Rising Hegemon

Friday, November 25, 2005

From one who should know

I was detained by a group of hostage takers in Beirut because they suspected me of engaging in dubious political activity. They blindfolded me and kept me in poor conditions without any contact with the outside world. They subjected me to physical and mental abuse during a lengthy period of interrogation. Had I not been able to convince them of my innocence I would not be walking free today. What is the essential difference between the methods deployed by my captors, who were labelled terrorists, and those of the authorities that detain suspects in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere? They have been detained on suspicion and treated in a way that no civilised nation ought to condone.

Amen.

Let's see the Memo

Because there really is one. George Bush DID tell Tony Blair he wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera in Qatar.

A civil servant has been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.

The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments.

The Daily Mirror attributed its information to unidentified sources. One source, said to be in the government, was quoted as saying that the alleged threat was “humorous, not serious,” but the newspaper quoted another source as saying that “Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair.”

Thursday, November 24, 2005

That we have a moron in the White House...and looking at Congress and realizing, he's not near the worst of the bunch.

The toll in Iraq was at 2,097 when I headed out on my trip and 2,104 when I arrived.

Seven more dead, who knows how many Iraqis. Seven families getting a visit from Uncle Sam to say that their husband or wife, son or daughter is no more.

Would that George W. Bush experience a few moments of the pain that those families will feel -- that from now on each and every Thanksgiving will be remembered by the knock on the door from Uncle Sam.

The Murican Dream

I have a lot to be thankful for, too much in fact to put into words here. Besides, that isn't any fun to read about anyway, so how about just a little cynicism?

Trolling around the world of internet news I checked into one of my hometown newspapers, the one I grew up reading every day--the Los Angeles Times. Digging deeper into the site I went to the editorial page where I found Jonah Goldberg. Which got me to thinking about success and how it is achieved.

If you aspire to be President you don't have to be smart. You don't even have to work hard to achieve anything in life. Doesn't even matter if you are a colossal horse's ass and under-achiever. As long as you hire people that will do any manner of dirty work and you can socio-pathologically lie, you can be the leader of the free world. And it helps to have really wealthy parents.

And all you gotta do to get a column in a major newspaper is identify yourself as a Republican and write nonsense in a convincing way, have not much of a conscience, and good family connections, maybe a little money.

Oh alright. A short list of things I am thankful for:

Healthy kids, parents, siblings. My friends (the ones that read this know who you are). Hypocrites that remind me who my real friends are (because if you don't know who they are by the time you hit 40 it is abolut time to do so). I am thankful for any active political opposition in this country and people that stand-up to power. I am thankful for every person that gives us this platform and joins the fray. It makes what little time I am able to spend here so worthwhile.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Progressive Blog for those who will need to purge

Hey, every blog needs a slogan.

After you have your dinner, and you feel you've eaten far too much, just remember you can always come back to this blog for the sweet relief of virtual Syrup of Ipecac.

For the image below is a real consumer item.

The Holiday Season Begins

I'd become more religious, but the very fact that various awful Adam Sandler songs (in his ridiculous baby voice) are going to be drilled into me for more than 30 days is proof there is/are no God(s).

I hate to be too much of a cultural critic (and your mileage may vary)...but...HE SUCKS!

Why in my day, we only had to put up with Bob & Doug McKenzie getting touques.

And we liked it!

In summary:

Enjoyable.

SUCKS!!

What's old is new again

I haven't heard of a Godwin's Law equivalent to making Vietnam=Iraq analogies, so I'll go on using them to make a point.

Daniels Ellsberg (yes, THAT Daniel Ellsberg) is arrested outside Camp Coo-Coo Bananas.

In response, Bush has told Tony Blair he wants to bomb Ellsberg's Psychiatrist Office.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Gropinator & his Cosmetic Surgeon

Have some of my excess skin.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Just Relax

When will we get Zarqawi?

BAGHDAD –– US forces are closing in on top Al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and expects to capture or kill him "in the not too distant future", a US general said Wednesday.

This, of course, was reknowned American General, Clayton Forrester.

In the not too distant future?

Next Sunday A.D. perhaps?

Compare & Contrast

Turkey versue Turkee

Turkey:

Turkee:

Such Pain

The Deep Thoughts of Tom DeLay...

"Must...hold...smile...look sincere..."

"Muscles...so...tight...so...unnatural"

"Must...look...like...nice guy."

And now the thoughts of his wife...

"He's touching me! Dear God he is touching me! I can still smell Abramoff's English Leather. Must keep lunch down! Bargain broken."

Liars

To follow up from the post below, the PDB reported on by the National Journal discussed immediately below is important because it shows INTENTIONAL manipulation of evidence by Bush, Cheney and higher up officials just prior to the Senate vote authorizing the use of force.

Examples from the article:

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.

They had been informed repeatedly and consistently that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime.

Yet there they are, just before the vote proclaiming NEW evidence (evidence for which the existence of is...we lack evidence) of a connection between Iraq and the now ever present "boogeyman" Al Qaeda. This evidence, like the September 21, 2001 PDB has not been provided, even in redacted form to the Senate.

Funny how we find out of this as Darth Cheney is heading out to AEI to lie in front of a Kool-Aid consuming audience.

Karma hates you Dick.

