The Veep who couldn't shoot straight

I wonder if the next time Dick Cheney offers to take a judge who is to hear a case against him duck hunting, the judge will think twice.

The first thing I thought of when I heard the news was – of all things – fractal geometry. Life in the large scale often resembles life in its details. According to the Wikipedia, fractals can be most simply defined as images that can be divided into parts, each of which is similar to the original object. Fractals are said to possess infinite detail, and some of them have a self-similar structure that occurs at different scales, or levels of magnification.

Dick Cheney is a man who doesn’t seem to look at the details before pulling the trigger, whether he’s shooting quail or hunting Osama bin Laden, you never know who is going to get hit. Did Cheney really think Saddam and Osama were the same bird? Did Harry Whittington’s face look like a quail? Or maybe Cheney is just a dangerous blowhard with bad eyesight and the need to look macho.

Anyway, it’s not hard to see the comparison between large scale Cheney and small scale Cheney. On every level, he’ll shoot first and make up a story later after it comes out in the papers. If you can’t trust him with that 28 gauge peashooter of his, why do we trust him at all?

UPDATE

It gets worse. The Veep who can’t shoot straight – either with a gun or with the truth – was protected from having to deal with the Law after he shot his friend in the face. CBS News reports that local law enforcement officials were prevented from interviewing Vice President Cheney .

Texas authorities are complaining that the Secret Service barred them from speaking to Cheney after the incident. Kenedy County Texas Sheriffs Lt. Juan Guzman said deputies first learned of the shooting when an ambulance was called.

Of course we get a different story from the House of Lords, or the White House as it used to be called. CBS News White House correspondent Bill Plante reports that the Secret Service says that agents had informed the local sheriff of the shooting about an hour after it happened and that the vice president had been interviewed about the accident by local authorities on Sunday morning.

Did Cheney leave the scene of the accident under the protection of his private army and without speaking to law enforcement? The smoke screen is already smoking - read the transcript of Scott McClellan's three ring circus on Raw Story.

Whether this accident constitutes criminal negligence or criminal recklessness is an irrelevant matter to a group of would-be feudal Lords. They have already told us that laws, treaties and constitutional mandates are only binding upon them at their discretion. So what does it matter? All we can do is wait and hope these people go away before our country is turned into a private hunting preserve for the rich and powerful.

The Prophet

Verily, we warn you of a chastisement close at hand: The day on which a man shall see the deeds which his hands have sent before him; and when the unbeliever shall say, "Oh! would I were dust!"
-surah 78:1-40 'Al Naba' -

“Everyone’s talking about Islam and Muslims” says the voice on the radio. WCEV, an “ethnic” station in Cicero, Illinois broadcasts Radio Islam on 1450 KHz. There are many names for Allah: Ar Rahim, the Merciful; Ar Rahman, the beneficent; Al Aziz, the Mighty and 96 others. There are many faces of Islam and some are not as beautiful as the names of Allah.

We’ve seen the face of outrage caused by a cartoon. We’ve seen the face of wisdom and the face of reason put on for us to see, but there are faces that turn our stomachs and break our hearts; there are faces that make us want to kill. None of them seem to disturb the Islamic public as much as some silly cartoon done by someone outside their world.

There is another face of Radio Islam: covered with running sores and putrescent pustules of hate, lies and demented rage. If the images and lies there offend Muslims, I’ve not seen the evidence. Doubtless there are Muslims who are different and who perhaps are not part of that many headed beast, but they are quiet and their dry protests are hard to hear and harder to find sincerity in.

“Who runs USA?” barks the headline – “The Jews” is the answer and all America’s Leaders are Jews and all the founding fathers of America knew it and hated them as much as we do. Image after image of grotesque, bearded Jews committing loathsome acts are apparently not offensive to the sensibilities that feel murderous outrage at something as silly as a cartoon of a bearded man with a bomb in his turban.

It’s wrong to offend someone’s beliefs, says the Vatican, but to whom is it addressed?

Al Batin is a name of Allah. It means the hidden. Perhaps only the Prophet knows where Allah hides in that vast and boiling sea of murderous anger.

God doesn't read the funnies

"What if it's not a picture of Mohammed - what if it's a picture of a picture of Mohammed? "

Fafblog manages to see the humor in all human idiocy. I wish I could smoke whatever they're smoking - I'm sure I would live longer.

And all the while Osama runs free

As the Curmudgeon says, you can’t make this stuff up. Homeland Security: that organization whose name just begs one to say Vaterland Security, has handed another gift to comedy writers and cynics by blocking a visit of a kindergarten class to NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Normally and traditionally NASA has sought to get the attention of younger generations and attract them to the sciences, but that was before the Keystone Cops took over national security, demanding, among other things that they keep quiet about science when it offends Bush’s fundamentalist base.

The Ohio Free TImes tells us that although some 400 school groups have already toured the facility, the kindergarten class at Lakewood Ohio Taft Elementary School is too dangerous to allow in the building. Two toddlers in the class are not US citizens and while to some extent, all 6 year olds are terrorists, very few are able to ferret out the kind of secrets from rocket scientists that might be useful to older terrorists, nor are they likely to build homemade cruise missiles after a brief tour of NASA. I feel safe in saying that the citizenship of a kindergarten kid really doesn’t matter here in terms of making us safer much less saner.

“It was just a policy that came down from the Homeland Security Department,” said Chief Community and Media Relations Officer Linda Dukes-Campbell, who disavows any connection with the writing staff at Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

“We are a federal reservation, and we have to work within those ramifications” says she apparently not having spent much time learning the English language herself.

Dukes-Campbell says that NASA is “looking at a policy revision” that might allow kindergarteners onto the federal reservation for field trips. She says they’re “hoping to have language” in order in a couple of weeks. No word on whether the language is English.

pull the chain

I admit that I take a perverse pleasure in watching fundamentalists of all sorts shrieking in tongues with foam-flecked beards. Religious charlatans of the sort common in America often jerk the chains of their simian pets by imagining some threat to their belief system (or con if you prefer) and they have only to announce, for instance, a war on Christmas or a movie that cleaves too close to history or scholarship for the good of their mythology (or con if you prefer) to cause a riot or a crusade or a jihad. It makes a wonderful cover or diversion when needed.

