TWAT by any other name

It's hard to understand why the White House and the Pentagon would waste time and money to come up with a new slogan for our invasion of Iraq. Until you see that the acronym for "a global struggle against violent extremism," or GSAVE replaces TWAT, or "the war against terror."

You just know that a memo came down the pike at some point entitled "Talking Points to strengthen support for TWAT" and some WH staffer thought it was referring to Bush.

Ohbladi

Loyal readers may have noticed the spareseness of posts around here this summer. This is mainly due to the fact that being poor in New York and potentially homeless has a way of putting blogging on the back burner. The good news is that both poverty and homelessness* have been averted. The bad news is that said new home is also a in new building that hasn't been configured for internet access. So ultralite posting will unfortunately continue throughout August. Red Rabbit has been granted administrator status since she has done such an admirable job of keeping things from going to seed around here (also she was very much instrumental in averting my potential homelessness so the least I could do was give her a lil more clout). So things will continue as they have. And don't worry I'm still here.

*Yes I am exaggerating but only slightly.

The Democrats and the Supremes

Nothing better illustrates the differences between Republicans and Democrats than Bush's nomination of John G. Roberts for the Supreme Court. Before the announcement Conservatives made it clear that even Alberto "torture is good" Gonzales was not far enough to the right for their tastes. They reminded Bush of his promise to appoint justices in the mold of Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, and in Roberts they got a Rehnquist without the bad fashion sense, a Scalia without the visible fangs, and a Thomas with a brain.

The Democrats, for their part, characteristically charged into battle by retreating to their fall-back position: "GIVE US," they demanded with fists clenched "a moderate in the mold of O'Connor." That'll really rally the troops. And of course they got much less than that. To be sure there was no chance in hell that this president was going to nominate anyone truly palatable, so why not use the opportunity to mention the names of the kind of justices we'd really like to see on the court? The goal wouldn't be to get them nominated, but to illustrate dramatically how partisan Bush's short list is/was.

Better, why not discuss how undemocratic the Supreme Court is as an institution? The idea that nine men and women should be able to wield so much power in a representative democracy is really kind of crazy when you think about it. Why not open the debate on how to fix that? Propose that we amend the Constitution so that justices serve for twelve-year, staggered, non-renewable terms. Each elected president would get three Supreme Court appointees. Certainly presidents might be tempted to nominate partisan judges, but the knowledge that court majorities could change dramatically every four years would tend to force the justices themselves, if they do not wish to see their opinions overturned, to strive for broadly consensual rulings. Just a thought.

My point, though, is that Conservatives of late have tended to be more politically radical than Liberals--threatening to do away with the filibuster or, before the bloom faded from the Schwarzenegger rose, calling for a Constitutional amendment to allow naturalized citizens to run for President--while Liberals, mired in their red state/blue state funk, are behaving as if they'll never again represent the will of the majority. We've got to believe that more democratization favors our side because . . . well, because it does.

The Brass Ring = Impeachment

The sweet smell of bacon frying in the morning...ahhh...it smells like victory! The headlines calling for Karl Rove's head warm the cockles of my heart.

But let's not forget that we're going for the whole enchilada. Remember when President Backed Into a Corner met with a criminal lawyer last year at the time that federal prosecutors were initially questioning White House staff about the Plame case? I hope he has that number handy, because Karl Rove is this administration's Monica Lewinsky. Oh yes. And I mean that on several different levels.

Let's not forget that the whistleblower here, Joseph Wilson, was outing the administration's reasons for invading Iraq as lies and damn lies. Rove's calls to Cooper and others were meant to plant false allegations to try to discredit Wilson because Wilson was standing up and talking about the IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE of taking the nation to war under false pretenses.

I'm suddenly very pissed and very hungry.

Conduct Unbecoming

If you missed this opinion piece by Burton J. Lee III, former physician to George H.W. Bush, in the Washington Post last week it might have been because you were scratching your head wondering what the hell Attorney General Alberto "The Enforcer" Gonzales was doing in Iraq.

Chris Floyd connects the dots rather nicely, and every U.S. senator should read this before they even consider this little evil man for the Supreme Court. He had the nerve to blame the abuses at Abu Ghraib on the NIGHT SHIFT of one cell block. This administration has no shame in using cliches to lie about, excuse and rationalize criminal conduct performed at its command.

Next thing you know he'll be saying his dog ate the Constitution.

Thanks to Smirking Chimp for the link.

Bush Falls off Bike...AGAIN

Jeez, what is it with this guy? Was he chewing gum AND pedaling?

Say...maybe that's why his secret service detail didn't interrupt his bike ride in May when a Cessna violated restricted airspace near the White House and Capitol Hill had to be evacuated. Maybe he loses his balance at the slightest distraction. Maybe he drinks and bikes at the same time.

He clearly needs training wheels.

Sarah Vowell is who I'd like to be when I grow up and she's a guest columnist for the New York Times this week. She has a pithy take on the Live 8 concert today.