Americans: BushCo is lying about being liars

From the Wall Street Journal, that fine publication ruined by an insane editorial page:

A majority of U.S. adults believe the Bush administration generally misleads the public on current issues, while fewer than a third of Americans believe the information provided by the administration is generally accurate, the latest Harris Interactive poll finds.

While the telephone survey of 1,011 U.S. adults indicates about 64% of Americans believe the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends," opinion on the topic is clearly divided along party lines. A large majority (68% to 28%) of Republicans say the Bush administration generally provides accurate information. However, even larger majorities of Democrats (91% to 7%) and Independents (73% to 25%) think the information is generally misleading.

The poll was taken between November 8 to 13 so about the time the White House hysterical pushback started. I'm guessing that probably didn't help their numbers. If nearly two-thirds of the country thinks you are a liar, they are not going to be persuaded by you wheeling out Crashcart to glare and sneer at people. Not to mention if you think someone is a liar, you tend to think they are the type to point fingers.

And, of course, it helps if they are actually liars.

From the National Journal:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter...

...One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

So:

1. Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neil were right when they said that Bush wanted to take out Saddam early and often and 9/11 provided a search for an excuse to go after Iraq.

2. Bush, Cheney and the rest were informed that there were NO connection between Iraq & Al Qaeda.

...except to the extent that Saddam hated them and feared them as a potential threat to him...not as allies in the war.

3. Laurie Myolrie is nuts. But so is every other PNAC tool that actually got a job in the Bush Administration.

To build up support for their glorious little war, the Bush regime constantly buttressed their now discredited "WMD" claims with peripheral evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.

This is the thing that has gotten Stephen Hayes, who left his prior profession of septic tank cleaner to push these unsupported half-assed ideas, on all these talk shows the last several years.

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists...

..."What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.

Douchebags one and all.

So when does Bush plan on bombing the National Journal?

Just you and me and the two nuts between us

Ol' pal.

Bush flees to the ChickenRanch for Thanksgiving.

(AFP/Mandel Ngan)

A picture that Summarizes all of the Artistry of Mariah Carey in one picture

I predict 27 Hehs and 23 Indeeds

OSM Peemypajamaramas or whatever the hell it is called had this "teaser" up today:

A CARNIVAL OF PRE-WAR INTELLIGENCE: WHAT WE KNEW, WHEN WE KNEW IT, AND WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN GOING INTO THE IRAQ WAR. On Friday, OSM extended an open-invitation to bloggers everywhere, requesting posts on the topic of pre-war intelligence. Over fifty bloggers weighed in over the weekend, and Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, edited the results. Read on to find out where the bodies (or WMDs) are buried.

Oh, what could be a more dubious honor than being "edited" by Ernest T. Bass, Professor of Blogging?

This isn't good

As we approach, if we already haven't the 2,100st death of an American soldier, Iraq continues to show signs of unending madness.

Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms broke into the home of a senior Sunni leader on Wednesday and killed him, his three sons and his son-in-law on the outskirts of Baghdad, his brother and an interior ministry official said...

...The slaying follows a big push by U.S. officials to encourage Sunni Muslim participation in the upcoming election, which will install the first non-transitional government in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Some Sunni-led insurgent groups have declared a boycott of the election and have threatened politicians who choose to participate in it.

Good job C plus Augustus.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Memories

I thought now would be a good time to resurrect this beauty from what now seems ages ago. It is a good reminder of the lengths this administration will go to perpetuate the cult of the personality in Dear Leader.

It has been a tough year for me but I'll count my blessings. I didn't lose a home in a hurricane. I didn't send a loved one off to a foreign land where every day brings new danger and death. I have enough food. My children are clothed and seem well adjusted. But there is still so much suffering right here close to home, so much to do, so many people to help.

What shall we do? Cut taxes for the rich, of course. And use our soldiers as props in a real-life tragedy where even the Thanksgiving turkey isn't real.

War Criminal

You know I'm guessing we'd have caught Osama by now but for a few things, but a couple prominent ones come to mind:

1. Bush and his major appointees are gross incompetents, who'd manage to blow a Girl Scout Cookie Sale let alone manage a military action.

I'm serious, you know that Bush & Rummy would only order "the shortbreads" thinking nobody would ever want to buy the Thin Mints or Caramel Delights.

2. Bush himself is a virtual war criminal, with virtually no higher brain function whatsoever. Here's more evidence and if this is serious, I want the impeachment proceedings to be wrapped up by next week:

PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.

A source said: "There's no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it." Al-Jazeera is accused by the US of fuelling the Iraqi insurgency.

The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key ally, enraged the Middle East and almost certainly have sparked bloody retaliation.

A source said last night: "The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush.

"He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem.

"There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it."

A Government official suggested that the Bush threat had been "humorous, not serious".

But another source declared: "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."

Jesus Mohammmed Christ!

Lying, war mongering, torturing, and now wanting to bomb the press (and let's not forget known Al Jazeera facilities actually were bombed by U.S. forces in Iraq)

Uncle Cheney

Well, like the buzzards returning to Hinckley, the Bush Confligracy returns Dick Cheney to friendly audience after friendly audience to audaciously lie about being lied about. It happened again yesterday.

And so...as always the lovely pictures flowed from another public Cheneying.

(To "Fiddle About" from the Who's Tommy)