I think the Saudi Government, having failed again to control the situation at the annual Hajj needed just such a smokescreen and found some Danish cartoons that otherwise would without their efforts have been, if not unremarked upon, at best a minor provocation. The orchestrated outrage has worked wonders for Islamic solidarity and weak-kneed western governments have been forced to assert that of course they’re not bigots and of course freedom of speech is limited by the need to coddle believers in their faith.

“In other words, we use their sense of "fair play", "multiculturalism", "democratic values", and of course their guilt feelings, against them, so that they restrict their own freedom of action, but are very lax when dealing with the Muslim, for fear of offense or violent reaction. This of course confuses and demoralizes the ordinary person-in-the-street, and weakens their resistance to the onward march of the Ummah.” Says a cynical piece in The Religious Policeman. It’s just too impossible to be too cynical about it when Western religious leaders have to swallow their certainties and state that it’s wrong to contradict anyone’s faith a practice which is essential to all the religions in conflict here.

The Hajj , the pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim is obliged to make at least once if at all possible, is a big deal. Somewhere around 200 pilgrims per year have died in various incidents and stampedes and the Saudis have long promised to do something about it. This year at least 360 people were killed. The Saudi’s collaboration with the West has long been a problem for them and of course it was the presence of Infidel troops on the Sacred Sands that is said to be the cause of Osama bin Laden’s outrage and the cornerstone of al Qaeda.

How convenient for them that some cartoons in a nowhere country can inflame the world.

Of course it doesn’t work nearly as well here, but it works. Whether it’s the attempt to get us riled up about Christmas or flag-burning or crime or political correctness or communism, our national monkey cage has been rattled to good effect by politicians for as long as I can remember.

Nothing can be done about it, of course. Not only do we and Chimps have a common ancestor, but we are as much an ape as any other and we are controlled by our ape genes and ape instincts. The more the fundies deny it, the more they prove it.

Gravy train

I’m on welfare – and I love it. Right, I knew it, you’ll say; pulling out the stereotype book and starting to build an image of a Liberal out of the little cardboard cutouts. But you’re more wrong than you imagined. I should love Bush, because he just keeps handing me the handouts.

This week, The Republicans voted 53 - 44 to defeat an effort to scale back the Capital Gains and Dividend tax breaks – they stopped those nasty liberals you love to hate right in their tracks. Imagine me not having those extra bucks to spend on my sports cars and boats! Hell, it’ll all trickle down anyway – last week I slipped one of my gardeners an extra five bucks and told him to spend it wisely.

Imagine the giving that money to provide medical care for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans instead! What nerve! I want every penny of that $70 billion to go to rich people and powerful corporations so they can afford to support the government that keeps my gravy train rolling. I can’t imagine anything more unpatriotic than giving even $18 billion of it to help veterans – that’s just plain socialism.

OK, enough cynicism, but from the way I’m hammered by military types and veterans when I criticize George Bush, you’d think he was sending them to Disneyland and paying them like Enron executives. Bush has been screwing them all along, trying to take away combat pay from troops he sent into harm’s way to boost his sinking ratings; troops who are getting shot at and blown up every day while their families struggle to make ends meet.

But such is the power of propaganda, of stereotypes, that the guy in the rented trailer thinks Bush is standing up for him against people that want to take his hard earned cash. Yep, Guys like me get a bigger break from this government than the single mother whose husband didn’t come back from Kabul. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

I am the Law

I am the Law and the Law is not mocked

-Javert, from Les Miserables-

Let’s face it; the domestic wiretap activity of the Bush administration is not going to go away just because we discovered it. It’s not some embarrassing little peccadillo that they are ashamed of; it’s the expression of the autocratic powers Bush feels are his prerogative as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. Of course as civilians, we are not subject to such powers. We are supposed to have a chief executive not a commander, but with the de facto one party system coming into place, and the tendency toward de facto marshal law, we may have little other recourse but to click our heels and salute.

This Monday, Alberto Gonzales is planning to explain to the mislead public why The Chief Executive simply doesn’t have time to comply with the law, which is another way of saying that George W. Bush is the law. We have already seen, and most have ignored what would have been unthinkable not long ago: a President signing a bill with the provision that the law applies at his whim and pleasure. Perhaps freedom and Democracy are only pep-rally words used by cheerleaders: the game itself is called Power.

Time magazine, in a web exclusive article, says that “Gonzales contends in his 10-page opening statement for Monday's hearing that fighting al-Qaeda "is, in fundamental respects, a war of information," and that asking the FISA court for permission for each intercept "would necessarily introduce a significant factor of delay, and there would be critical holes in our early warning system." A common trick of con men is to push you into immediate action. When you’re told there’s no time to think or you’ll lose the deal, it’s time to walk. We can’t walk away from these con men.

Asked about FISA provisions for eavesdropping first and getting a warrant later, Gonzales says that they could not begin "without knowing that we meet FISA's normal requirements." The Constitution is just too damned much trouble for a warpresident and if you don’t trust him to tell us who’s naughty or nice, well then up against the wall, Liberal traitor.

The pattern is clear, the warpresident was in too much of a rush to find out the facts about Iraq and he is in too much of a rush to determine probable cause before listening in to what war critics are saying in private. What he’s saying is that Bush just doesn’t have time for the law - his will is the law.” The fact that he’s been spying on vegetarian groups and the Quakers and that so far, according to the FBI director Robert Mueller, no al Qaeda operatives have been located by this surveillance, suggests a darker motive – hell, it bleats out a darker motive in neon lights.

Apparently we have lost the passion for freedom this nation once had. Perhaps if Tom Paine and Paul Revere had had iPods, Fox News and the Super Bowl, we would be singing a different National Anthem tomorrow.

The following post

has been posted and deleted without my permission twice today. Perhaps I'm being hacked, but let's see if it remains in view this time.

"The right to freedom of thought and expression ... cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers” Said the Vatican in its first response to the Danish cartoon debacle that’s got the Muslim world in an uproar.

“The hell it can’t” says Capt Fogg remembering the centuries of passion plays, blood libels and inquisitions during which that organization smeared mocked and slandered the Jews and went so far as to exterminate the pacifist Cathars for their beliefs. American Fundamentalists raise holy hell every year when anyone appears not to be bowing down to their retrograde beliefs and seem to be working hard towards an America where our freedom is limited by their faith.

