Saturday Malamute Blogging

...from the archives

It's All True

So it turns out the invasion of Iraq was about oil, after all.

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

...

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

And our lapdog journalists report it with little, if any, criticism. It's both old news and new news. Which has been pretty much how all the news about our corrupt government gets reported in the MSM. Forget about impeaching the bastards. It's off the table. Probably knocked to the floor by our "we might nuke Iran" policy.

Nimbeciles

Anybody else sick of the "Tim Russert was the best journalist ever" fantasia? It appears that Chris Matthews, grief-stricken and possibly drunk, divulged that Tim was just a big, fat, frightened patriot, really, who didn't do his job in regard to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At least Tim claimed to believe the sky was falling in the form of a nuclear bomb in Saddam's twitchy little hands, and later blamed his lack of journalistic due diligence on government officials who didn't "pick up the phone" to tell him that Bushco was lying through their teeth.



Hell, I'm not the NBC News' Washington Bureau Chief, but I knew the build-up to the invasion of Iraq was one lie after another. Maybe I should apply for the job now that it's vacant since it appears you don't have to be a professional journalist to get paid to be a professional journalist. You don't even need a working bullshit detector, but I do have one of those.

MSNBC: I didn't mean to hit you, baby!

MSNBC really knows how to sweet talk the ladies:

'It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,' Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. 'And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.'"

I'm speechless.

Blogroll please...

Welcome to John Petty and progressive involvement, Anglachel's Journal, and Astarte's Circus. Welcome to our humble little blog.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Watching the game...

Makes me wanna holler

Well respected astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has a very interesting Op-ed in the NYTimes today.

...If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him.
...

Two questions arise in the face of this result. Whom should the Republican candidate prefer to run against to maximize his party’s chances of retaining the White House? And what does it say of the Democratic delegate selection system when its winner would lose the presidency if an election were held today, yet its loser would win it?

Is it stilly fuzzy math when "the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal" uses it?

Friday Malamute Blogging

That doesn't look comfortable.

It Was Only a Matter of Time

Michael Savage decided that the news about Ted was the perfect moment to crawl out his hole and spew.

Following the announcement that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage opened his May 20 show by interspersing audio of Kennedy singing "Ay Jalisco No Te Rajes" with clips of news reporters discussing Kennedy's diagnosis and audio from the 1990 film Kindergarten Cop in which Arnold Schwarzenegger's character says, "It's not a tumor." Later, Savage played the Dead Kennedys song "California Über Alles" after stating: "The poor guy's been suffering for years, you know? Unfairly he's been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated. And so, to cut this out in some respect for Ted Kennedy, here's a tune coming at you from the Dead Kennedys. Go ahead and play it, please."

After reading from the lyrics of "California Über Alles," Savage said, "No gloating today, no laughter, all serious. You don't joke about a man's cancer. I do it, but I won't do it today; it's something I will not do." At one point in the program, he told a caller, "You know I'm playing the Dead Kennedys not to mock Ted Kennedy. It's just appropriate, that's all."

Later in the program, Savage aired a clip of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) offering a tribute to Kennedy on the Senate floor before describing Byrd as "a senile senator" and "a walking psycho." Savage went on to assert, "For years now, Byrd has been blubbering on the floor of the Senate. For years, I mean, to be honest, Kennedy didn't seem sane to me." He continued, "Forget about the drunk stories and all that -- anybody can drink. The guy sounded like he was off for years, I'm sorry."

Michael Savage is probably going to live a long life and die quietly on the toilet at an unjustifiably old age.

Wow! I think the only thing that would make me feel better after writing that sentence is finding Ann Coulter and punching her in the neck before she can add her shrill two cents.

Don't It Always Seem to Go?

...you don't know what you've got 'til your faced with the possibility of a Democratic senate without a real Democrat. I feel numb.

Sweet Home Chicago

We're #1!
Everyone else is #2 or lower.

