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Archive for September 9th, 2006

A Man of Brilliance Approaching to Genius

Posted by s.z. on September 9th, 2006

And speaking of people with mental disorders, Mona Charen wrote a piece proclaiming that President Bush has gotten his groove back (in that he gave a couple of speeches in which he didn’t talk about putting food on your children, but instead focused on his speciality: terra). 

She adds that if he can keep this up, he could raise his approval rating to a sum that could be expressed using positive numbers for a change:

There is every reason to suppose that if President Bush can hold on to the momentum he is currently establishing, his approval ratings should markedly improve. Here are just a few reasons: 1) Terror. The exposure and disruption of the London plot reminds Americans that our enemies are ceaselessly planning atrocities and that strong leadership in the war on terror remains the first priority for government.

Yup, terror is good for the President – not that you should thereby assume that this plot in London was over-hyped or anything. No siree!

2) The revelation that Richard Armitage leaked Valerie Plame’s name has blown to smithereens the Democrat/MSM fable about a White House conspiracy to “out” her in retaliation for her husband’s activism.

And that report about Karl Rove calling reporters to say that innocent CIA officer Valerie Plame was “fair game”? Well, that was blown to smithereens too, by osmosis.

Wilson stands revealed as a liar. There was no crime. Judith Miller spent weeks in jail, and Lewis Libby faces trial — all because the media hyped the false allegations of a publicity-seeking liar. The president should mention this in his next speech.

Yes, the President should say, “Judith Miller had no choice but to stonewall a criminal investigation, because that darned media hype made her do it. Lewis Libby was forced to lie to investigators because of the evils of media hype. They can not be faulted in any way for their actions, in that if the investigation hadn’t started, they wouldn’t have been guilty of these particular crimes. I’m pretty sure that media hype and/or federal investigations were also responsible for the crimes of Ken Lay, Tom Delay, and Warren Jeffs. So, if you are ever accused of anything, blame it on media hype – and if you get away with it, remember that your old friend George Bush, from the Party of Personal Responsiblity, is the one who tipped you off to this great defense.”

3) Gas prices are coming down […]

4) The economy is doing extremely well […]

6) The hurricane season was unexpectedly mild.

Personally, whenever I see that gas now costs me only $2.68 a gallon (instead of the $1.75 a gallon it was right before the invasion of Iraq); whenever I learn that only 4.8% of the population is out of work; and whenever fewer people than there might have been are devavasted by hurricanes and the resulting poor disaster management, I always start to think, “Say, that ol’ George Bush is a darned good President. And he’s kinda cute too.”

5) The homicide rate in Baghdad is declining. In July, the Los Angeles Times reports, 1,800 bodies were delivered to the morgue. In August, after 8,000 U.S. and 3,000 Iraqi forces swept through the city attempting to quell sectarian violence, only a quarter of that number were killed.

Wow, so George’s policies must be working!

But wait, here’s some info that may be of interest to Mona:

The NYT, WP, and LAT stuff word that the Baghdad’s morgue preliminary estimate of the violent deaths in August was off by almost 1,000 people. U.S. and Iraqi officials had cited the figure as evidence that their security operations were working. The preliminary number set the number of violent deaths in Baghdad at 550, but yesterday authorities said the number was actually 1,536.

Oops!

However, Slate adds:

Regardless, the number is still less than the 1,855 deaths reported in July. The WP helpfully mentions that many of those who die violently in Baghdad do not end up in the morgue and are not included in the figure.

So, the President is indeed quelling a civil war (just not as well as was first claimed), meaning that he’s doing a great job of presidentin’. Just don’t look over here!

Military officials lie to keep Iraq body count low

U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren’t counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country’s sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

But hey, what does the truth matter as long as Bush’s approval ratings go up?

7) The Democrats remain the party of weakness and appeasement. Harvard hosts the ex-president of Iran. Jimmy Carter hugs Hezbollah. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean says of the Iraq War: “The idea that we’re going to win this war is an idea that, unfortunately, it’s just plain wrong.” Al Gore thinks global warming is a much more serious threat than al Qaeda. ABC is airing a mini-series that blasts the Clinton administration for malfeasance in pursuing Osama bin Laden. Things could be a whole lot worse for President Bush and the Republicans.

Yes, instead of Bush and the Republicans, we could be ruled by the current President of Iran and his party (which is probably even wackier than the GOP).  And we could have all been destroyed by global warming after CBS aired the mini-series which blasted Ronald Reagan for malfeasance in (not) pursuing a cure for AIDS.

So yeah, we should all just thank our lucky stars that we merely have an incompetent megomaniac like Bush in charge, instead of a holocaust-denying meglomaniac like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  And we should be glad, GLAD that the Republicans remain the party of self-interest, graft, and stupidity, because change is always scary. If you keep these things in mind, the President’s ratings are sure to rise, just like Mona said.

