It Polls For Thee

Of all George Bush’s many hobbies (such as pretending, hoping, praying, believing, and decidering being just a few) his most favoritest is ignoring—his dad, responsibility, reason, the Constitution and of course, polls.

And well he should as his approval rating in the US has lately been no higher than 30%.

Let me put it this way: If ten randomly selected Americans got on a plane piloted by George Bush, seven of them would rush the cockpit.

Well, now there’s a new poll for Bush to ignore.

Every year a survey of six Arab countries is conducted in which the respondents are asked this simple question: Who do you dislike the most? The respondents aren’t given a list of likely people they’d dislike but are free to choose absolutely anyone.

And the winner is…

George Dubya Bush!

The award invariably goes to whoever is the Israeli Prime Minister but this year for the first time ever an American president has received this distinction! (In fact Bush got more votes than Ehmud Olmert and ex-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon combined--kudos to the comatose Sharon for such a strong showing!).

Congratulations, George! All that freedomating and democratizing finally paid-off!

The mystery prize package will be addressed to you, George W. Bush, but when you hear the doorbell ring don’t bother to get up, don’t ask for whom the bell tolls—the American people will get it.

RIght-Wing 'Comedy' Kills Me!

Over at the very estimable Red Tory blog a lengthy discussion ensued as to the amusement-ocity or some-such of right-wing 'comedians'.
Red Tory and about 50 commenters all posited that right-wing politics and humor are about as compatible as fried eggs and the floor.

But long-time (yet plucky) Red Tory heckler 'Biff' countered that there was at least one (well, only one...) right-wing comedian to counter the thousands of lefty comedians—none other than Dennis Miller who Biff thinks is “very, very funny.”

Whilst I was impressed that Biff didn’t also offer up self-appointed-comedians-when-they-risk-hate-speech-lawsuits Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, I couldn’t agree less with Biff.
Dennis Miller is the Hillary Clinton of right-wing comedy—both Miller and Clinton are the only names everyone recognizes but only half of everyone actually likes.

Nonetheless the right-wing does in fact have a pantheon of brilliant humorists who, like the jazziest of jazz musicians, are really only appreciated by those who listen beyond what sounds like random noise and in the discordant melee of invented musical notes, find elements of fundamental truthinessand thus joy.

Without a doubt the Miles Davis’s and Stockhausen’s of right-wing fundamental funsters are of course Bill O'Reilly, John Gibson and Neil Cavuto of Rupert Murdoch's Fair and Balanced Circus.

I’ll report their latest comedic stylings, and let you decide:

From Bill O’Reilly--(the Jack Benny of Fox, master of the deadpan delivery)

"For my money, pardon the pun, capitalism is a good thing. It gives opportunity to people like me who started with zero money to work our way up…Republicans generally believe you should work for what you get and not take other people's money."

From John Gibson--(Fox's Jerry Seinfield; just two shallow observations can be turned into an entire episode of comedic gold):

"I like ‘Big Oil’-company profits because I think every American should have the opportunity to buy shares in a hugely profitable enterprise, as the oil companies have demonstrated they are."

From Neil Cavuto--Fox News'..umm…Tony Danza? Or maybe Beaver Cleaver? (OMG I just realized how hilarious that name is for an 8-year old boy!)

"Two years. It's a long time. But to most in the media, it's a waste of time. Too little to get too much done—so he's [Bush] done. I don't know about you, but two years is a pretty long time to me.
That's about two-thirds of JFK's entire presidency. That's two Thanksgivings. Two Christmases. Two New Years. Two years from now we'll be two years older than we are now. A lot can happen in that time. Look what's happened in the last two years. Two years ago Pope John Paul II was alive. So was Terri Schiavo — remember her?"

Dennis Miller isn't even fit to be smeared by these comedic geniuses. And why? Because Dennis Miller tries to be ironic whereas O'Reilly, Cavuto and Gibson were born ironic! ( And they don't do "blue" material!)

Funny?!! Funny like looking for non-existent WMD's under your desk!

And that’s just Common Sense, My Word and today’s Most Ridiculous Item.