In fact I don’t remember such a huge commotion in Gaza when Islamic radicals blew up the World Trade Center or at any of their other murders for that matter. I have a right to think about hypocrisy and a right, so long as we remain a secular nation, to express my disrespect for it.

Nearly everything one might do offends the “religious sentiment of believers” and what the Vatican is saying here and what the madmen in Gaza are acting out, is that belief conveys a superior right. No one seems to be defending my right to believe the results of scientific investigation or mathematics, so why then do I not have the right to “offend” when the offense simply means a different viewpoint? To many fundamentalists of many flavors, the very existence of another religion is offensive. In fact the “offense” given to the faithful by the presence of unbelievers in Saudi Arabia is the basis of al Qaeda.

If we let faith determine the limits of our freedom; whether it’s our faith or someone else’s, we have no freedom.

Invisible hand

Kind of breaks your heart, doesn'’t it? Could be your brother or son or father. No matter what you think about the legality, morality, necessity or worth of George Bush'’s war, real people are losing life and limb because of it. This is not the Super Bowl, it'’s not a game and every day, some of them get killed. No matter what they think of this endeavor, they don't get to say no, they don't get to hide or take time off to work for some politician and they don'’t get enough of what they need from the government that has plenty to give Halliburton and Exxon and the Drug industry. They are not responsible for the lies of Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld or Bush.

True, some of these guys hate my guts and love George. Some love war;– any war. All are real people; most have real families and all are at risk. I've seen Americans act like heroes to save people from fires and mine collapses; people risk their lives pulling children from wells. That helicopter pilot pulling you from a roof isn't going to ask you about your politics first and you're not going to inquire about his.

It'’s not hard or expensive to do as much for a wounded soldier as most would do for a stray cat. You can make a small donation, send morale and comfort items to a hospital; you can send a letter. Wounded Warriors makes it easy. Isn'’t it as much your duty as opposing a corrupt government?

Home Economics

Laura: George, I don’t know what we’re going to do. The credit cards are maxed out, we’re in debt up to our eyeballs, the roof is leaking, the basement’s flooding, the furnace is out, our retirement fund went down with Enron and Junior needs an operation.

George: Laura, really. Have some confidence in me. I have a plan to cut our debt in half by the end of the year.

Laura: Oh George, you’re wonderful.

George: The first thing we do is to buy new appliances and furniture and borrow the money from the store – next we take out a third mortgage from Ditech.com for 150% of what our home is worth. I’ll find the highest bidder with the worst reputation for honesty to fix the house and with enough prayer; Junior’s appendix will clear up by itself.

Laura: But George. . .

George: Now at the end of the year, when the house is worth 50% more, I’ll borrow 150% of that and pay down the debt, pay off the furniture and the repairs and buy an SUV.

Laura: But George. . .

George: Now wait – here’s what makes it all work. I’m going to take a massive salary cut! With my employer's increased profits safely in a numbered offshore account where it will trickle down to me, we'll be rich! Now do you see?

Laura: Oh George! You’re a genius!

What is truth?

What is truth? It’s an eternal question and eternally hard to answer, because in effect, truth is what you believe it is and what you believe is often a manufactured product.

Caught with its gray striped pants down in 2001, the Government needed some good men to come to the aid of their party and with the aid of the internet; cover stories began to cover the country. Although many stories were immediately debunked, the cyber world is not like the real world; the demolished lies reassemble themselves like pools of spilt mercury and rise again – and again. On Tuesday last, I got another copy that had been sent to a huge mailing list.

Efforts to pin the Destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the “liberals” began before the dust cleared. One of the first bits of creative writing that appeared in my mailbox; enthusiastically forwarded by some passionate patriot, concerned a story that Oliver North during his 1987 trial for misappropriating government funds, cited the threat of Osama bin Laden as his reason for purchasing some very expensive security systems.

The man interrogating him “before God and country” was said to be Al Gore – that name appearing amidst pictures of the flaming buildings – and Al was said to have quashed any suggestion of going after and assassinating Osama. The Liberal Press was said to have edited out this story.

Amidst more maudlin exhortations never to forget and always to forward this e-mail, we are told that Mohammed Atta had been imprisoned by Israel for a terrorist act and that Clinton and Warren Christopher had agreed as part of the 1993 Oslo accord to release them, forcing Israel to let the man go.

Please don’t break the chain, it said, with animated graphics of bleeding hearts. Send this to everyone and expose the cover-up!

Of course the story is 100% fiction, Gore never said those things to North, North was in fact questioned by committee counsel John Nields, not a senator. North was talking about Abu Nidal (Osama bin Ladin was an ally in 1987, fighting the Commies in Afghanistan.) Mohammed Atta was not a prisoner in Israel; Clinton did not demand his release.

The only cover up here is this attempt to distract from the fact that Bush had been warned and did nothing; Clinton launched an attack on Osama and had been criticized for it by the Republicans who as this bucket of slime circulated on the web, were stonewalling an attempt to investigate what went wrong. To his credit, Oliver North long ago issued a lengthy denunciation of this box of lies, but it had been told too often and like some retrovirus, lying dormant somewhere, it’s re-emerged with greater passion, more colorful graphics and accusations.

Short attention span America is embracing it again and people like me will be slimed again for telling you the truth. The truth is that you can’t kill a lie and the truth is that there is neither lie so foul or false nor any act of corruption so putrid that the Republican lie machine will not plaster over it with another layer.

I have addressed some of the people who forward this, some of them claiming to remember the circumstances and to have had personal involvement with things that never happened, but the response is “close enough.” The real truth is that truth is meaningless. The truth is that you can always fool enough of the people all the time.

Bonus Blast

We're transforming our military. The things I look for are the following: morale, retention, and recruitment. And retention is high, recruitment is meeting goals, and people are feeling strong about the mission.

-- George W. Bush, in a Jan. 26 press conference

Of course recruitment isn't high at all and one wonders how high the President is when he makes such statements. Salon.com claims to have documents that show the military, which recently raised the enlistment age to 40 in an attempt to meet quotas, is accepting people with fairly serious criminal records, such as domestic abuse, drug dealing and drunken driving. That's got to be just great for morale, but perhaps Bush can depend on the fact that comfort addicted Americans don't read and don't trust those who do.

