Osama bin Who?

Years ago, we were told the mission was accomplished. Today Bush tells the troops they’re winning the “war.” Years ago Richard Clarke, former presidential adviser on counter-terrorism said Bush had expressed no interest in finding, catching or hearing about Osama bin Laden. Republicans mocked, claiming that the “timing” of his book made that idea suspect. Today the CIA unit that has been hunting Osama was disbanded even though recent tapes released by him show that he is alive and well.

According to sources in Armenia, Clarke, whose testimony becomes more credible every time Bush switches positions, claims Osama may be hiding in one of the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia. Bush's response is -- tell the troops we're winning what we suposedly won three years ago? So just what is this course we're supposed to be staying? Just how short a memory do you need to be a Bush supporter?

Is Bush capable of listening to anyone not in his inner circle or to the voices in his head? It doesn’t seem like it, unless the last thing he wants to do is to find the man who planned the attack on New York. Certainly the first thing he wants us to do is to support war for war’s sake since it’s only his personal crusade that keeps him from being impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Church of lies

One of my most vain hopes (no, not the lottery thing or the one where Bush is changed to a pillar of salt) is to see Ann Coulter behind bars.  Yes, I said vain hope.  None the less, she does have her little felony problem in Palm Beach, where despite her claims to the contrary in her “lectures” and on TV she does dwell at 242 SEABREEZE AVE, PALM BEACH FL 33480 6129.

She denies this, in her lying little way, even in the face of her having registered and voted in Palm Beach County using a false address, which is, as you might suspect, a felony.  

In an attempt to bury the evidence, she’s applied to have her actual address (see above) stricken from the records.  That’s something the law reserves for certain categories of citizens, such as policemen and not for quasi-human birds of prey like Ann.  Victims of stalking, which she claims without evidence to be since someone has sent her roses (Satan?) may qualify, as may victims of domestic violence, yet Ann has no domestic partner, or if she has had, she has eaten them.

So although Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson has as yet after four months of trying, been unable to get Ann to admit to living there, her address of 242 Seabreeze Ave, Palm Beach FL  33480 is valid says the Palm Beach Post.

You may want to take the opportunity to write her or if the number of record at the time she bought the house is still valid, call her at (561) 655-9520 and ask why those nasty people at the Church of Liberalism feels that she isn’t above the law. I’d like to know why she can’t simply live in one place and vote in another – is it the Liberals again?  

If you’d like driving information, click on this link.  It’s about 4 blocks south of the Breakers, half a block east of A1A.  No ocean view, of course, lest the sea boil at her gaze. . .

Zarqawi's phone

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death may raise more problems for the Bush administration than it solves.  Although it gave Bush a bit of a bounce with the morons who still support his Kampf,  numbers found on his cell phone may indicate that he had friends or perhaps supporters amongst senior officials in the new US supported Iraqi government according to CNN this morning.

That might lead the skeptical enquirer to question whether the major hindrance to a new birth of freedom in Iraq is Americans with long hair and enquiring minds or corrupt and anti-US members of the Iraqi government.

Of course to question any of the proclamations of Big Brother Bush borders on treason under the definitions used by the Bush Reich, but I’ll run the risk for the moment and predict that the utopian scheme of producing a Western secular liberal republic in Iraq is a million to one long shot.  I will run a bigger risk by saying that this goal is a sham and that the Bush administration wants and needs a prolonged war in order to further its tyrannical goals.

If this is my last post, you’ll know why.

Forward is backward

Die Gedanken sind frei,
wer kann sie erraten;
sie fliehen vorbei
wie naechtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen,
kein Jaeger erschiessen;
es bleibet dabei:
Die Gedanken sind frei.

-an old German song-

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I heard Martin Sheen say this a dozen times in ads for the West Wing last year. After this, therefore because of this, it sounds more impressive when a President says it even if it’s only one of the two guys who play President on TV, but of course it’s a very common fallacy. It’s a useful fallacy too, used to “prove” how smoking Pot leads to heroin use, to sell miracle remedies and sometimes to justify a war. Of course you see how it reduces to the absurd in short order when you observe that everyone who uses heroin once drank milk and although we attacked Iraq after Sept 11, 2001, a chain of causation does not exist. I won’t go into the technicalities, but if we accept that this is a fallacy, how do we perceive Anti hoc, ergo propter hoc?
Can the vector of causation run from effect to cause?