The Music Man

Adolph Reed's lastest gem on Barack Obama in this month's issue of The Progressive brought to mind Robert Preston in his finest role:

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.
...
Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

Once again, Professor Reed doesn't let us down. Not only does he speak truth to power, he's speaking truth to the bamboozled Left, lost in the afterglow of its collective Obasm.

I think its too late to prevent them from embarrassing themselves (I'm looking at you, editorial board of The Nation, Katha Pollitt, and for God's sake, Barbara Ehrenriech, who wrote, on Valentine's Day, no less, about being swayed by her "grown feminist daughter" weeping inconsolably when Obama lost NH. Sheesh!). We can only hope that, if Obama does win the nomination, the Democrats can pull themselves together and figure out how to build this deeply flawed candidate into someone who can win in November without compromising away all of the things that would make a victory matter in the first place.

And then, maybe, we can all march out of the high school gym to the strains of 76 Trombones.

Saturday Malamute Blogging

Squirrel watching. Or squirrel, watching.

Hateful Speech

Mike Huckabee has just moved to the top of the shit list. I'm not shy about making Obama the butt of a good joke, but this isn't funny:

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak,” said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

And the audience laughed. Of course, he was giving a speech to the NRA in Kentucky. Check out the youtube video

Bill O'Reilly: The Remix

This just doesn't get old.

Thanks Felicia!

Friday Malamute Blogging

Have bone...

...will travel.

Hollow Man

Obamarama has come full circle as Barack's own private chickens are now coming home to roost: Alice Palmer is campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Indiana. Remember Alice Palmer? She was Barack's political mentor before he kicked her to the curb in '95, and then took her seat in the Illinois state senate, not by making his case to the voters, but by using tried-and-true hardball political tactics to knock her--and all his other rivals--off the ballot.

Palmer served the district in the Illinois Senate for much of the 1990s. Decades earlier, she was working as a community organizer in the area when Obama was growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia. She risked her safe seat to run for Congress and touted Obama as a suitable successor, according to news accounts and interviews.

But when Palmer got clobbered in that November 1995 special congressional race, her supporters asked Obama to fold his campaign so she could easily retain her state Senate seat.

Obama not only refused to step aside, he filed challenges that nullified Palmer's hastily gathered nominating petitions, forcing her to withdraw.

"I liked Alice Palmer a lot. I thought she was a good public servant," Obama said. "It was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."

His choice divided veteran Chicago political activists.

"There was friction about the decision he made," said City Colleges of Chicago professor emeritus Timuel Black, who tried to negotiate with Obama on Palmer's behalf. "There were deep disagreements."

But, to be fair, this was before he took his all-inclusive Hope and Change/Dr. FeelGood roadshow to a town near you. So, at that time he clearly didn't have the smoke and mirrors to make the bitter masses swoon and all his enemies kneel before him. He had to rely on sketchy ballot signatures and unsealed depositions like everybody else.

And then there's Jeremiah Wright, who has now been thoroughly denounced by Obama for the umpteenth time. But I guess for Obama-tons (and by Obama-tons I mean the media) it always feels like the first time, so yesterday it was all-Barack and Jeremiah, all the time on cable news. The usual suspects were trotted out, again, to read the chicken entrails and rend their garments over the twenty-year pastor/poseur relationship, and pronounce Obama's campaign both dead and alive.

Barack Obama has built his appeal on the claim that he's different from the usual political player. How ironic, then, as recent events have shown, that he may be the biggest player of the them all. All of his campaign's problems have been there from the beginning. There have been no surprises. But to deal with them before his campaign got off the ground was to admit to the duplicity that has made Barack all things to all people. He played Alice Palmer to gain entry into Southside Chicago political circles, and for her blessing. He played Jeremiah Wright and Trinity church to establish bourgeois nationalist street cred. He played Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn for their white liberal, lapsed '60's radical, Hyde Park intellectual bona fides. By insisting that his faith was central to his politics he played his white, Christian supporters, for whom he figured one church would be as good as another.

He waltzed with all of them but had no intention of taking any of them down the aisle.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Wake me up when the election is over.