The worst fiscal deterioration in our nation's history

Well I hope you’re all up for it. The economy is great and “victory” in Iraq is just around the corner and we’re going to hear all about it tonight, condescending sneers and all.

Bush is hoping for a boost since his approval rating is a lower percentage of the population than those who believe in Alien Abductions and he may get it. Even though he’s been just plain wrong in all his predictions, some people still believe him, such is the power of faith.

Here are my predictions:

He will show us GDP figures and call it solid growth, even though last quarter’s numbers surprised even the pessimists. He will credit his tax cuts for that growth and insist that they be made permanent. He will again compare the tribulations of the Iraqi government to those experienced by the young United States in the late 18th century. He will tell us that his station as commander in chief allows him to bypass the constitution and that it is necessary to keep spying on anyone expressing dissatisfaction with his pet war because we are all in such grave danger. We will hear about strong job growth and low unemployment figures. Nothing surprising, in other words.


Gene Sperling, a columnist for Bloomberg News and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress writes today about what you will not hear.

That the main reason unemployment is low is that a smaller share of the population is working or looking for work than when Bush took office. If this weren't the case, the unemployment rate would be 6.6 percent to 7.2 percent

That level of job growth is 2.5 million jobs below the average 2 1/2-year period under the Clinton Administration, and more significantly represents less than half the average rate of job growth in the similar periods of economic recoveries.

That the mere 62,000 private sector jobs generated a month in the Bush recovery represents the worst job recovery on record.

That both family and household incomes have fallen and poverty has risen every year under this administration, according to the annual census report on income and poverty.

Of course since the man once worked for Clinton, all this can be readily dismissed by the remaining 37% who support Bush, by reciting the mystic formula “Michael Moore – Ted Kennedy – Canadian health care system.” But those Democrats, like Sperling and like me, who see the situation as more complex than can be explained only by Bush’s profligate spending and borrowing will none the less be nauseated by those fiscal policies that have mortgaged the future and led to what he calls “the worst fiscal deterioration in our nation's history. “

She take de money and run Venezuela

Come on home Cindy Cindy, Come on home Cindy Cindy
Come on home Cindy Cindy, Come on home to me.

-Elvis Presley-

Cindy, Cindy, Cindy – why did you do it? You had the moral high ground. You had a right to know and Bush chose to cut brush. You looked brave and Bush looked like a sniveling coward. You should have quit while you were ahead.

Cindy Sheehan you’ve made yourself into a metaphor. You’ve made it easy for them to dismiss the case for open, accountable government by calling you a communist. You’ve made it easy for Bush to keep ignoring you and you’ve undercut all of us.
Now anyone who opposes this unprovoked war can be negated by being seen with you, having talked to you or talked about you. 20 years from now, some worthy candidate will be successfully slimed with faked pictures of you.

You couldn’t have done more harm if you tried.

It's just around the corner

Yessir – the economy is doing just fine if your last name is Exxon.  Good job Exxy – let’s give you a tax cut!  Of course if you work at Wal-Mart 67 hours a week and get paid for 40 with no benefits, whereas a few years ago you owned two stores – well sit down and shut up, Commie.  

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's biggest oil company, said fourth-quarter profit rose 27 percent to a record $10.7 billion on surging energy prices, capping the most profitable year for any company in U.S. history.  Must have been those tax cuts for the rich boosting entrepreneurship, right?  Must be, because our friends on the right, the defenders of the people sure aren’t going to tax that windfall. That might screw up the gravy – I mean economy.  

Of course what we’ve been told for decades is that it will trickle down to someone’s great grandmother currently bagging groceries at the Winn-Dixie so that she can almost afford her medications.  I’m sure it will someday.  I mean, how could these oil men be wrong?

Of course we can feel good about the last third quarter’s 4.1% growth while ignoring or doublethinking the next quarter’s 1.1% - that’s the way we keep the economy strong – by talking it up and borrowing on our houses.  A 17.5 percent plunge in durable goods purchases, the biggest drop in almost two decades?  A 1.2% drop in consumer spending for 2005? What are you, some sort of socialist, Michael Moore loving, French Canadian Liberal?

Joe Carson, director of Global Economic Research at Alliance Bernstein, says: ``Low growth in GDP and a decline in productivity -- hours worked rose more than GDP -- implies margin compression and a sequential decline in operating profits.''  Of course these figures get revised more often than George Bush’s promises, but it’s hard to disagree that people are working longer for less, spending more to keep afloat and alive, while the rich get richer.

Something needs to be done – I mean the homeless may be increasing dramatically in my town, but that’s because they are lazy.  The real problem is that it’s getting harder and harder to find a place to keep my yacht!

Con dolcessa, Condoleeza!

Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.


Of course you recognize the quote. The glib and unflappable Renault has become a metaphor for the unabashedly self-serving and corrupt official who really doesn’t care whether you know it or not.

As quoted in the New York Times, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Sunday that the United States had failed to understand the depth of hostility among Palestinians toward their longtime leaders. Well, I’m shocked; and in the same way and to precisely the same degree that Captain Renault was shocked to find that there was gambling at Rick’s.

"I've asked why nobody saw it coming," Ms. Doctor Rice said, speaking of her own staff. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse.” Ms. Rice pointed out that the election results surprised just about everyone. "I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing."

Rice should talk to people outside her circle of sycophants. The chorus of jeers and smears, high fives and hot air from the Great Uneducated Right hasn’t completely drowned out the voices that have argued that Iraq would freely vote for someone far more inimical to the West and its interests than was Saddam. And so they may have done, and so now have the Palestinians.

Perhaps if Rice should stop to consider her failures to see, failures to report, failures to anticipate, failures to investigate, she might produce shock enough to start a tsunami – but she won’t. It’s not in the script and after all. We still don’t know why she sat on the warning about an al Qaeda attack, why she didn’t see that the invasion would not go exactly as it did, that we would not be welcomed, that the oil fields would not produce - that Saddam had no weapons or plants to build them or materials to use nor any way to deliver them. Of course the Administration hardly has to justify its gross failures here and abroad while it can count on blind, flag waving, Budweiser swilling patriotism. I’m quite sure my mailbox will again fill with quasi-literate, misspelled, ungrammatical hate mail, filled with references to communism, New York, Cindy Sheehan, Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore and all the other demons of the demented despot loving losers of the Starboard wing.