Sure it can – When you fail at plan A, or plan A is exposed as a fraud, Plan B becomes the reason you had to use plan A. That’s why our invasion of Iraq was about freedom before it was about preemption even though the freedom story came up after the preemption story was exposed as a lie. So it is with the “9/11 changed everything” proposition. 9/11 it seems, changed things well before 9/11/01.

Do you still doubt that our invasion and occupation of Iraq had anything other than the magnification of presidential powers as its prime motivation? Perhaps the administration officials who claim that Bush planned that invasion before his election and that Bush was obsessed with Saddam to the point that he refused to hear anything about bin Laden or al Qaeda are lying. Perhaps too, the breach of privacy case on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. AT&T and BellSouth Corp. customers is spurious, but it’s hard to get around the notion that because the Bush administration asked AT&T to facilitate wiretapping some 7 months before the attack on New York, the wiretapping had nothing to do with 9/11. Unless of course time works backwards and effects precede their cause.

AT&T is in quite a bind here, because the dictatorship forbids them to tell anyone whether it’s true or not on pain of being charged with treason. You can’t accuse the gang of four of being stupid; one can prove that they lied and created an illegal war in order to become dictators, but that would be treason, so the official viewpoint must be that time runs backwards – just like progress under the dictatorship of Bush.

None the less, our thoughts are free as the old German song that was last sung during the Nazi said. No one can arrest us for thinking that Bush has taken a liberal republic down the fascist road. Perhaps some day it won’t be illegal to tell the truth or to expose treasonous crimes; perhaps. Perhaps someday we too will be free.

Ich denk was ich will,
und was mich begluecket,
Doch alles in der Still,
und wie es sich schicket.
Mein Wunsch und Begehren
kann niemand verwehren,
es bleibet dabei:
Die Gedanken sind frei.

Heil Bush!

There is one person who descends from illegal Mexican immigrants that I would like to see deported along with the illegal, un-American ideas he has and the illegal President whose horse he rode in on.

Alberto Gonzales believes that adhering to treaty and to the constitution and to basic ideas of human rights is just a terrible thing because it might hinder George W. Bush’s imperial jihad against “terrorists” and to perpetuate the war he started for the very purpose of becoming a dictator. No matter that we have defeated the greatest armies the world has generated, outside of our own, without having to resort to the barbarian, inhuman and disgusting practices of his psychotic Majesty George W. Torturing Bush -- we need to become monsters in order to fight “evil doers.”

Speaking of the decision of our hand picked and ultra conservative high court to limit the god-like arrogation of supreme and unchallenged power of our Salamander in Chief to do anything to anyone at any time without let or hindrance, Gonzales spewed forth today: "What this decision has done is, it's hampered our ability to move forward with a tool which we had hoped would be available to the president of the United States in dealing with terrorists,"

He hoped George could be the kind of tyrant who would cut a swath through law, treaty and morality to get at the motley band of bombers whom he hates more than he loves freedom. and if the courts won't permit it, why, we'll do it anyway!

"We are currently evaluating the writings of the Supreme Court," Gonzales said, and "we are going to be working closely with Congress to look at legislation." Said he to CNN today.

Surely he and his party of God will be able to remove the last vestiges of an independent judiciary, checks and balances, the US constitution and the 1949 Geneva conventions: all those things that separate us from the barbarian nation he so fondly wishes us to become.

Do as thou wilt shall be the law

I long for the days of the double standard.  These are the days of anything goes and standards that are based only on the ever changing expedience of the moment.  If China cracks down on dissent by tightening control over what is considered to be a State Secret, we look down our noses and make clucking noises.  When we do it, it’s the patriotic thing to approve of – there’s a war on.  That’s if, of course, the leak didn’t come from those charged with keeping those secrets. Senator Sanatorium can wave classified documents around and offer them to reporters as long as he is only using them to support Bush’s big lie. The New York Times is a nest of traitors for publishing common knowledge that was released on the White House web site years ago.

