever.

But after not being "greeted with flowers," after no WMD, after "last throes," after Katrina, after Gonzales, after Jessica Lynch, after Pat Tillman, after a stronger-than-ever al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden still at large - after all of these colossal miscalculations and failures, there is no more face value.

These clowns have no credibility whatsoever.

They should be the same laughing stock that Baghdad Bob was back in the day.

And yet still the president waits for the general's report.

And the dumbest soul rocker in Delmar cowers, goes fetal, sweating, shaking, waiting for it all to be over.

Labels: in the news

A history lesson from our friend Jon Stewart.



Why is this history so hard to understand?

Why is it on Comedy Central to put forth what should have been on the front pages of every newspaper in America in 2003 - before we bumbled our way into this quaqmire?

What depresses me more than the fact that the clowns in the White House have exploited 9/11 to get everything they ever wanted is the fact that America so willingly abandoned history and common sense to let 'em have it.

And continues to let 'em have it.

At this point, these kinds of lessons shouldn't even have to be taught. It should be common knowledge by now. Instinctive. In the blood.

After all, if the dumbest soul rocker in Delmar could see it coming...

Labels: in the news

Afghanistan and Iraq are going so well, we might as well start another.

But how will our dear leaders in the White House pick a fight with Iran without Congressional approval?

It's easy - they just pretend Congress has already given approval!

Today, the White House has solved that pesky problem in one fell swoop. By explicitly linking the Iranian elite guard into the post 9/11 "global war on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's lawyers would certainly now argue that any military strike on Iran is now covered by the October 2002 authorization to use military force in Iraq, as part of their overly sweeping response to the 2001 attacks.

If you wonder why I gave up on linking to Reality Based News back in March, it's because this crap gets worse and worse every day.

Their machinations are so transparently obvious that even the dumbest soul-rocker in Delmar can figure it out, and yet these clowns in the media and in the halls of Congress continue to let them get away with it. No one confronts, and when they come close to confronting, they never ask the right questions. To say it's frustrating is the understatement of the century.

(A good example of not confronting even when confronting: the stunning revelation that the White House will be writing General Petraeus' September progress report was in the - wait for it - 26th paragraph of that Los Angeles Times article. Talk about burying the lede. Jesus.)

Here's the one question I want answered:

Why do they want this so bad?

It's obviously not the so-called War on Terror - because if they were really fighting a War on Terror, they would have done things much differently. Like, um, going after al Qaeda instead of going after someone that they pretended was directly affiliated with al Qaeda while leaving the real al Qaeda to flourish in places where they were and to take root in the very places they weren't.

The way they've waged these wars is al Qaeda's dream. It's terrorism fertilizer. Either they're just that dumb or it's definitely not about the War on Terror.

Or both.

So what is it? Oil? Money? Halliburton? The Carlyle Group? Is it that simple? And if that's really what it's all about, if it's big money and big business pulling the strings, then just how bad does it have to get before you tell the people with the vested interest in these wars (paraphrasing the Vice President) to go screw themselves?

Why would they want another disaster this badly?

It's the same question I asked myself when they went into Iraq - a time when, despite the photo-ops of Kabul and Karzai, the Afghanistan conflict was far from resolved, even crumbling.

Why would they want another disaster this badly?

At the time, I told myself: They must know something I don't know.

Sure, Colin Powell convinced a lot of people that Iraq had WMDs, but the trifling mobile labs in his presentation to the U.N. were what finally convinced me that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Even the dumbest soul rocker in Delmar could see that if a Winnebago of Mass Destruction was the scariest thing he had to offer, there wasn't much to be scared of.

But still: They must know something I don't know.

After all, as Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney had been the most vocal defender of the decision not to march into Baghdad during the first Gulf War. Getting rid of Saddam would be the easy part. But how could it not dissolve into civil war in the aftermath? How many soldiers to die, how many civilians to die, how many years of U.S. occupation would it take before we could leave?

"Quagmire," he said.

Quagmire.

Why would they want another disaster this badly?

They must know something I don't know.

Labels: in the news

...I would have been fired a long, long time ago.

President Bush. July 17, 2007.

I will repeat, as the Commander-in-Chief of a great military who has supported this military and will continue to support this military, not only with my -- with insisting that we get resources to them, but with -- by respecting the command structure, I'm going to wait for David to come back -- [General] David Petraeus to come back and give us the report on what he sees. And then we'll use that data, that -- his report to work with the rest of the military chain of command, and members of Congress, to make another decision, if need be.

Los Angeles Times. August 15, 2007.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

Talking Points Memo and BarbinMD have more on the bait and switch (h/t Atrois.

Labels: in the news

This video is from 1994. Why is it only surfacing now?

UPDATE: Also: this dick is down.

Labels: in the news

Went to a wedding last night. Seated next to a law student who's taking the bar exam in February.

"Constitutional law is the hardest," she said. "It relates to everything."

"You're in luck," I said. "I hear they're getting rid of the Constitution."

Sadly, I was not kidding.

Labels: in the news

Dick Cheney. July 2007.

CHENEY: I firmly believe, Larry, that the decisions we've made with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan have been absolutely the sound ones in terms of the overall strategy.

KING: Although there were mistakes.

CHENEY: Oh, sure. Yes. There are always things in war that happen that nobody anticipated, surprises, things that don't go exactly as planned, that's the nature of warfare.

Dick Cheney. April 1991.

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place.

What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?

I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

I'll add that a lot of people these days are claiming that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good idea, but the disaster that is Iraq today is a result of bad decisions and incompetence.

That's crap.

What's most fascinating to me about Mr. Cheney's Nostradamus-like rhetorical questions from 1991 is that he's making the case that taking out Hussein and his government was just a dumb idea, period. Even with the half-million U.S. troops and a true multi-national coalition at the ready back in the day, it was a dumb idea. So to do it on the cheap in 2003 with fewer forces and little to no international support was beyond dumb.

If only they had asked the dumbest soul-rocker in Delmar. Or the 1991 version of one Richard Bruce Cheney.

Labels: in the news