Martin Indyk, who was a top Middle East negotiator in the Clinton administration, says: "But on the American side, the conceptual failure that contributed to disaster was the president's belief that democracy and elections solve everything." That’s an understatement.

Atilla the Conservative

Ten million words have probably been written about Newspeak: the word George Orwell coined for the dumbed-down language with the purpose of controlling public perception and belief. Certainly the decay of American English has many sources cultural and academic. Certainly many words have lost their meaning and have taken on other and sometimes antithetical meanings. Certainly it’s not all progress and it’s not all accidental.

What does it mean in Newspeak to be called Conservative? I’m not sure the word has much to do with preserving the status quo or with a reluctance to tolerate large or rapid change or even the avoidance of risk any more. As used by our grotesquely politicized mainstream media, it seems to have more to do with extravagant hostility toward intellectualism, toward reason, toward freedom of thought, collective humanitarian pursuits and perhaps even toward ordered society.

Hence Ann Coulter, a woman who in more conservative times would have been hanged, drawn, quartered and burned as a witch, can repeatedly be labeled as a conservative commentator while calling for the violent overthrow of our government and its institutions. The word simply denotes high hate content and a bias against civilization.

Speaking in Little Rock, AK yesterday, psychopathic, Bolshevik revolutionary insurgent Coulter called for the murder of Justice Stevens, one of the most intelligent minds and elegant writers on the Supreme Court. CNN calls that a “strongly conservative view.”

Coulter belongs to a political party that was willing to call “please don’t tell my wife” Subornation of Perjury and “I did not have a sexual relation with that woman” a high crime worthy of impeachment. What then would a person of normal moral character call "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' crème brulee?” Does the word “Conservative” really attach itself to calls for murder and insurrection?

Coulter seems to believe that you can say things like this and write it off as a joke; that if you smile during a felony, it’s all right. Perhaps she’s right and perhaps if I say someone ought to feed her feet first through a manure spreader after pouring boiling nitric acid up her nose, I will be conservative too.

That was then - this is now

Crankyboy, the Daily Curmudgeon gripes today about Bush's dismissal of the 1978 FISA law as being too old to be worth obeying. Check out Wednesday's fafblog satire on the same theme and more. I read it twice and I'm still laughing.

I doubt, therefore I think.

There is no doubt in his mind, says George W. Bush. There is no doubt that domestic spying without court supervision is legal. This is the same mind in which there is serious doubt that the planet was not created in 6 days and populated with billions of living species in 12 hours or so.

Whether or not he believes what he says, nearly everything he has presented to us has been built with false reasoning on a false premise. Even though it seems that about half the country thinks he’s honest, consistently wrong is still consistently wrong and if it were somehow legal to spy on the Vegans and the Quakers or anyone who questions his proclamations, it’s still wrong. You have to hand it to him for doublespeak, though; just as the Clean Air Act was designed to dump more dirt into the air, this program, says the President, is “designed to protect civil liberties.”

Up pops the Devil

Ever notice how Osama bin Laden pops up like a puppet in a Punch and Judy show whenever Bush needs to lower the level of reason in America? Ever notice how the only ones who assure us that these timely tapes are authentic are the same people who told us Saddam had a nuclear program nearing completion and vast stores of chemical weapons? Other countries like Sweden tell us that they are fakes and even Al Jazeera questions their authenticity. In most things, timing is everything and Osama’s satanophanies seem timed to Bush’s needs. Beyond his need to keep the public convinced of Osama’s enduring presence and malice and since “fighting Terrorism” is his most loved attribute, Bush needs to distract from his failures and blunders.

With the Dollar faltering again, oil on the way up, economic signs on the way down, the Army stretched to the breaking point, corruption leaking out of the seams and anger from our few allies at the air strike in Pakistan, George Bush just like Orwell’s Big Brother, feels it’s time to put out more pictures of the bearded devil.

Sooner or later one has to ask, if this “warrentare” is so productive why is he still out there and why have we caught no “terrists” while spying on Americans? The conclusion that comes to my doubting mind is that Bush needs a war to maintain his power and his power is the only reason for that war.

Long Live the King

Two and a quarter centuries ago, our forefathers wrote a constitution and somehow got it approved. Would this country buy such a Liberal document today? Popular outrage at the idea of George III of England looking through one’s dwelling, papers and accounts ad libitum and at random helped the popularity of our Bill of Rights. Now with such things under attack by George II of America, one has to wonder whether our national cowardice has finally led us to choose the security of Big Brother government over the turmoil of liberty.

People's choice

In the history of our dealings with Iraq, we have made many false assumptions. Amongst those assumptions of which the United States seems to be frequently guilty, is to equate the holding of elections with true Democracy and to equate Democracy with freedom and justice and stability. George Bush offered us the prospect of free elections in Iraq as a goal; a marker of success in building a Liberal Western style democracy, while ignoring the centrifugal effects of strong religious, ethnic and cultural disparities. While we can always find Iraqis who would welcome these things, we seem to be discovering that they may lack the numbers and the power to stand against the popular urges toward Fundamentalism and theocracy.

Holding the recent Iraqi elections, held by an occupying power that has backed certain candidates as an example of Freedom on the March, is a contrived argument, but the Palestinian Elections which seem to have put Hamas, a violent organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel using all means including terrorism, is a good one. Iran too has elected fanatics and militants with nuclear ambitions and other countries, like Iran, have willingly elected dictators and tyrants. It can be strongly argued that governments largely controlled by dictators, kings Sheiks and Shahs have done a far better job of insuring peace and stability with a smaller charge against the account of Liberty than leaders elected by angry, deluded and hostile citizens.

Perhaps we too have elected leaders with certain ambitions, yet so far, our Constitution’s checks and balances have limited such attempts in extent and duration. Of course other countries with exemplary constitutional frameworks have put people like Adolph Hitler in power, illustrating the dangers of weakening our Constitution’s protections against duly elected tyranny.