The inner circle of mob captains like Karl Rove can do as they please.  It’s patriotic to believe that it’s OK to break the law by revealing a state secret when the leak damages someone trying to legitimately influence policy by supplying the information they were hired to supply. It all hinges on whether the information is something the Republican autocracy wants you to hear or not to hear. Right and wrong legal and illegal are infinitely relative.

On the other hand leaking news of illegal, corrupt behavior on the part of the government is not OK.  It’s patriotic to back the government when the government breaks the law and it’s unpatriotic to protest when that crime harms you because exposing a crime might be revealing a state secret.  Understand?  It’s all very simple – anything is right or wrong depending on what the administration wants to do, steal or make you believe at the moment. We have a standard to fit any occasion.

Chinese courts have imposed prison terms for journalists, social activists and religious leaders for disclosures that would be routine public information in most countries, according to the New York Times. Anything can be a state secret if they want it to claims Human Rights Watch’s Nicholas Bequelin.  That’s just totalitarian and terrible isn’t it?  We can know that for sure, because they are Commies over there, it’s a different story here because when we lie, cheat, steal and punish the righteous, it’s to fight for freedom – and besides, we believe in God and they don’t.  I hope that helps you understand.

It’s hard to know how to be a good citizen without a good old fashioned double standard.  Maybe the safest thing is to sit down, tune out and shut up.  

Armageddon ready for NASCAR

The Palm Beach Post assures me today that the asteroid designated 2004 XP14 will pass by the Earth on Monday with sufficient margin that I don’t have to worry about being able to finish all the ice cream in the Freezer before we’re all blown to hell. That’s not what pleases me so much as the fact that this article gives the pertinent data in miles, feet and miles per hour.

When is the last time you saw or heard any media story use any measure of distance other than football fields? Has the dumbing down stopped? Are we to finally learn the distance to the moon (4,224,000 Football fields, give or take a few beer cans) in miles or even Kilometers? Or is this only because the people who measure things in beer cans and football fields are occupied with the World Cup leaving behind only those reporters with three digit IQ’s?

Who knows – and who knows what other idle thoughts will fill my mind while waiting for the Nextel Cup Pepsi 400 to begin at Daytona International Speedway?

Stupid, stupid, stupid

A Los Angeles Times poll conducted this week shows that if evolution works in the human gene pool, it certainly doesn't work quickly. Many Americans remain hoplessly and adamently stupid; believing that that proto-hominid in the White House is "tough on Terrorism" whatever the hell that means to the simian mind. Perhaps it means accidently clearing up 0.000001% of the mess he created in the first place - and that only temporarily. Zarkawi, who was able to enter Iraq in the first place only because of George W. Bush, his lies and bungling, has already been replaced and possibly with someone worse. George is once again the man on the white horse.

Most disgustingly, The poll found a plurality, 43 percent, of adults say Bush has higher ethical standards than former President Bill Clinton. Twenty-nine percent say they are lower. Forty Three percent of America - at the very least - are ipso facto so stupid as to be undeserving of liberty if not life itself. To listen to the idiots of America take pride in their own cognitive failure and wail about the dire effects of letting Mexicans into the country makes me wonder if the aggregate IQ wouldn't be noticably improved by hordes of baboons instead.

If it weren't that giving up would be participating in the destruction of my country, I would give up.

Under whose God?

What should I say,
Since faith is dead
And truth away from you is fled.

-Thomas Wyatt-

I’m one of the dwindling few who clearly remembers Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961.  It had moments of honest eloquence not often reached by presidents arriving or departing -- or by their professional speechwriters.  It has been mentioned often of late because of his dire warning about the growing power and influence of the “military industrial complex” which as he predicted, has gained enough power to perpetuate the need for armaments and policies that make not only war and talk of war a constant, but which supports bellicose and paranoid attitudes in the public and private arena.  For opposing a fraudulent arms race, for recognizing the military’s needs as different from the needs of peace and stability, Eisenhower will be remembered and should be better heeded.

But there is another Eisenhower legacy, one which can be seen in that speech and heard in classrooms and read about on editorial pages today.  He talked about faith, about spiritual blessings; he talked about nations under God as being the upholders of the good and identified non-believers with enemies of freedom.  Had he really forgotten the faith and religious rhetoric of the enemies of freedom he helped defeat only 16 years earlier? Was he yet unaware of the scarcely countable centuries of religious persecution and tyranny and war by, in and between nations under God?   In the words of his final address, it is the atheists who are the enemy and not because they are totalitarians, but atheists.

The notion that it was God who stopped Hitler from taking England seems to have some currency in that country, now that the huge sacrifices of her military and civilians are being forgotten. I’m sure many Americans feel that it was God-fearing America alone who won the war against the God-fearing fascists and not the atheists from Mother Russia.  Mythology and false history, like entropy increase over time and Eisenhower was happy to play along with a faith based interpretation of it, whether or not it offended the single most basic founding principle of our nation: that our government derived its legitimacy entirely from the consent of the governed and not from God.

I was 9 years old in 1954 when a teacher whose name I have forgotten told me I had to affirm that I lived in a nation under God because the President said so.  I wouldn’t do it then and I will not today because I consider it an illegal intrusion into my private beliefs and an illegal establishment of religion and an illegal requirement to make a religious oath.  Yet somehow it’s passed into the mythology and people support groups who insist that the Eisenhower clause was written by the pious founding fathers who dreamed of theocracy.  Herein lies, I do fear, the end of America.  The truth is what they say it always has been and not what it was and so it shall ever be.

Pride and Prejudice

"I'm proud that my son wanted to protect the freedom of this country, whether we all agree with the war or not," said Mike Plouhar whose son was killed by yet another roadside bomb in Iraq just 38 days before he was to be shipped home.

His son, Raymond J. Plouhar was seen in Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 as a Marine recruiter, and was depicted as an agent of exploitation, preying upon the young and confused and those with questionable opportunities. I doubt he himself thought of his job in that way.

Raymond J. Plouhar might be seen as a fine man, a man of courage and a man who had sacrificed a bit of himself for the sake of another. He was serving a stint as a recruiter in Flint Michigan, Moore’s home town, after having surgery to remove the kidney he donated to an uncle. A selfless man, it would seem and a man of admirable courage.

Apparently young Plouhar hated Farenheit 9/11 because it criticized the war. Like many, he perhaps believed that the will of the leader is the will of God and so no matter how wrong the war, it’s more wrong to criticize it. Certainly he had no fear of telling a man, married with children, that this was all the more reason to sign up. He must have believed the ever changing stories of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Bush, America’s gang of four.

His parents are proud of Raymond and I too am proud of anyone making a sacrifice to protect the freedom of my country – our country. It’s too bad that he has to see this particular action, that has done more than anything else in my lifetime to erode the freedom of this country, billed as not only something worthwhile for the nation, but something involved with keeping us free, but how can a father face the loss of a son who lived for others and died for nothing.

Raymond J. Plouhar, in my opinion, was more than another anonymous victim of forces wishing to oust us from Iraq and from the Muslim world. He was a victim of George W. Bush and his neo-con barbarians. He was a victim of a strategic ethic that involves the kind of blind obedience to authority that should have died long ago and has no place in a free society.

What a tragedy that this man who gave a piece of himself to save another gave the rest of himself to support a president for whom peace is an obstacle to profit and ambition.

Apocalypse whenever

Some historians seem to be worried that Mel Gibson’s latest pseudo-historical drama Apocalypto, might turn out to be more pseudo than historical. Ya think? That he gives the illusion of authenticity by having actors speak in a modern Mayan that would be unintelligible to Mayans of the day reflects the Roman Legionaires in his last pseudo-historical effort, who spoke medieval Church Latin rather than the dialect of the first century. That’s a stretch greater than allowing James Brown to play Chaucer, but of course all is permissible in the retailing of the Faith, isn’t it Mel?