Wingnuts | 28 Comments »

Here Comes Your 19th Nervous Breakdown

Posted by s.z. on September 9th, 2006

Yesterday at the grocery store, I ended up in line behind a couple who had $300 worth of stuff in their carts that needed to be rang up, and who wrote a check for it all that required that several layers of store management be paged (it turns out that the couple had written bad checks to the store before, and so were on some sort of terrorist watch list).

Anyway, this all gave me plenty of time to read the tabloid headlines. And not only did I learn that Katie and Tom sleep in separate bedrooms, but that Camilla had left Charles and returned to her ex.  But the story that was least surprising came from The Globe magazine –their headline read something like “Laura Bush has Breakdown: Tells Prez ‘I Just Can’t Take it Anymore!’”

While I didn’t read the article, I find the headline itself credible (and after all, The Globe is the same publication that brought us news of President Bush’s secret nervous breakdown last year, so they seem to be the ones who would know about this kind of thing).

But besides that, it seems more likely than not that a person like Laura, who can read and all, would find her situation intolerable at times. And I can relate to her situation. For instance, when that Senate report came out which indicated that Saddam’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward” al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates, and then WH Press Shill Tony Snow responded that the reports are “merely “re-litigating things that happened three years ago, ” I myself screamed “I just can’t take this anymore!”

 

 

Hey, Tony, if this is just stuff that everybody has known for three years, why was George saying just last month that people should “imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein” with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and “who had relations with Zarqawi”?  If this is all old stuff that is common knowledge already, who is keeping this knowledge from the President of the United States?  (Okay, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, but who else?)   

Also, I am getting really irate at the way that Bush and Cheney responded by basically saying, “Well, everyone else thought this too, so how could you expect us to know any better? And besides, regardless of why we got into Iraq, it’s now the main arena of our War Against Terror, which is such a serious matter that we don’t have time to figure out exactly who was right and who was wrong, so we should all just shut up and give the President more authority to do whatever the hell he wants. To do otherwise is to be a traitor.”

First, apparently not everybody was saying this. Here’s a snippet from the LA Times story about the Senate report:

The CIA and other intelligence agencies were generally skeptical that Hussein had significant links to the terrorist group. But Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have persistently highlighted isolated intelligence reports suggesting a relationship between Hussein and Bin Laden. The Senate report contradicts many of those assertions.

And remember Cheney’s favorite “proof” of a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection – the one that he continued to mention even after the CIA, FBI, Czech Intelligence, etc. had determined that it never happened? Well, the report gets into that too.

The committee’s report also dismisses a contention repeatedly cited by Cheney that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague in April 2001. That claim has bolstered public perceptions that Iraq was somehow linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.

But postwar evidence indicates no such meeting ever occurred, the committee found, citing Atta’s travel and cellphone records obtained by the FBI, as well as information from the Iraqi agent alleged to have attended the meeting.

So no, not everybody believed this stuff. Hell, even George Tenet now says that he didn’t really believe it — but the President was so persuasive, and what with the moonlight and the music and wine, he allowed himself to be seduced. And so he woke up the next day alone, with his innocence gone, the country at war, and with a Medal of Freedom on the dresser.

From the ABC News story:

Democrats singled out CIA Director George Tenet, saying that during a private meeting in July Tenet told the panel that the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration’s case for war despite his own agents’ doubts about the intelligence it was based on.

“Tenet admitted to the Intelligence Committee that the policymakers wanted him to ‘say something about not being inconsistent with what the president had said,’” Intelligence Committee member Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters Friday.

Tenet also told the committee that complying had been “the wrong thing to do,” according to Levin.

“Well, it was much more than that,” Levin said. “It was a shocking abdication of a CIA director’s duty not to act as a shill for any administration or its policy.”

Yeah, what he said.

So, no ties between Iraq and al Qaeda — cross yet ANOTHER one off the list of reasons of why we supposedly invaded Iraq. I guess we’re now down to the one supplied by Ann Coulter: “”Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil.”

And so, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, while you may not exactly be liars (in that you probably believed yourself what you were telling us), you are obviously totally incompetent.  And so patriotic Americans should question vigorously your war policies, because your track record demands it.  To do otherwise is to just accept the four-year-old’s assertion that he needs some matches to “do some stuff,” and that we don’t need to supervise him, and can trust him to not to misuse them, even though he burned down Grandma’s house just last week.

And so, for Laura, who has to smile and nod and agree demurely with all this crap, a nervous breakdown is probably the only way out. More power to her, I say.

 

Wingnuts | 18 Comments »