Seeing Robertson in that commercial with Bono - and Bono's hair - is a little like listening to Paul Anka's new recording of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." At first, it's jarring to hear the guy who wrote "Puppy Love" for Donny Osmond sing Kurt Cobain's lyrics: "a mosquito, my libido." But listen hard and you can hear what Anka hears. He doesn't hear the ranting of weirdos. He hears the poetry, the architecture of a justifiably standard song like "Autumn in New York," like "Fly Me to the Moon."

My soft spot for strange bedfellows aside, I am a capital-D Democrat who still believes in the value of partisan politics. And I hold onto that belief despite the fact that I belong to a party whose only true talent is writing exceedingly eloquent concession speeches.

Cool
Our dear Professor made The Smirking Chimp. Now we could get him to blog.

The Beauty of Innuendoes

Durbin's remarks were not aimed, not even implicitly, at Holocaust victims or at your average soldier on patrol in Baghdad. He did want to say both directly and indirectly that all people under U.S. detention, no matter what we happen to think about their guilt or innocence, should not be subjected to certain kinds of treatment. But by construing his remarks as innuendo, Durbin's opponents were able to sidestep that discussion.

Impeachment's just another word...

...unless Dean, Biden, Reid, et al, grab this opportunity to keep the idea alive and in the news.

The latest Zogby poll included a question about impeachment and a healthy 42% agreed that Congress should impeach George Bush if he misled the country into going to war in Iraq. And that included 25% of Republicans responding to the survey. (IF he misled the country? Were his lips moving?)

These numbers will grow alongside our ballooning deficit and, unfortunately, the number of casualties in the "war on terra."
We have nothing left to lose.

Dear Democratic Leadership

Please stop apologizing for telling the truth. We must focus on the midterm elections. We must capitalize on Bush & Co. falling poll numbers. They have made a mess in Afghanistan and Iraq, and made a sham of our democracy.

I understand we do not have the votes to impeach right now. But if Republicans and Democrats who face midterm re-election can be made to feel the growing disillusionment of Americans, they may see their way clear to stand up against this administration. We cannot let them get away with the criminal incompetence and corruption of the last four and a half years.

Please get tough and stop criticizing each other. You all should have closed ranks around Senator Durbin and focused on the abuse and torture he was condemning, not on a metaphor blown out of proportion to distract attention from the abuse and torture.

Keep your eye on the ball!

Sincerely,
a true-blue Democrat.

Drunk on Freedom

That's exactly what you are if tonight between 7pm and 8pm CST, you watched any of the big three networks, cable news, or CSPAN; played a drinking game; AND picked the correct word: FREEDOM as your cue. According to Think Progress, that is.

The latest propaganda event brought to you by Karl Rove and his Flying Feces Productions, gave the chimp another chance to listen to the sound of his own voice bring tears to his beady eyes in front of another captive military audience.

When that little bastard tears up you just know that he's touched, not by real courage and bravery of true heroes and patriots, but by the momentary illusion of his own fake humanity. When he thinks of you he touches himself.

I may vomit.

Strategery = Abduction & Torture

Last week when Karl Rove criticized liberal responses to 9/11 for presumably wanting "to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," he specifically singled out MoveOn.org as one of the targets of his criticism. Eli Pariser was said by the New York Times to have responded by asserting that MoveOn had not opposed military action in Afghanistan. Pariser then rightly criticized the administration for trying to deflect attention from its own failures and problems.

What's wrong with the first part of Pariser's response is that it plays the administration's game inadvertently. In deriding a desire to prepare indictments Rove is attempting to discredit a more effective response to terrorism than the dubious war strategy Bush & Co. have embraced. If you doubt me, follow the details of the arrest orders against 13 CIA officials issued by an Italian Judge for their role in kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in Milan who was taken to Egypt and allegedly tortured.

Although there's alot to be said here, my key point is that the rendition of this terror suspect reportedly "disrupted Italian efforts to identify his connection to a terror network believed to have active operations throughout Europe," and that in other countries the effort to capture and convict terrorists has been stymied and undone by the Bush regime's lack of cooperation. Bush & Co. are not merely deriding effective legal responses to terrorism, they are actively subverting them.

We should not forget that the rush to unity after 9/11 was an attempt to make war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq apear to be the only justifiable alternative.

Thanks to the Professor.

Learn the Truth

If you have friends or loved ones serving in the U.S. Military, of if you give a damn about the two wars we are waging in the Middle East, you might want to check out this web site.

Operation Truth is an organization made up of non-partisan veterans. This web site has a lot of information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that you won't see on the evening news, or read in your local newspapers.

Thanks to Kate over at Broken Windows for the info and link.

Go read Kate for first and second-hand news from the front.

M'aidez

Last week Tbogg had this photo posted. "My God," I said, "she looks like a Sith!"

Today's Boondocks.

The transformation is complete.

TIME Magazine Dabbles in Freeper Porn

I’ve just finished my first paper of the semester (a charming bon mot about the relationship between Jeffersonian Anglo-Saxon nationalism and racial ethnology) and given that I already have a headache, I figured a look-see around the net couldn’t possibly hurt.