Then too, the film which seems to be based on a protagonist trying to escape some mass sacrifice, which Mayans apparently didn’t do in the first place, is no worse than his dismissing the life, works and teachings of Jesus in favor of explicit, hard core, sado-porn and 4th Century Greco-Roman mystery crap, but confusing Aztecs and Mayans and the countries they lived in won’t bother Americans any the more than portraying Jesus as an Aryan. We’re all a bunch of idiots when comes to history and barbarians when it comes to caring about it.

Frankly, I wish this baby-faced bullshit artist would go back to claiming that the Jews of Germany migrated to Australia rather than Auschwitz so that the hilarity of his phony history lessons would be seen in better light.

Of the historians who criticize his tendentious twaddle, “I frankly don't give a flying fuck about much of what those critics think” said Gibson to Time magazine.

Nice talk Jeezeboy. Go tell it on the mountain and I don’t give much of a damn about your sick crappy beliefs either. Go say a hundred Hail Mary’s or go fuck yourself – whatever.

Manchurian candidate.

So much for Mr. Obama.  I used to dig him, but it’s all over now.  Democrats must court evangelicals, says he and even though our Constitution scrupulously avoids any mention and forbids official acknowledgement of God or gods or any group claiming authority derived from invisible powers, he thinks the party must compete for their support.  

"Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," he said to a religious group: Call to Renewal.  Indeed it does and one context in which I deem and the writers of the constitution deemed inappropriate was the context of the Federal Government and its laws.

Frankly, though he is correct that religion plays a large part in the individual lives of Americans, I fail to see that as a mandate for the legislature and the courts to get involved in our personal mythologies any more than they should get involved in other important things we hold dear, like our family relationships and our love lives and all our private matters.

"It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,” he continued. Perhaps that’s because he believes in God and thinks everyone else should too. I was embarrassed to have to say it in 1954 and I refuse to say it now as do many who have actually read the Ten Commandments and the constitution and take one or the other seriously.

In truth, if the world’s biggest generator of waste and the largest den of corruption and imperial lawlessness since Caligula’s term as emperor of Rome is to be involved in matters of private conscience simply because such matters exist, then why not recognize all the myriad concerns from bigotry to baseball by courting support?  After all, the Aryan Nation is a religious group acknowledging the same God as other Christians and so does the KKK.  I don’t notice the Junior Senator from Illinois advocating for the official mention of Krishna or Allah or Vishnu, Wauconda, Legba, shri Ganesh, Amitaba or Baron Samedi and these are just a few of the deities dear to the hearts of American citizens. The Nazi party is faith based and so is al Qaeda. Sometimes it doesn’t take much reductio to get to the absurdem part, does it?

We don’t do this; we don’t recognize any establishment of religion because that would require government to say this religion is good and that religion is bad and because that would be the end of religious freedom, the constitution forbids this.  Barak Obama is a very intelligent and very educated man and I don’t have any evidence that he is corrupt, so I can only assume that, speaking of brainwashing, his failure to recognize the obvious is an artifact of some other process.  Should we look for a small scar on his shoulder?

If this be treason. . .

Treason?  I think we’ll all be hearing the word applied to more revelations of government misdeeds in the build-up to the sham elections in November.  Of course more terrorist plots and rumors of plots will abound and there will be more sham hysteria about pornography and drugs and people who speak Spanish and perhaps even a staged burning of a flag or two.  I predict that it will be effective – it always has been and Americans are all too eager to go out in the streets with pitchforks and lanterns to fight whatever monsters the Government invents while the men in black plunder us in secret.

If the New York Times has committed treason, than so has every newspaper because if George W. Bush can retroactively classify things which have long and publicly been announced, then we are all traitors whenever it suits him to make us traitors.

Indeed an executive order calling for greater cooperation with foreign entities “to monitor money that might be headed to terrorist groups” was posted on the White House website only days after the September 2001 attacks and numerous mentions have been made of such monitoring whilst bragging about how successful George W. Bush has been in preventing terrorist attacks.