We have survived other, temporary curtailments of civil rights, yet never before has it been so easy for a President to create a war without the due process formerly required of him. By endless repetition, he has contrived a war against no particular entity, but rather a category of enemy so amorphous and diverse that the struggle may be eternal and could provide an equally long-lasting call for ever greater executive power.

Have we willingly, or even gleefully, given up the only defense we have against the fate to which most democratic efforts have fallen?

Like manna from Hell

It almost sounds like one of O’Reilly’s made up stories, but although it fell into Fox’s lair like a gift, it’s true.  Vermont Judge Edward Cashman sentenced a child molester to just 60 days of jail time -- a sentence he said was designed to ensure the man got prompt sex-offender treatment.  

This is a country where someone can get 55 years for having a couple of lids of weed and a country that jails offenders by the millions, but it only takes one example for the Republican Hate Machine to build a plenary case upon it.  This judge is too lenient, therefore all judges are lenient – sounds logical if you’re an idiot or if you pursue outrage as an avocation as many in the Budweiser Belt do.

Cashman’s argument, that the offender needs treatment and that there is no treatment in jail is factually true, but the argument is incomplete as it assumes that treatment will work and that the offender will be released harmless into the midst of us.  I doubt that this is reliably the case and I’m sure that popular sentiment prefers punishment to rehabilitation in any case.

In sentencing the man to 60 days in jail, Cashman warned the defendant, who allegedly has such a low IQ that he cannot understand why is actions were criminal, that he would get life behind bars if he failed to undergo treatment or comply with other conditions, including a prohibition against alcohol or living in an apartment complex that allows children.  That’s not quite, lenient as it is, the same scenario being flatulated by Fox and it’s disturbingly out of character with Cashman’s record, which is hardly liberal as the average Limbaughian lunkhead would define it.

Cahsman is religious, a Catholic and a man who has jailed parents for refusing to testify against their children. Although he has long had a concern for the convict, as a Christian might be expected to have, his reputation is harsh, but all it takes is one misstep and he becomes another straw man for the burning.  

It’s another victory for the Fox.

Invasion of the Theocrats

"I feel bad about the turmoil, but I don't feel bad about my convictions, which are based on the Bible," said Tom Swartley, a minister at First Christian Church in Elm Creek Nebraska. The problem is not that he apologized to God for our “33 year nightmare” with Abortion rights and for teaching the “religion” of evolution to our children – the problem is that he said it as a morning prayer before Congress.

Too bad he didn’t go on about slavery, genocide, wife beating and giving your daughter into prostitution – other things the Bible seems to oppose very little, if at all.

"We put our children in the same category as other mammals and then we wonder why some act like animals," said Swartley, ignoring the millennia-long history of religious crimes against humanity. Perhaps he would like to repeat this to the nearly countless children molested by priests, ministers and other shameless shamans. Children in the Bible belt are more likely to grow up criminals, to wallow in poverty and dependency and they are more likely to fail at marriage.

Babbling about the Bible doesn’t prevent religious leaders from stealing from the poor or leading lives of luxury, or persecuting heretics or unbelievers nor does our beleaguered freedom of speech prevent them from lying. If our tax subsidized opinion shouters hate anything it’s freedom, whether it’s freedom to choose to terminate a pregnancy, freedom to disbelieve legend and believe evidence or to think logically and associate with whom we will in any way that does not hurt anyone. Tom Swartly’s opinions are a demonstration of the danger of mixing religion, whether legitimate religion or psychopathology and stupidity like Swartly’s religion, with government.

Too bad our Idiot in Chief isn’t honest enough to tell us that the staging of elections does not define liberty, only a constitution that protects the minority against the invidious and occasionally demented passions of the majority can allow liberty to flourish. If believers are free to impose their will on others, there is no freedom.

Truth or Consequences

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανειν θέλω.

-Petronius: Satyricon-

When I hear Giggling George justify the NSA spying on us with reference to the results of that effort I think of giving up too. It really no longer matters what you do or what you say. What matters is what those who profit by it tell us it all means. What suits a profit seeking oracle best, is a source whose pronouncements are confusing and contradictory to the point of meaninglessness.

• The results of the massive NSA enterprise have been exiguous at best. One arrest of a man who planned to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch; an accomplishment more absurd than arresting your grandmother for a having a nail clipper on an airplane. The flood of “tips” given to the FBI has lead to nothing, reported the New York Times.
• You can’t expect us to ignore Al Qaeda phone calls to the US, says Bush, and of course we don’t, but we do expect him to leave the Quakers alone and not to use his arrogated powers to persecute his critics. We expect him to respect us and our laws rather than to pretend that he is Commander in Chief of civilian America as well as of its armed forces.
• Bush’s claim that: "leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it" is close enough to a lie, that we might as well call it a lie. The National Security Act requires that he keep Congressional Intelligence Committees fully informed and Bush fulfilled the requirement as he fulfilled his military requirements – he didn’t and got someone else to say he did.

George Bush has broken the law. George Bush continually lies about the law and about his having broken it. How long will his diversions and perversions and prevarications and obfuscations go unnoticed or excused? If we do not stop his progress, and stop it now, the future will hold nothing but leaders who start unprovoked and endless wars to nullify or circumvent the constitutional backbone of our nation. George W. Bush has taken us too far down the road to tyranny.

Impeachment is the only solution.

Liberal Extremist Judges

Liberal Activist Judges: I’m told they’re everywhere; legislating from the bench as The Republicans say they do, so I’ve been wasting a lot of time lately looking for one, or at least hoping to find evidence for the assertion that they are here amongst us, like Witches or Commies or the Elders of Zion and making up laws that we don’t like.

I think maybe I’ve finally found one; Clarence Thomas. I read this morning that the National Black Justice Coalition released an advertisement asking if Justice Thomas’ marriage to a white woman is an offense to God. Of course the axe that they’re grinding is the question of gay marriage, currently a Straw Man paraded about by the Religious Right who not long ago told us that interracial marriage was a similar annoyance to the great Republican in the sky. Thomas, that Liberal extremist, has turned up his nose at the traditional, segregationist, Bible based values of the American Right and snubbed the will of the American People. He is a Liberal, at least as concerns his personal rights.

Until I was a senior in college, that marriage, and indeed my marriage would have been illegal in 34 states and a felony in about a dozen. The reason being that God, as represented by the Supreme Court, didn’t like it. The SCOTUS, in fact has a long history of telling us what should or should not be legal as determined by their beliefs about God rather than by the Constitution or the will of the government.

How much more of an activist court legislating from the bench can you find than a court insisting that some people are property, that women should not vote, that people of a certain color must use different bathrooms and go to different schools and only live in places with other people of certain colors? Maybe our courts have long been active in the field of social engineering, so it’s not the principle involved here; it’s the direction of the activism the running dogs of Republican repression hate so much - unless it interferes with their own desires.

What the Fox-infected Republican rabble are opposed to isn’t judicial activism at all, it’s freedom. They aren’t bothered by a judicial system that rules extra-constitutionally on biblical principles. What bothers them is a court that leans toward the letter and spirit of the law; a court that tries to guarantee equal rights and equal protection.

The tactical myth of an activist court is, like the myths about fiscal conservatism and less intrusive government, an exercise in doublethink to sell us activist courts, fiscal extravagance and more intrusive government.

The vermin under the rock

My local paper, like many others these days, has added a feature to their on-line version that allows people to post comments to articles. Often there are none, sometimes, one or two, but if the headline contains the words rape, murder or molester, there can be dozens. They tend to be similar enough that one sees patterns.

Yesterday, an article ran that mentioned a certain piece of evidence would be withheld from jurors in a case involving the abduction and beating of an 82 year old victim. A bloody shirt had been obtained without warrant.
At least one letter advocated the murder of “liberal activist judges.” Another insisted that the country was being swallowed up by crime because of the L. A. J. legislating from the bench. Another insisted that crime was soaring because the courts couldn’t convict anyone, the hands of the police were tied and Liberals like me were at fault. My inevitable reply was to the effect that in fact these were very conservative judges, enforcing the letter of the law and that the law was put there to protect them from the Big Government they used to yell about before their party became Big Government. “It’s not Liberal Activist Judges,” I argued, “It’s the Constitution.”

“Ted Kennedy.” was his reply.

“I have no objection to the Police searching my home at random,” said the irrational voice. “I’d like to see some third world harshness return to our courts,” he added after some gratuitous mentions of Ted Kennedy. I responded to him, mentioning that better enforcement and better police were a better solution, but of course that smelled too much like taxes and he went off the deep end: “Ted Kennedy – Ted Kennedy!”

With the vast network of rabble rousing media underlying the American culture, people like this who listen to hate radio, listen to hate sermons and spend Friday Night sitting in bars glad-handing their hate-filled brown-shirted compatriots have all the impetus they need to continue their America bashing in the face of contradictory previous statements and in defiance of all facts. In fact what they really do want is something like Cuba or Haiti, foolishly thinking that there is a country that will kill weirdos on sight while protecting their private property and their safety. I won’t pull any punches – I think they’re psychotic.

The important facts, of course, are that we do have the harshest punishments of any modern nation, the most people in jail, lower taxes than most and that violent crime has been decreasing for over a decade. Moreover, the prosecutors in this case have an overwhelming amount of damning evidence. The man is likely to get a life sentence.

We do not have a political debate in America; we have something more akin to the replacement of Neanderthals with modern humans – only this time the rude beasts are making progress. The Mainstream Media, hungry for ratings, is joining the America Bashing, the lying, the calls to violence, the constitution bashing and the ignoring of stories that call the scenario into question.

The Republicans have courted the Devil, letting him think he’s smart, reasonable and valuable in order to use him to advance their persecution of civilization. Sooner or later the Devil will have his due.

Not again!

Yes, again. Mining has always been a dangerous business, but have lax inspections under the Bush administration’s kleptocracy contributed to recent disasters like the explosion at the International Coal Group's Sago Mine in Upshur County that killed 12 miners and Thursday evening’ fire that started on a conveyor belt at the Alma No. 1 Mine operated by Aracoma Coal, in which two men are still missing? Don’t worry, Bush will make an appearance somewhere and press releases will be issued and Bush will emerge, smiling and smelling like a rose.

It’s the way things are done in today’s faith based world where facts don‘t matter and perception is for sale. Hamas, that group of religious fanatics who relish suicide bombings and hate Jews is paying a spin doctor $180,000 to persuade Europeans and Americans that it is not a group of religious fanatics who relish suicide bombings and hate Jews.

As Bush’s ratings take another dive, Osama can be heard, prophesying war, but offering a truce so that war protesters here can be better compared by Fox to al Qaeda sympathizers. Can the yellow and orange “terror” tags be far behind?

Spy cameras in Podunk, your internet searches scrutinized by the government, your library forced to spy on you, your calls being monitored, your mail being opened and anyone daring to mention the impending death of liberty being flayed alive by the Kleptocorporate death squad on Fox News: does all this finally make you think of Orwell?

Me too. The Blog called Ministry of Truth has been keeping me in stitches for weeks. I think it’s time to re-read 1984. Of course I’ll have to put on my slouch hat and trench coat and search through the local used book store. I can’t risk the library or an internet search these days. Big Brother is watching you.

CNN sells out

What do you think of a guy who calls the grieving father of a young man whose living, screaming head was sawed from his body by Iraqis a “scumbag” simply because the man was grieving? I know, they don’t make adequate words, or if they do, they’re known only to those in the field of demonology or abnormal psychology.

Of course abnormal psychology includes the study of American Conservative Values and those values include those of CNN’s Headline News who according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are planning to add Glenn Beck to their stable of jackasses. Beck is the one who called Nick Berg’s father a scumbag, who says he hates the families of the 9/11 victims, who says publicly he wants to kill Michael Moore with his bare hands and who told someone who claims to have tortured prisoners he appreciated his having done so.

Jim Walton, president of CNN News Group, said Headline News’ goal is to continue luring an audience that is different from those who watch sister network CNN.

Maybe we could just bring back the Roman Circus where you can watch people having their heads cut off and their guts ripped out, or maybe bring back the burning of heretics – or maybe you could just dig up their graves and have a bonfire with Jefferson and Franklin and Washington and roast marshmallows over the ashes of America. Why not just worship the Devil openly? That would be different. That would boost ratings. That would lure some different viewers.