More Dirt!

Hillary to Donors: “No Money to Anyone Else” is the title of a new “article” on The Huffington Post.

Hillary Clinton is personally putting out the word that she has no intention of sharing the wealth: "She's calling all the big-hitter fundraisers and saying, 'I want you to understand: NO money to anybody else. You cannot play both sides of the street,'" in the '08 presidential race, says a longtime Democratic operative who has worked for the Clintons in the past but turned down a role in the current campaign, and is so far sitting this one out.
And what's the reaction been? "People don't like it, but they're afraid of her." Yet the far more palpable fear for Democrats, discussed constantly, is that she'll have so much money she'll sail to the nomination.

There is no verifiable attribution to this 'report". Both 'quotes' are paraphrases from an anonymous source. Democrats are really afraid of Hillary Clinton! (if Democrats are afraid, imagine how shit-scared Republicans ought to be!).

Who is this “longtime Democratic operative who has worked for the Clintons in the past but turned down a role in the current campaign, and is so far sitting this one out”? We aren’t told. Maybe it’s the author or the source who are scared.

And how is this source who isn’t involved in the campaign, privy to Hillary’s (or her staff’s) calls to major contributors?
Why is this person “sitting this one out”, when Hillary already has a huge campaign chest and the Democratic Party is favored over the Republicans; where win or lose this well-connected person could still make a useful living from working on the campaign?

It is impressive how this story fits the Obama Madrassa/Hillary Political-Hardball sham; anonymous author, anonymous source "close to Clinton", NO evidence and Clinton painted as a manipulative calculating ambitious bitch.

And then there is this NewsMax post, from September 21, 2003:

Dick Morris: Hillary Discourages Donors to Other Dems

"U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton is actively discouraging potential donors from contributing to any of the announced Democrat presidential candidates, so they'll have political cash on hand if she decides to run next year.
So says Dick Morris, who pointed to a meeting two weeks ago between Bill and Hillary Clinton and 150 party fat cats held at the former first couple's mansion in Chappaqua, N.Y."

Dick Morris worked for Bill Clinton on his 1996 re-election campaign but resigned on the day Bill Clinton accepted the Democratic presidential nomination due to Morris’s extra-marital affair with prostitute Sherry Rowlands. The vast majority of his political consulting work had been for Republican governorship candidates, but since the Rowlands affair he has not actively consulted US politicians.
He has however made a partial career as a Hillary Clinton critic in the print press and as a frequent pundit for FOX News where the vast majority of his insights and predictions about Hillary Clinton’s political career have so far proven to be wrong.

The anonymous Huffpo piece may not actually be Dick Morris's work--after all he's been publicly gunning for Hillary for years now--but any like-minded person can plagiarize him for their own coincednetal poltical purpose.
Crtiticism and dissent ought to be based on reasoned and substantiated argument, not unexamined rumor and emotional manipulation. But these days "debate" is not chaired by a disinterested obudsman but by partisans where unsubstantiated utterances are not only given the same consideration as carefully developed arguments but are actually promoted with zealous deference.

This story might actually be true, but if so it should be able to stand the test of open debate and disclosure. Truth is defined by the tests of disagreement, lies are revealed by them. But until the champion of this story stands up to be tested, it remains only a story a particle of the common soil, deserving of disinterested until its quality is revealed and houses might be built from it.

But thus far this looks like dirt to me, not clay.

Dirty Politics, Dirty Pundits and the Dirty Press

“The first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race illustrated how easily dubious information can spread” writes New York Times journalist David D. Kirkpatrick in his article Feeding Frenzy for a Big Story, Even if It’s False in which he follows the progress of an anonymously-sourced and anonymously written political story that major news outlets deemed worthy of 11 days of serious coverage.

The original story was posted at InsightMag.com on January 17th 2007 with this lede: .

"Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?
This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama. "

But as Kirkpatrick notes not even the gossipy and often standards-free Drudge Report that frequently links to Insight paid any attention to the story.