But George can get away with such slithery deeds because we the people are far too concerned with the pantheon of threats provided to distract us, with American Idol and the Superbowl; with witch hunts and wars on Christmas.  We don’t remember what George did or said yesterday; the president says jump and we jump. He says hate and we hate. He does what he wants in defiance of law and we love him for protecting us.

To paraphrase Lincoln, we are in no danger of any foreign entity conquering us; we can only be conquered from within.  We are in far more danger from those who claim to protect us while breaking, twisting, misusing and bypassing the law for purposes of power and the accumulation of wealth.  George W. Bush and his band of villains constitute the greatest danger this country has faced in its 230 years of existence and if this be treason, hang me.

We're number 1

If it’s foreign, it’s faster – that’s been a virtual mantra for many years, ever since the emission controls of the early 70’s made it seem that big, powerful engines were a thing of the past and even worse – uncool. It must strike some of as amazing to consider that 1970 ended 35 years ago and I say that because the opinions one hears would make it seem like those three and a half decades never happened and that the ’72 Oldsmobile 88 still represented the height of American engineering.

People still look to driving machines that are “ultimate” and cars for which “there is no substitute” as the fastest and best handling and most reliable or even more vaguely: the most “high tech.” I’m always amused to listen to breathless advertising telling about the latest thing from Toyota that my Chevrolet had back in ’93 or the new, exciting thingie that was standard on the 1948 Tucker. People still think that small engines spinning at 60 jillion rpm are inherently more virtuous than one with more displacement and yet which are smaller, lighter, more fuel efficient, more powerful, reliable and cheaper, but it’s all about fashion and de gustibus non disputandem est. Besides, nobody knows how anything works any more and if Volkswagen tells us they’re made of Turbonium, we believe it.

Last week, General Motors’ fastest son, the Corvette C6-R won the G1 class at LeMans, beating the next entry, a far more expensive Aston Martin DBR9 by five laps. Number three was an old C5-R running as a private entry. This marks the 5th first place finish in 6 years since Corvette returned to international racing.


G1 is the class for the fastest, production based sports cars. One would think this would stop Porsche pilots from harassing Corvettes on the highway, or give pause to the Honda Civics with enormous wings and coffee can exhaust, but it does not. The power of fashion and the might of advertising are far stronger than fact.

Face it, we don’t make much here any more other than cars and airplanes and yet we have no pride in them. We’re convinced that Europeans in their Fiat Pandas and horrible little Ford Ka’s are having all the fun while we are not. Europeans in the know disagree. I’ve driven very prosaic American cars in Europe and the locals all but chase you down the street waving cash.

I met with the President of the Aston Martin Club of Belgium last week in Luxembourg and he told me that if Corvettes were available there without the lengthy wait and massive taxes, he would gladly trade. That’s quite an admission and it’s too bad we flag waving types can’t find anything worth buying or even being proud of that’s made in our own country. We may indeed be amoral, imperialist warmongers who can’t play soccer worth a damn, but sometimes – just sometimes, we’re number one.

A Swift Boat armada

Gerald Riviera, who embellishes himself with the more dramatic name of Geraldo Rivera, claims during the last 35 years, to have seen “a hell of a lot more combat than John Kerry.” While this no doubt delights the fatuous Foxheads of America, it annoys the hell out of everyone else, including me.

I suppose I could claim to have explored Greenland, since I flew over it at 39,000 feet last Friday and I certainly experienced the entire Battle of the Bulge by watching Band of Brothers on television, but then I’m capable of being embarrassed while Gerald is not. I’d rather not explore in detail a long career that makes Jerry Springer seem like Walter Cronkite by comparison, but we all remember how in recent years this cheap copy of Baron Munchausen claimed to be broadcasting from the scene of a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan which in actuality had occurred 300 miles away. We remember how he gleefully began to draw a map of US positions during the invasion of Iraq and yet somehow avoided being put against a wall and shot for it. He was however expelled from the country. True to form and quick to supply a lie, he called the expulsion “voluntary” and continued chattering from a luxury suite in Kuwait. I would imagine that such things are what Mr. Riviera calls “seeing combat.”

Loathsome as he may be, Gerry is only one snarling head of the thousand headed dog of the American Right. One could sever them by the hundreds but they would still hold fast to their victims and there would always be more to rend the truth and ravish everything decent and all to the unending delight of the Republican Party and the indecent trash who support them.

I Robot

The Observer tells us of a new breakthrough in robotics; a kind of cybernetic pied piper that can look like a leader to cockroaches, luring them out of their hiding places into the light where they can stomped, flattened, smashed and otherwise destroyed. It uses pheromones to trick the loathsome creatures into thinking it’s one of them, just as Republicans use the stink of money to lure those without it to their ruin; use the stink of patriotic rhetoric,  the stench of fear, bigotry and superstition to lead what once was arguably the greatest nation on Earth to it’s sad and sordid destruction.

What reek, what foul effluvium would it take to lure the miscreants of the Bush Administration from under their rocks and what kind of citizens would have the courage, the honesty, the patriotism to sweep away the vermin and start to rebuild something we could be proud of again?

No one will ever do that for us and I fear that  none of us will ever be able to undo the damage any more than we can bring back the wooly mammoth or the Roman Republic.  George Bush and the worms that feed on the carcass of America have more cockroaches than we can step on.  

You must remember this. . .

A number is just a number, as time goes by - unless of course it's your father or brother or daughter blown apart by a roadside bomb.

"You know, it's a number, and every time there's one of these 500-benchmarks, people want something" said Tony Snow. Imagine that - some people think that we have a Democracy here and have the nerve to think they can influence the Emperor.

And let's hear it for the troops, who as you know, volunteered to suffer " to try to ensure that the people of Iraq really do live in a free, effective democracy of their own creation and design." So dedicated are thy that they didn't even wait to hear that bogus excuse when they were told they were fighting to destroy a government that was only minutes away from nuking us.

If this were fiction, it wouldn't sell. Readers would not buy a story about a whole nation being that stupid, that gullible, that willing to submit to tyranny. An America so cowardly that nothing seems important other than to save our SUV's from the terrorists, whether it's liberty or democracy or even sanity.

I need a break. Ineed to get away from the madness and so Fogg will be offshore for a week. Until then, don't believe a damned thing they say.

Quacks like a duck?

Maybe it is a duck, but how much goose stepping does it need before anyone calls it a nazi? Our new, non-activist court might just have something under those robes that you don’t want to see – like shiny knee boots. Today they decided that on those rare occasions when the authorities have a search warrant, they can just kick down the door rather than knock, reasonable or not.

Although a concept of the natural rights of man is the cornerstone or our republic, that right no longer applies to a non-citizen who can for any reason and with no recourse or explanation be held indefinitely without right to council or hearing. A Federal Judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that Immigration law allows the boys in shiny boots to detain non-citizens on the basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation.

To put it bluntly, it would seem that now that the Republicans own the government, our natural rights as humans, our guaranteed rights under the constitution, the rights of a prisoner of war and in fact our rights under plain old notions of common decency are now only defined as what the party feels it expedient to allow you.

To put it more bluntly, the difference between our government and a fascist government is narrowing to the point of irrelevance and there is only one place to place the blame; on the cowardly, ignorant, superstitious, xenophobic and stupid American public. We, at the peak of our power and affluence and with momentum toward the goal of a fair, just and ethical society have thrown it away for a fable, a fatuous fear and an ape-like attraction to the alpha apes who now rule us. Due process is dead. The dream is lost.

I am here as the descendent of a hundred generations of people who knew when to get out, who could sense the periodic madness as dogs sense an impending hurricane. My only remaining question is – do I get out now, or do I force them to take my keyboard and my gun from my cold dead fingers?

New whine - old bottles

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

-T.S. Eliot-

George Bush’s new pose on Iraq seems to have the fools fooled again.  Always eager to look on the brighter side of life, the supporters of the occupation would like to make the question that of the half full Vs. half empty glass and sometimes have us looking at a cracked jelly jar full of dust while listening to someone call it a magnum of Clicquot.

Bush’s studied diminution of bravado is “. . .a display of candor that may help him to make up some of the ground he has lost with the American public by consistently pushing an overly optimistic line”  says an editorial in today’s Miami Herald ; happy to show us order and hope in chaos and hopelessness while trying to avoid the appearance of partisanship with a bit of faint damnation.  Was Bush’s quick trip to Baghdad a confidence builder as the Herald suggests, or was it an example of a con man dipping his big toe into shark-infested waters and declaring it just the place for a swim? Was it another cheap example of Bush trying to associate himself with an event by posing, as he did with New York firemen in 2001, while stonewalling any attempt to discuss the failures that allowed it to happen?

“The elimination of Zarqawi is an important milestone, but it does not turn the tide. It shows, though, that Iraq's enemies can be vanquished. Violence and despotism are not Iraq's inevitable destiny if Iraqis have the will to fight for a better future” says the Herald.

A skilled politician, like those who put words in Bush’s mouth, can use a true statement to make an unsubstantiated claim, to mislead and in this case to create unwarranted optimism.  The editorial neglects to point out that many and perhaps most of “Iraq’s enemies” are the people of Iraq and Iraq’s favorite sons.  It neglects that the Neocon crusade itself inflicted Zarqawi and al Qaeds upon Iraq in the first place. It neglects to mention that many Iraqi’s vision of a better future is despotism and they have a will to fight for it. It neglects to mention the difficulty of overturning a culture and its mores and its animosities and its visions and replacing it with a culture that has been seen as the enemy for over a thousand years.

For those of us who read identically fatuous articles about the doomed occupation of Viet Nam 40 years ago, the amnesiac gullibility of the nation today is frustrating, heartbreaking and infuriating.  I cannot say with certainty that there is absolutely no hope for Iraq, but I can say as I said then during the many years of the horror in Southeast Asia, that continuing the same thing that isn’t working and to appeal to patriotism and hope using fallacy and fraud will result in failure.  We did not win the “hearts and minds” of Viet Nam by devastating their country, propping up crooked government and slaughtering their women and children, and we will not remake Iraq in our image by doing the same thing.

Lower ego emissions

Does anyone still wonder about the nature of the man who occupies the most dangerous throne on Earth? We see him mock, sneer, shrug and make cynical dismissive comments every day designed to remind us that he's the man and we are not.

Volkswagen has been running a series of TV commercials implying that if one has something better than a VW, it's because of some egotistical hypertrophy, some overcompensated for inadequacy or other dire character defect. Of course that's snobbery in reverse, allowing the "can't-afford-its" to feel superior to the people who, for a great variety of reasons, don't drive a Passat. Indeed, there is no lack of conspicuous consumption involved in choosing a car, but in many if not most cases a fast car is just a fast car. I think I see a lot more aggression from econo-box drivers than Bentley Pilots, but that's just my opinion.

Sometimes an arrogant, dismissive twit is just a twit, even if he is a President. Sometimes he's also a dangerous man trying to seek revenge for the myriad offenses and humiliations he has received from smarter and better people all his life. George sneers first and asks question later - if he asks them at all. Witness the incident reported in Raw Story today where cocky little George attempts to embarrass journalist Peter Wallsten at White House Rose Garden by remarking on his sunglasses repeatedly, trying to get a laugh. George "bring 'em on" Bush stresses "for the viewers" that there is no sun.

"I guess it depends on your perspective" replied the immensly cool Wallsten, who of course wears dark glasses because he is blind.

Whatever he drives or rides is driven around in, George Bush is not the kind of guy I want to share a road with, or a country. I have more respect for the 18 year old brat in the 1992 Honda Civic with the J.C. Whitney wing bolted on the back who tries to race me at every stop light, than I do for this pathetic, overgrown, insecure adolescent who has the world by the throat.