Thanks Liberal Media. Thanks for your dedicated public service, you stinking, traitorous, criminal bastards.

Dig him up, then hang him

"Hoka hey, it's a good day to die," Allen said in Choctaw. "Thank you very much, I love you all. Goodbye."

It wasn’t that easy, his 76 year old heart, recently recovered from an attack in September, refused to give up and they had to give him a second shot to stop it.

I’m not going to argue that he was a good man and I’m not going to give my usual polemics against the practice of killing people we don’t have to kill. I’m simply going to use this as another piece of evidence that our country is insane and it’s much vaunted value system is a web of lies and contradictions we use to justify having no value system.

Back in September, Allen had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor.

"At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life," said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon as reported by CNN. "We would resuscitate him, then execute him.”

Hocus Pocus; it’s a good day to be insane.

United they stand

A central theme in Bush’s rhetoric is that freedom and democracy are one and the same thing. He believes, or wants us to believe that he believes that the huddled masses of Muslims are yearning to breathe free and that once there are elections, governments will become less repressive and corrupt.

Of course we’ve been voting for a couple of centuries and we have of late been moving toward repression and corruption at a disturbing rate, but the argument that a country like Iraq will embrace a liberal democracy that respects the individual rights we hold to be self evident, is either wishful thinking or a blatant and cynical lie.

Of course you may consider the rule of extremist Mullahs as preferable to a secular tyrant and perhaps many Americans secretly do wish for something similar in our country, but when given a choice, Islamists in Islamic countries choose strong Islamist leaders and submit (as the word Islam suggests) to their rule willingly.

Witness the success of Islamist candidates in Egypt’s recent elections and indeed Iraq’s.  Seattle Times writer Warren P. Strobel argues that the real beneficiary of Bush’s current excuse for the unprovoked war against Iraq have been the Islamists.  In Lebanon, the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah is part of the government for the first time and Hamas appears likely to do well in the January 25th Palestinian elections.  These, needless to say, are terrorist groups dedicated to destroying Israel and perhaps any other secular government in the Muslim world.  Elected leaders in Iran are building nuclear weapons and threatening Israel, and of course that threatens the world.

An administration that has made much use of false accusations of weakness on the part of its opponents is hard pressed, in my opinion, to make a case for strength on its own part as it wages a war making it more probable that Islamist extremists will prosper and unite against us.

Life imitates Art

With thanks to Reuters

Unbelievable!

"If Iraq, in the middle of the Middle East, can build a stable democracy, it'll be unbelievable, really.”

Laura Bush is right. Although the word IF should be done up in flashing neon lights, unbelievable is the key word. It’s a brave new world, that the Bush’s envision. A utopian world where the natives merrily vote, even if at gunpoint and justice ( according to Biblical principles) pours down from heaven like manna.

Nation Building, a practice scathingly derided by Republicans when practiced by non-Republicans, has a shaky history. Indeed failed attempts at putting together countries define the boundaries of the Middle East today.

Liberia is one of the United States’ attempts to restore Freedom to slaves while avoiding the problem of tolerating them as free citizens. George and Laura, in a rather transparent attempt to dress up that horrific country to appear as an example of successful American nation building, is traveling to Liberia to draw attention to their newly elected female President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. It was “a really good, competitive and fair election." Says she, ignoring the indifference the US has shown to all African problems of late and that elected tyrants, crooks and madmen fill the pages of history books. Like Her husbands handlers, she doesn’t agree that liberal democracy in an impoverished, savage, ignorant and corrupt land does not flower as easily as the Sonora desert after a rainstorm.

Laura likes the idea of a Woman President, or at least she was programmed to say so at the Stepford institute. I have no objection either, although the notion of a women leader being intrinsically more honest, compassionate and incorruptible isn’t really supportable. I do however object to her terrifying choice of a successor (if he allows a successor) to her husband George: Condoleeza Rice. "I'd love to see her run, she's terrific" says she, sounding like an animated Norman Rockwell image.

Laura is apparently the image the administration wants you to see: a pleasant, white, Anglo-Saxon, small town, devoted wife. As such she can tell us how important it is for Alito to be treated with respect and not hint that the stunt with Alito’s wife was choreographed or that disrespect for Alito stems from his disrespect for the rights of women – or that her husband leads the greatest political smear machine in several generations. The pirate ship of state her husband pilots has become broken, bloodied and in need of some dignity. A nice female figurehead might just help; conservatively quaffed and suited, shy smile carved and painted on the wood.

Born in the USA

You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
'Til you spend half your life just covering up

-Bruce Springsteen-


You may be born in the USA and on the on the Fourth of July, but if someone decides you are or look like or have the same name as an “Enemy Combatant” you may have no more rights than Ivan Denisovich; you may disappear into America’s Gulag for however long George Bush wants you to. You may never be charged. You may never have a lawyer. You may never have a trial. You may never return.

Our notorious facility at Guantanamo Bay has of course been under scrutiny for quite a while but investigations concerning torture and abuse of prisoners of war involve certain difficulties.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, former commander of the “detention center” at Gitmo, is declining to answer questions in two courts-martial cases involving the use of dogs during interrogations. Miller, who recently requested retirement, took command of the Guantanamo detention center in Cuba in late 2002 with a mandate to get more and better information from prisoners. Military law (UCMJ Article 31) provides the right to remain silent, something like the 5th Amendment protection against self- incrimination given civilians.

I agree, of course with Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told Pentagon reporters that while he expects military leaders to do the right thing, that does not mean they should lose their constitutional rights.

The irony of course is that you or I may lose those rights on the basis of an unfounded accusation. Citizen or non-citizen. You may have less protection from cruelty than the law offers a dog or a barnyard animal.

I read in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that In August 2003, the Pentagon sent Miller to inspect interrogation procedures in Iraq, and he recommended using the Guantanamo techniques on prisoners in Iraq to improve intelligence on the growing anti-U.S. insurgency. He was sent to Iraq in March 2004 to run detainee operations. I expect the old soldier simply to retire and fade away. and perhaps the investigations of other incidents at Abu Ghraib will have similar outcomes. We will get little information from the torturers as we have had little information from the tortured. The boot heel of the Texas Tyrant will press a little harder on the face of America.