“So, as usual, (empahasis added) [Kuhner] e-mailed the article to producers at Fox News and MSNBC” whereupon it then got the exposure Kuhner seemed to think it needed on TV, in the print press and on radio

CNN and ABC, already publicizing the story. felt obliged to confirm it given its obvious lack of provenance. On the 22nd of January John Vause of CNN reported from the “maddrassa” that it was in fact and always had been a secular school.
ABC reporters checked with Obama’s political strategist David Axelrod who instead of exploiting the article’s claim by simply saying that it ‘might be possible’ instead said he "did not believe ... for a second" the story's claim against the Clinton camp.

With the “maddrassa” assertion proven false and the Clinton ‘attack by proxy’ unfounded the only source left was Insight’s editor Jeffrey T. Kuhner. But he refused to even name the author and offered nothing to substantiate the story other than to say:

“CNN's claim that Obama attended a multi-confessional, secular public school needs verification by other news outlets -- such as FOX News -- who will look the facts straight on, without a vested ideological interest in downplaying Obama's Muslim heritage.”

At this point much of the media began to distance themselves from the story and thus also neatly ignored their own roles in peddling it. David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times however went searching for the story behind the story—and then studiously ignored his own research.

“In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kuhner, 37, said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign (emphasis added), to be “solid as solid can be.” But he declined to say whether he had learned the identity of his reporter’s sources, and so perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions” writes Kirkpatrick.

So the story wasn’t investigative journalism; it was an unsubstantiated opinion piece with a political purpose. So what does Kirkpatrick conclude?

“And at the start of a campaign with perhaps a dozen candidates hiring “research directors” to examine one another, the Insight episode may be a sign of what is to come.”

Oddly enough FOX hack John Gibson arrived at a similar though more specific and partisan conclusion on January 22nd –a week before Kirkpatrick’s article:

"Saying Obama attended a madrassa is tying Obama's name to terrorism. And that, my friends, is real political hardball in action…Are Hillary's fingerprints on the story? Doesn't seem so because they can deny these stories with a straight face…My point is simply this: The senator from Illinois is going to get a baptism by fire if he thinks he's going to challenge Hillary Clinton for the nomination."

Gibson properly identifies one function of the fake report (to smear Obama) and perpetuates the second function (to smear Clinton) by strongly implying that Clinton will probably engage in such tactics (the tertiary smear of Democrats overall is thus a 'given') .

Gibson actually gives the game away, and what is Kirkpatrick’s revelation?

Not that a right-wing hack of record pushed a propaganda piece onto biased media outlets that ignored professional standards and willingly turned it into national “news”, but that campaign staff in general may increasingly use websites as a back-channel for political dirty tricks!

The facts are that Kuhner could count on FOX to give the story legs and could count on its rival MSNBC to put competition before professionalism. Others followed suit, giving the lies relevance through mere repetition.
And yet even Kirkpatrick (who bothered to apply some professional diligence) misses the real story—which is that right-wing operatives (not left-wing) employed these “dirty tricks” and will continue to do so because they will invariably be abetted by the pseudo-journalists and ignorant pundits that infect today’s MSM--and neither will be held to account.

Of course there will be more to come but it will likely be mostly from the Republicans and the right-wing who have the greatest motivation and the greatest means, thanks to the MSM (this event is just the latest in a long line) that will be sure promote each and every smear the right generates

To quote Mr Kirkpatrick, “as usual”.

Active Denial System. A Military Metaphor

To perfectly complement the political ‘active denial system’ that Bush and the neocons have been using lo these many years, the US military this week publicly demonstrated its own high-tech hardware-based Active Denial System.

The military ADS focuses skin-penetrating millimeter waves that make a person up to five-hundred yards away feel like they are being cooked.

The whole idea is to disperse gatherings of people who might not like you without charging them down on horseback with drawn sabers or pelting them with rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannon, regular bullets or cluster-bombs.

The director of the ADS development program, Marine Colonel Kirk Hymes thinks that “non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in”.

Given that the Marines are mostly operating in Iraq and that the ADS won’t be deployed until 2010 (5 years later than originally promised), I can only assume the Colonel anticipates a re-run of the 2006 mid-term elections.

When news of the ADS first surfaced, various civil-rights groups expressed concern that it might be used domestically against peaceful demonstrators to quell political dissent—but of course that would require some kind of fascist sensibility of the government and administration to happen, wouldn’t it? And that’s not what the ADS system is for--says the military.

Instead it is intended to protect our troops from crowds of foreign civilians that may or may not be plotting against our soldiers to prevent them from accomplishing their mission without resorting to lethal means, which is where the real benefit lies--says the military.

After all, what civilian wouldn’t be grateful for being zapped with microwaves rather than being shot or blown up? What soldier wouldn’t be grateful for not having to shoot someone he or she is not certain isn’t actually a civilian? And what politician wouldn’t prefer that a soldier sent into a foreign country to liberate its citizens and establish democracy inflict only momentary pain and discomfort on liberated citizens from 500 yards rather than kill them all and sort everything out later, lest ‘freedom’ prove to be messier than anticipated?

To illustrate how this system would work let us imagine a scenario:

Real US troops have overthrown an evil dictator ‘Sodom’ in the imaginary country of Mesopotaminarnia.

Despite having been greeted with sweets and flowers, the old dictator’s minions plot to repel the noble US forces who have just established sweet, sweet democracy. So the die-hards exploit the new democratic principles they’ve been given and organize a protest march.

The participants proceed to the nearest contingent of the new democratic authority, the US Army, to present their demands and grievances.
The US Army, having been subjected to random attacks from an informal collection of ‘Sodomites’ and with limited communication between the soldiers and the civilians, will be obliged to assume that the protest is just a tactic of the insurgents and might have to resort to lethal response.
However, with the new ADS they could simply ‘zap’ the crowd before they got too close and thus preserve democracy and freedom without killing anyone in the process by persuading them not to assemble or petition authority through the scientific magic of focused millimeter waves!

Now let us imagine a real scenario for Colonel Kirk Hymes to ponder:

Several hundred clearly unfriendly locals converge and march towards a US military enclave in an urban area. The US military can’t tell the agitators from the ordinary civilians, but the threat to their authority is clear—the civilians are challenging US military authority. Rather than using deadly force to repel the perceived threat they employ the ADS and dissuade the mob from proceeding.

As an ADS unit is directed against the mob, it begins to disperse. But as the ADS is a Humvee with a 5-foot square vertical slab on top and requires “line of sight” deployment it’s pretty easy to spot. So whilst the $350,000(?) ADS is being concentrated on the mob an auxiliary in a nearby building or a car (that the ADS beam can’t penetrate and isn’t focused-on anyway) can destroy it with an $1,000 RPG or just disable it with a $15 clip of 7.62 mm AK-47 ammo fired at its beam-focusing array.

One Iraq-based soldier said his base was often approached by Iraqis that he suspected were actually reconnoitering in preparation for a future attack and that the ADS would be useful to prevent that sort of thing.

Well, soldier, if that guy approaching your base might be “the enemy” on a recce, why don’t you just fire an 18-cent warning shot instead of waiting 3 years until you can warn him away with a half-million dollar microwave? Or you could kill him, just to be on the safe side—it’s not like you’ll go to jail for it.

According to Global Security the ADS cost $40 million to develop and I can only assume the unit cost would fall somewhere in the $100,000 to $250,000 range (not including the Humvee and assuming KBR isn’t providing it).
Also ADS was commissioned to provide non-lethal troop protection against small-arms fire which is universally reckoned at 1000 yards—the ADS range is actually only half that. Oh, and it has to be a nice day to be effective too. One other thing; apparently the military hasn’t tested it against anyone using a dustbin lid as a shield .

The beam apparently takes 1-2 seconds to have its complete effect (supposedly without residual harm), and the pain disappears immediately when out of the beam (assuming the military isn’t lying about this).

I’ve found nothing yet on the focus area of the beam which would indicate how many individuals might be targeted at one time, so how big and how spread-out would the hypothetical mob have to be before a single ADS unit would be overwhelmed by the “threat” and the troops have to resort to tear gas or ;ethal force?

The whole supposition of this system is that if an unarmed coordinated mob of a specific size approaches an armed group of soldiers along a direct and restricted path and in plain view then the soldiers can disperse them with the ADS instead of killing them.

As a general rule that kind of activity doesn’t take place in the middle of an internal shooting war, nor when a foreign military occupation serves as the ultimate authority over civic life—because who the hell is going to march in the streets en-masse when just going shopping can get you killed, and who is going to protest en-masse against armed foreign soldiers without the support of an effective civil-rights infrastructure to protect them?

The only circumstance in which ADS can be optimally employed is when civilians engage in urban organized public protest where and when they can have the confidence and the right to do so granted by civil authority, without the potential of significant bodily harm.

Though ADS may well have been sincerely developed as a combat weapon, it is essentially useless in that regard. As a civilian control weapon it holds much more promise.

When you spend tens of millions of dollars on something you thought was a neat idea only to find out it is crap (which if you’d actually thought about it you would have realized long ago), the choice is either to abandon your efforts or re-apply them and that’s much easier to do when the money spent wasn’t your own and the people who approved of your idea are as stupid as you are. Ergo instead of acknowledging your idiotic and wasteful mistake you simply move the goalposts, re-task the project and thereby negate your incompetence. Rinse and repeat.

A public majority has finally challenged the conceptual and civil 'active denial system' of Bush and the Republicans but the system remains and continues to be deployed.

By the same token the physical, military Active Denial System also remains and is intended to be deployed.
Both systems are useless to the public and to the military. Dismantling the political 'active denial system' will take years, but dismantling the ADS need only take days.

All the research conducted could conceivably be redirected to medical and industrial applications that might provide social benefits, given some careful consideration and critical informed imagination.

But that’s never been the hallmark of Bush’s administration, nor the military that has been once again but perhaps more significantly than ever suborned to political rather than military objectives.

The military Active Denial System is a perfect physical complement to the philosophical and “intellectual” political and cynically pragmatic 'active denial system' of the entrenched Republican Party and its current titular chief, President Bush.

Both systems depend on denial of practical reality and sound reason to exist and flourish; the political system succeeded for a time precisely because of denial but though it has finally been proven to be a failure it has yet to be fully excised.

The military Active Denial System is also literally built around denial as I think I’ve already illustrated and it too can be disproved but without ever having to be applied in the real world.

It cannot serve its stated military purpose and its only other possible function is to serve a political purpose—to suppress organized political dissent by the very people who have paid for the system with their tax dollars and will pay a much heavier price should the ADS be allowed to flourish.

As it did with the politicians in the mid term elections the public can and should employ its own active denial system and stop further development and deployment of the ADS--not because of its ironic symbolism but becuase it is an insiduous device and a complete waste of money.

State of the Union 2007

On September 20th 2001 George Bush addressed the Congress and the nation thusly:

In the normal course of events, Presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the Union.

Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people.

I doubt he’ll use that line this time, what with election results and his approval ratings and all.

In this speech the least hardest-working President in politics revealed his and the nation’s future:

Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated…we will direct every resource at our command…to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

But rather than draw a comparison to WW II as he and his cohorts have done subsequently, Bush drew on a more recent and more limited example of war;

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion

Indeed, why would the Global War on Terror be like the regional Gulf War? As the public majority has known for at least two years Bush’s declared “global war” was already focused primarily on the territory of Iraq (even before the invasion of Afghanistan) and the swift conclusion of Iraq's ‘liberation’.

But at this time even the best-informed skeptics couldn’t know the true import of this single remark.

Bush, the Republicans and a conservative cabal chose to use the most impressive “irregular” attack in history to launch a war of aggression using the world’s most powerful military against a weak but oil-rich country under false pretenses to satisfy their egos, their bank accounts and their lust for power over America and the world by exploiting like-minded supporters and bullying dissenters; bending all government resources not to preserve and promote freedom for all but to destroy it for all, save for a privileged few.

It is this powerful minority that has chosen to define America in the 21st Century not by the principles of its constitution and its Bill of Rights; not by self-evident truths, nor government of, by and for the people but by a war of aggression and the illegal occupation of a single country, Iraq, for the interests of a self-righteous, self-important and self-serving few.

But in 2007 a majority in America now holds these truths to be self-evident:

"That whenever any Form of Government become destructive to these ends it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it…But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

In 2007 absolute "Tyranny over these States" is not being impressed by a King of Great Britain, but by a King in our capitol, George Bush, propped on his throne by legions of courtiers.

The real State of the Union is much as it was at the moment of its inception, and as insurmountable as the power and rule of government appears to be today, it appeared so then when England ruled.

It is not a King nor a single misbegotten adventure that defines the state of a nation, nor the President that defines the State of the Union—it is We, The People.
Just as the Colonies warned the King, so the November elections warned the President—change your policies or we will make our own. Govern according to our needs or we will govern ourselves.

According to the latest Newsweek poll 68% oppose Bush’s escalation of troop deployments to Iraq, his personal approval rating is it 31%, on Iraq is just 32%, and not forgetting the post- election exit polls that showed the majority's major policy concerns were inversely proportional to Republican political priorities.

So after six year’s of exclusively Republican rule Bush and his cohorts have largely united this nation not behind them but against them. Whatever verbal concessions Bush might make about “mistakes” in his 2007 address, the people have spoken and continue to speak against his policies and his party’s rule.

The State of the Union is a shambles (to put it kindly) not through circumstance but precisely because of his and his Party’s direct ‘governance’.

If there is any reason to listen to Bush’s State of the Union address at this juncture it is not to search for hope in his singular American vision but to confirm once and for all the hope in our collective vision for a united nation, a truly United States of America.

As Bush famously said in his speech that September of 2001, “You’re either with us or against us”.

President Bush has been against ‘us’ for six years now, and now the majority is against him, personally and politically. The only meaningful acknowledgement of that fact would be if he were to announce his resignation.

In essence that is the real State of the Union.

Rudy Can Run, But Can He Hide?

Will Rudy run?

He hasn’t said no and he hasn’t said yes, but what he’s been saying lately sounds a lot like presidential posturing to me.

Following Bush’s escalation speech Sean Hannity asked Rudy one of his trademark stupid questions: “Has any war ever gone perfectly?” to which Rudy offered an even more stupid reply.

GIULIANI: ... I mean, you could have made those same comments at some point mid-way through the Civil War, the Second World War or the Battle of the Bulge, which was one of our great intelligence failures in the history of our country

Of course, the US Civil war wasn’t a result of Arabs invading America to steal millions of barrels of sweet, sweet whiskey: A handful of disaffected Shinto priests didn’t persuade a bunch of German Wodin-worshippers to attack the US at Pearl Harbor (or vice-versa) either. And the Battle of the Bulge was just a battle that resulted from a lack of intelligence, not the fabrication of intelligence.

But Rudy wasn’t on the show to provide a reasoned analysis; he was there to establish his bona fides as a hard-core Republican and to sound presidential:

“The new strategy will be a sufficient number of soldiers and troops, mostly Iraqi but also American, to hold areas”

“And whether Iraq turns out successfully, which we all should hope does turn out successfully, or it doesn't, we're still going to be at war because they're at war with us.”

“I wish there'd be more really sincere bipartisan support surrounding something as important as this, as getting it right in Iraq, because if you don't, the terrorists win.”

"I think it was only a month ago that many of these Democrats were talking about increasing the number of troops in Iraq...

"Americans are uncomfortable with the way things have gone. I think most Americans --- you can't speak for all Americans. Americans -- you know, we're a democracy. We have vastly different views."

"I think this strategy, which is a strategy that really comes out of a great deal of analysis and a great deal of thought, gives us a chance to accomplish that."

Sounds a lot like Bush, doesn’t it? Exactly like Bush actually; ergo Giuliani = Bush. But just before Rudy’s identity completed disappeared Hannity came to the rescue:

HANNITY: Your analogy of you battling the crime and the drugs and the prostitution in New York -- you had a low approval rating, but you stood firm.
GIULIANI: Yes, and...
HANNITY: You think in the prism of history, that George Bush...
GIULIANI: And the key...
HANNITY: ... will be viewed favorably?
GIULIANI: And the key was to analyze these areas correctly, have the right number of police. If I had kept the police department at a lower level of policing, we never could have accomplished that. And if I didn't have a COMSTAT program to analyze what we were doing, we never would have been successful.

So it looks like Giuliani will talk like Bush to appear presidential, praise him to appear solidly Republican and then leverage his much vaunted success in reducing New York’s crime rate to differentiate his candidacy. No doubt he is saving his trump card, 9/11, for later in the game.

Plenty of right-wing pundits think Giuliani would be a great GOP candidate, even though James Dobson has rejected Rudy already for his sins of being pro-choice, pro gay civil unions, and adultery, because he’s apparently regarded as moderate (according to a recent Rasmussen poll) and as we know “moderates” are supposedly all the rage these days.

In fact Giuliani is as extreme a self-serving hypocrite as any in the GOP and its base.

He lied about his management of Police and Fire coordination on September 11th .

He lied along with Christie Whitman about the health-hazards at Ground Zero.

He lied in the most nauseating fashion possible when at the 2004 RNC he claimed that his first thought when the towers were struck was “Thank God George Bush is our President!”

He’s made millions out of 9-11 by “consulting” and selling security equipment and services to corporations and government agencies along with his criminal business partner Bernie Kerik.

Once upon a time Giuliani was an effective prosecutor and a competent mayor. But just like Bush he decided to exploit 9-11 to the hilt, and to use the GOP to suit his own ambitions.

So let him run. Let him ride Bush’s coattails and exploit 9-11 for political gain if he can. That well hasn’t run dry, it’s been poisoned. And the fact that that is precisely his strategy suggests he’s almost deluded as George Bush. The public doesn’t want another George Bush.

See Rudy run. Run, Rudy run. Lose, Rudy lose.

It just might be the best thing he could do for this country

New Way Forward! Now with more ZAZ!

So George Bush stayed up past his bed-time to tell us all how re-invading Iraq will protect America even more from pissed-off Arabs.

Why, you may ask, do we need a new strategy? After all, since we invaded no Iraqi terrorists have flown airplanes into our buildings! Doesn’t that fact prove the President’s pre-election statement that we were winning in Iraq?
Of course it does; or rather it did.

But the President also said that part of his winning strategy was to listen to his generals and adapt to the situation on the ground, and the situation has changed!
Just as the President and Vice President warned us all, if the Democrats gained the House in November it would embolden the terrorists.
Sure enough as soon as the elections were over and the Democrats won, America lost. The generals began to speak out about increased violence and Negroponte stated explicitly before Congress that the US was no longer winning in Iraq.

Could this have been coincidence? Of course not—George Bush had exactly predicted it! So when the Democrats started to call for a withdrawal of troops, our President had to come up with a new plan for not just victory, but more victory!

A new plan for victory would have to be in diametric (that means opposite) opposition (that means opposite as well-- so really it’s double-opposite which doesn’t mean the opposite of opposite which would mean….well…double-opposite means more opposite, okay?) to anything the Democrats were proposing.
So as the Democrats were calling for un-winning the war by un-invading Iraq it’s obvious to even the most colossally stupid idiot in the world that to defeat the Democrats and their terrorist supporters George Bush would have to re-invade Iraq—and that’s what he’s decided to do.

But, you ask, how is re-invading Iraq really any different from the original invasion except that we’ll be doing it with even less troops?

Well to take a cue from Karl Rove’s famous marketing analogy that “you don’t introduce new products in August” you also don’t advertise to the consumer all the benefits of your product all at once.
Either the product is ‘New and Improved!’ or “Now with power of Formula X that kills 99% of all suspected terrorists!” or “10% MORE!”

In this case “New and Improved Victory” has “10% LESS!” and then you wait until sales start dropping before announcing “Now with power of Formula-X that kills 99% of all suspected terrorists!”
And if that doesn’t keep your sales going, you can always repackage the old product with a new name, like perhaps ‘Iran-B-Gone!’ It Smells like Victory but with Twice the Killing Power!

Mad King George

(Note: For the past month I totally forgot how to log in post-beta which also buggered up my attempts to comment at other's blogs. All fixed now).

If George Bush insists on increasing troop levels in Iraq by 20,000-30,000 when the Army is telling him they only have 9,000 available and when the Joint Chiefs, the Congress, the American public, the Iraqi public and the US troops themselves all object (for very good reasons) I think we can safely conclude that our President is certifiably insane, that he is a danger to everyone and is unfit for office.

Iraq Study Group Report--Grade: WTF?

It took the Iraq Study group nine-months to compile their report and the main stream media five minutes to sum it all up for the ignorant masses:

“Realists declare Iraq a mess!---Bush’s strategy isn’t working!---The troops can come home in 2008!---Lindsay Lohan is out of control!—Funniest Christmas Home Videos Available Now on DVD!”

It seems Bush hasn’t actually read it; he’s waiting for additional reports which he will then decide not to read all at once before deciding to do nothing until say, January 2008.
Not that the ISG Report shouldn’t be ignored; it is after all nothing more than a political tract garnished with a few statistics and bound together with idiotic suppositions and ludicrous “recommendations”.
Having actually read and then mulled-over the ISG report I offer this summary (which falls far short of the report's actual craptacular inadequacy and sheer poltroonosity, but neither you nor I have all day to really get into it).

ISG SUMMARY

The ISG recommends that the US military should stay in Iraq, put more effort into a training program that is beyond repair to save the country, democracy and freedom and in the meanwhile use their spare time to kill “insurgents” who ipso facto aren’t Iraqi citizens as well but just a bunch of fucking fuckers .
The non-insurgent Iraqis need to stop relying on fucking awesome US expertise and generosity, pull their fucking socks up and get fucking real.
All the countries that were castigated and threatened by the US over the past five years need to get their fucking act together and follow US orders on how to polish the giant steaming turd that Uncle Sam dumped on the porch and then accept whatever tip they get afterwards without whining.
The American public should shut the fuck up because they were the idiots who wanted to go into Iraq in the first place.
The Iraqi public should shut the fuck up because their "government" hasn’t asked the US to leave and even if they do the US won’t leave until their “interests” have been taken care-of and until they’re damn good-and-ready.
And then the Iraqis can have all the fucked-up and radio-fucking-active military equipment that no longer works to defend themselves and their utopian US-supplied democracy.

Once all that’s accomplished our brave and noble troops can finally leave Iraq—for Afghanistan where the situation is grave and deteriorating as militias are running rampant killing innocent civilians, sabotaging reconstruction efforts, undermining the authority of the government and giving safe-haven to terrorists planning attack the United States and freedom-loving democracies everywhere!

The bottom line is this: despite its ballyhooed criticisms of the Bush/Neocon adventure in Iraq the ISG report is nothing more than a cut–and-paste collection of hackneyed theory, spurious assumption, puerile analysis and remnants of neocon fantasy that allows the Bush administration to tread water for the next two years until Dubya inherits the immunities afforded all ex-Presidents.
During that time likely another one thousand US troops will die serving a pointless and irredeemable cause as will thousands more Iraqi civilians trapped in the consequences of US warmongering, political arrogance and ignorance, beyond the help of any sympathetic American soldier or Marine not too busy trying to save their own lives.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill; “Never in the field of human conflict have so few fucked-up so much for so many”. To expect the fuck-ups to abandon their entrenched fuck-uppery and thus un-fuck-up their fuck-up is about as fucked-up as you can get.
There is no “single solution” to the Iraq problem, but there is a course of action obvious to all except the fuck-ups still searching for some benefit from this mother of all fuck-ups, and that is to get the fuck out! Sure, it’s not perfect but really, what the fuck?