Christ was I wrong!

If you haven’t already seen it, Here’s TIME magazine’s latest cover girl. Ms. Right indeed. Gross.

I’m not going to read the piece. My brain is not so fried as to not feel the pain of Ms. Coulter’s non-logic. One of the depressing things I’ve realized, particularly after spending the weekend on this paper, is that Coulter is part of along WASP-y tradition beginning before the revolution that declares Anglo-Americans as the true heirs to ancient Anglo-Saxon democratic values. Coulter’s rhetoric of “invading their countries and converting them to Christianity,” abhorrent as it may be, is quite as American as apple pie.

Discouraging n’est-ce pas?

However, just because Coulter isn’t technically un-American, that doesn’t mean we have to stop treating her like the lunatic throwback she is. This means NOT reading TIME, canceling your subscription , and telling them that you’re offended at their foray into the obscene. For fuck’s sake, there is a war going on! Coulter’s shtick is over 200 years old. It’s not going anywhere. Bring on the news already.

293,027,571 pairs of rose-colored glasses, please

Ironically, one reason why Washington can persuade the outside world that its venture in Iraq is finally coming right is that it is too dangerous for reporters to travel outside Baghdad or stray far from their hotels in the capital.

OK, note to American reporters: if it's too dangerous to leave your hotel, then the situation is getting worse not better.

Most violent incidents in Iraq go unreported...Last year US soldiers told the IoS that they do not tell their superiors about attacks on them unless they suffer casualties. This avoids bureaucratic hassle and "our generals want to hear about the number of attacks going down not up". This makes the official Pentagon claim that the number of insurgent attacks is down from 140 a day in January to 40 a day this month dubious.

Boy, does that tactic sound familiar.

The White House finds its military commitment in Iraq politically damaging at home. The easiest way to bring the troops home is, as in Vietnam, to declare a victory and full confidence in US-trained Iraqi forces to win the war. These soldiers and police supposedly number 152,000, but it is not clear who. The figure may include the 14,000 blue-uniformed Iraqi police in Nineveh province, the capital of which is Mosul, with a population of 2.7 million. But Khasro Goran, the deputy governor and Kurdistan Democratic Party leader in Mosul, told the IoS that the police had helped insurgents assassinate the previous governor.

Mr Goran said that when guerrillas captured almost all of Mosul on 11 November last year, the police had collaborated, abandoning 30 police stations without a fight. "They didn't fire on terrorists because they were terrorists themselves," he said. Some $40m-worth of arms and equipment was captured by the insurgents.

It is a measure of how far the reality of the war in Iraq now differs from the rosy picture presented by the media that the fall of Mosul to the insurgents went almost unreported abroad because most journalists were covering the assault by the US marines on Fallujah.

So we lost Mosul in November; we're training terrorists and counting them among the forces we are confident can "win" the war that we declared victory in over a year ago; our guys are hamstrung by leaders who don't want to hear bad news or properly arm them; and our biggest stories have been Terri Schiavo, Michael Jackson and the pope, with Tom Delay's shenanigans thrown in for balance. Terri and the pope are dead. Toss Michael Jackson and Tom Delay in jail, and be done with it.

We are at war and people are dying needlessly every single day. Can't that be taken seriously by the goddamn news?

Jesus

At least 16 people were killed when an American military helicopter crashed in bad weather near the town of Ghazni, south of the capital Kabul, an American military spokeswoman said.

The American spokeswoman, Cindy Moore, said that 18 people were listed as having been aboard the helicopter. It was not known, however, whether the two people unaccounted for had actually boarded the aircraft.

Nor had the nationalities of all the victims been determined, she said.

I missed the death of the Pope because I was off watching Sin City and studying. And after reading this, I'm really not sorry that I did.

...the conversation has been conducted almost exclusively among men. It's like that recent God panel on Meet the Press that consisted of five men theologizing, with Jon Meacham of Newsweek mewing the most awful pious twaddle, at one point using Bush and Dante in the same sentence with a straight face.

Ick.

As a laspsed Catholic I can't quite bring myself to completely disregard the Pope's death. But c'mon people. This has been coming for ages. Stop mourning and rejoice that the man no longer has to suffer the indiginity of the mortal coil.

Now I'm off to an early bedtime because I'm getting sick. I think that God is punishing me for the whole Sin City thing.

What Do We Do with a Drunken Liar?

If we're the CIA and it's 2001, we codename him Curveball, invade a country and kill thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, based on his wacky stories of biological weapons programs.

If the headline on thisGuardian special report isn't enough to make you choke on your oatmeal, the very first line will.

An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq.

"An alchoholic cousin of an aide..."??!!??

According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as 'crazy' by his intelligence handlers and a 'congenital liar' by his friends.

The defector, given the code-name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq. Despite considerable doubts over Curveball's credibility, his claims were included in the administration's case for war without caveat.

I say let's put him in a boat and row him over or at the very least hoist him up to the topsail yardarm. Nope, this kind of incompetent lunacy deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor.