Iraq War worsens terror threat, part II

WaPo weighs in on the National Intelligence Estimate I posted previously:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

[...]

"Together with our coalition partners," Bush said in an address earlier this month to the Military Officers Association of America, "we've removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in America and other nations, and stopped new attacks before they're carried out. We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

But the battlefronts intelligence analysts depict are far more impenetrable and difficult, if not impossible, to combat with the standard tools of warfare.

Although intelligence officials agree that the United States has seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its ability to plan and direct major operations, radical Islamic networks have spread and decentralized.

Many of the new cells, the NIE concludes, have no connection to any central structure and arose independently. The members of the cells communicate only among themselves and derive their inspiration, ideology and tactics from the more than 5,000 radical Islamic Web sites. They spread the message that the Iraq war is a Western attempt to conquer Islam by first occupying Iraq and establishing a permanent presence in the Middle East.

[...]

The latest terrorism assessment paints a portrait of a global war in which Iraq is less the central front of actual combat than a unifying battle cry for disparate extremist groups and even individuals. "It is just those kinetic actions that lead to the radicalization of others," a senior counterterrorism official said earlier this summer. "Surgical strikes? Nothing is surgical about military operations. They tend to have impacts, affects."

That description contrasts with Bush's emphasis this month on offensive military action in Iraq and elsewhere as the United States' principal road to victory in the global war.

"Many Americans . . . ask the same question five years after 9/11," he said in a speech in Atlanta earlier this month. "The answer is yes. America is safer. We are safer because we have taken action to protect the homeland. We are safer because we are on the offensive against our enemies overseas. We're safer because of the skill and sacrifice of the brave Americans who defend our people."

But "a really big hole" in the U.S. strategy, a second counterterrorism official said, "is that we focus on the terrorists and very little on how they are created. If you looked at all the resources of the U.S. government, we spent 85, 90 percent on current terrorists, not on how people are radicalized."

Republicans only know how to blow things up. They don't do nuance. The right-wing would characterize that "really big hole" in strategy as appeasing the terrorists. Fools don't know how to make peace. Heck, they don't know how to protect America so why listen to the GOP spiel. Bush says, "America is safer." A question for George: Where do you stash your booze? Happy talk comes from something and it isn't reality.

Iraq War worsens terror threat

I've written before that the Iraq War has worsened terrorism when 87% of the Terrorism Index' bipartisan experts said the war had hurt our national security, not alleviated it despite the misleading edicts of crazy King FUBAR and the propaganda of the GOP.

The Sunday NYTimes confirms the harsh reality with a new National Intelligence Estimate:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

[...]

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

[...]

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

[...]

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

[...]

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

[...]

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

[...]

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

Republicans sure know how to lie about and exaggerate their national security expertise. I agree with Glenn that this report alone ought to dictate the outcome of the election:

If I were shaping the Democrats' election strategy, I would create a television commercial where someone reads the [first] four paragraphs -- from a new report in the NYT today -- and then I would air it over and over and over every single day as much as possible until November 7.

Let me repeat the crux of the NIE report in the NYTimes...

The overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.

The Bush Doctrine has spread terrorism, not diminished the threat.

America, land of the torturers

A detail from The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel,
c. 1562, oil on panel, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Behold the evil of our morally-vacant Congress, the detainee compromise bill (with emphasis):

The compromise reached on Thursday between Congressional Republicans and the White House on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects is, legal experts said yesterday, a series of interlocking paradoxes.

It would impose new legal standards that it forbids the courts to enforce.

It would guarantee terrorist masterminds charged with war crimes an array of procedural protections. But it would bar hundreds of minor figures and people who say they are innocent bystanders from access to the courts to challenge their potentially lifelong detentions.

And while there is substantial disagreement about just which harsh interrogation techniques the compromise would prohibit, there is no dispute that it would allow military prosecutors to use statements that had been obtained under harsh techniques that are now banned.

Tristero calls the detainee compromise bill the USA Mengele Act and for good reason:

...because it empowers modern-day American psychopaths to do their worst and pass it off as just trying to do their best for their homeland. Republican Ted Bundy would have loved this law, including the sheer cynicism of it. Torment and maim whomever you want just as long as you get something that can be used against a Bush-fingered terrorist. And yes, it's true, you can get into biiiiiiiig trouble if you do the nasty a little too much, but let's get real here. Someone tortures a prisoner to fink on Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and that "information" is used to convict KSM - that person's a friggin' hero, for crissakes. Okay, he got a little too enthusiastic, but his only crime was being too eager to protect his country!

The USA Mengele Act permits legal evidence to be gathered for an American legal procedure by committing atrocities against prisoners. Exactly the way Josef Mengele went about gathering his "scientific" evidence during the Nazi era.

And let's not kid ourselves that this will stop with terrorist suspects. After all, Tom DeLay used the Department of Homeland Security to try to round-up Democrats to pass his gerrymandering efforts. Of course, I'm not saying that Bush intends to torture to death his American political opponents. But it opens up the possibility down the line of using torture to produce legal evidence for American courts in, say, drug cases, and sex crimes. And when that happens, then yes, it will be pretty easy to re-evaluate the defintion of "terrorist." Let's say a modern-day Elllsberg - we should be so lucky - leaks a new set of Pentagon Papers. With this law, there's no reason to have Plumbers to burglarize his psychiatrist's office - you just grab the doctor and let him find out what a real headshrinking feels like.

I don't think in his wildest dreams Osama bin Laden could have anticipated such a tremendous and rapid victory over America and its values as [Bush] delivered. Yes, the destruction of Iraq and any day now, the fall of Iran and the consequent radicalization of millions of Muslims, the ruination of American prestige and influence, not to mention the vampirical drain on our economy: all that bin Laden joyfully anticipated. But for America to abandon all pretense of adherence to western law and morality, that was a pure gift from God to his obedient servant, Osama.

Jane Hamsher is disgusted: "We are now officially the country of torture." And furthers adds something I completely agree with:

I don’t know what happened to the country I grew up to [believe] in, but I don’t recognize it in this matter any more. 

Digby provides extensive details (including innocents held at Gitmo) beyond these snips:

They're all off the hook. All the perpetrators, all the personnel who ordered them to do it, the doctors who betrayed their oaths and all the politicians and their sycophants in the military, the CIA and the Justice Department who sat around in Washington dreaming up this sick, sadistic, perverted program.

And there's no guarantee that George W. Bush (the man who had his aides scan the reports for him before he personally signed off on 150+ executions in Texas and famously said he knows that none of them were innocent) will not use these measures in the future. The brave Knights of the Big Kabuki, McCain, Huckleberry and Mr Elizabeth Taylor all agreed to allow him to "interpret" decency out of existence. After all, it's something he knows a lot about.

[...]

This means that while the Republicans are pretending to keep the Geneva Conventions intact and prohibiting torture and taking great credit for it, they have removed any means by which one could hold the US government accountable for failing to live up to those rules. Rights without remedies. In other wrods, the whole thing basically just legalized torture for any practical purpose --- and that means all of it, from forced enemas to waterboarding to the rack. What's a furriner gonna do about it? He's is specifically not allowed any judicial review of anything to do with his treament unless his US government torturers turn themselves in and ask their superiors to punish them.

This is it folks. There will be no judicial oversight of torture which means there is no way to enforce the law. The world will just have to trust George W. Bush to follow those laws based upon his superior morals and decency.

Glenn Greenwald spells out the dire and shameful consequences:

This legislation unquestionably allows the administration to continue to do exactly what it is was doing before. It legalizes those methods. It actually strengthens what the administration was doing because now it provides those activities with statutory authority. Why are the media and others pretending that these questions are murky? They're not.

It's true that the "compromise" takes the indirect, cowardly path towards legalizing torture by relying upon vague standards to define torture and then vesting in the President the sole power (unreviewable by courts) to determine what techniques are and are not allowed by those standards. It is the President who decides whether the "aggressive interrogation" program (i.e., the torture program) can continue, and he has already decided, obviously, that it will.

That is why the President and his senior advisors are celebrating the fact that the "program" can now continue. Because it can. Because the "compromise" allows that. Because the White House won. Because the principled, dissident Republican Senators capitulated entirely on the central question of whether the U.S. will continue to torture people.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, who is more of an extremist on torture issues than even Dick Cheney (he was threatening in advance to block any "compromise," even if the White House signed on to it, if it even potentially impeded the C.I.A.'s interrogation program in any way), excitedly announced that he "like(s) the compromise legislation even better than the [President's] bill his committee had passed." It's bad enough that we are legalizing torture but can we at least stop pretending that we're not sure if we're really doing that?

But worse than any of that, would it at least be possible for Democratic leaders to stop drooling on themselves with praise for John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham, and refrain from holding them up as the heroes who safeguarded all that is good and just in the world. Because not only is it false to say that those Heroic GOP Senators did anything praiseworthy regarding torture, praising them this way is politically so inept and self-destructive that it is hard to believe (although it shouldn't be) that they're actually doing this.

I'm back to Jane Hamsher's reaction. The America I grew up in and loved has been irreparably tarnished by the neocon gang under the criminal mind of Bush-Cheney. And I'm no fool. I know the demise of America didn't happen just because the Republicans blew into town to shoot up and trash the place. I live among the angry rabble, the dark underbelly of the USA, so-called Christians who are the worst hypocrites, the racists, the sexists, and the homophobes who praise and worship Republicans for getting tough, e.g., detaining and torturing Muslims swept up in a wide net:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that, in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority - 60% - are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners, a nexus to any terrorist group is not identified by the Government.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

Just as bad are the clueless herded sheep who show more enthusiasm for football than liberty and justice for all. A pox on the house of Americans who have permitted and hastened the decline of this once great democracy. I can only pray for America's resurrection.

UPDATE: Suskind wrote about the torture of Abu Zubaydah, a mentally-ill man who said anything to stop his torture, and thus, sent American intel assets on wild goose chases for naught.

Previously in June, I posted a lengthy argument to abolish torture without exceptions and the reasons why torture does not work.

I also overlooked this excellent essay by Digby on torture, Unleashing The Beast. Excerpt:

People and societies don't just wake up one morning to find they no longer recognize themselves. It's a process. And we are in the process in this country of "defining deviancy down" in ways I never thought possible. We are legitimizing torture and indefinite detention --- saying that we will only do this to the people who really deserve it. One cannot help but wonder what "really deserves it" will mean in the years to come as we fight our endless war against terror.

Sure, right now it's just a bunch of foreigners and I guess we don't feel foreigners are entitled to basic human rights. They must not be human --- or at least not as human as "we" are. When you think about it, who knows who "we" are either? Right wingers make millions of dollars writing books about how liberals are godless, death-loving, traitors within. Many people who read those books probably believe these liberals are only one step away from being sub-human too ---- they are, after all, godless traitors.

But as the soviet experience shows, anyone can be defined as such sub-humans and at some point it usually comes around to catch even the people who wrote the original tales of godless, death-loving traitors within. I don't know why --- maybe it's a kill the messenger thing.

I would almost guarantee that if we continue down this path there will someday be a fine, loyal conservative who, for reasons of petty insider warfare or political expediency finds himself in a position like this at the hands of his former comrades:

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Perhaps nobody cares that that this very thing is being done every day to hunger strikers in Guantanamo. But do people honestly think it can't happen to them? Once we unleash this beast it won't only be terrorists or muslims who will be in danger. In one way or another, we all will be.

The pillory of Hillary

Be gone from here, ye witch! God created man to rule!

Rembrandt's 17th century painting, The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicholas Tulp, is a portrait about patriarchy depicting the all-male sanctum of science and reason. Creating a parody, I replaced Rembrandt's patriarchs from Amsterdam of 1632 with those of today's conservative pundits and political operatives to add a contemporary political narrative suddenly intruded upon by the ever-gaining presence of a powerful woman, a presidential contender. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Arguably, the new faces may not best the men of the 17th century in attitudes about women, however, science and rationality hold little sway over the current group. The talkingpointfürher, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the RNC, third from the left leaning over the cadaver, and his con-apparatchiki, the right-wing media propagandists who surround him, perhaps wish to place Hillary on the slab next.

Changing the approach of previous Hate Speech of the Week posts (here, here, here, here, here, and here) I thought I would examine sexism aimed at Hillary Rodham Clinton courtesy the Media Matters of America archive.

In today's media, insidious misogyny catapults Hillary bashing to new heights and sometimes with the language of the 17th century. Don Imus flogged Puritanical superstition:

Earlier in the show, during an interview with an impersonator of former President Bill Clinton, host Don Imus echoed his recent attacks on Sen. Clinton [in which he called Hillary "that buck-toothed witch, Satan."]. Imus asked, "[h]ow's Satan doing? Your wife." The impersonator responded: "Oh, she's fine. Bitch."

Remember the Puritan fools who hung witches in Salem? Those 17th century misogynists suffered from hysteria and fanaticism. What's the excuse for 21st century throwbacks?

Homophobic closet cases despise Hillary too. She has shapely legs and a husband who escorts her openly in public. Rather than face their secret envy, bitter drama queens plot revenge. Long-rumored as a major closet case, Ken Mehlman deserves to be outed according to the Barney Frank rule.


In tandem with Scarborough, Mehlman shared the same branding iron to try to burn Hillary with a familiar mark:

On the February 10 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-FL) -- host of MSNBC's Scarborough Country -- asserted that "there is a shrillness in [Sen.] Hillary [Rodham Clinton (D-NY)] that comes out on TV whenever she gets excited about something." Referring to a speech given by Clinton "a year ago," Scarborough added: "[E]very time her voice goes up, she gets very shrill, very un-Clinton-like, if you're talking about Bill Clinton."

Scarborough's remarks echo those of Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, who repeatedly described Clinton as "angry" on the February 5 broadcast of ABC's This Week:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (host): We're just about out of time, but before we go, I have to ask you a question about 2008 and the candidate that all the Democrats are talking about, Hillary Clinton. For the Republicans, is she the dream candidate or the Democrat you most dread?

MEHLMAN: ...I don't think the American people if you look historically elect angry candidates. And whether it's the comments about the plantation or the worst administration in history, Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger.... ...And when you think of the level of anger, I'm not sure it's what Americans want.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You've got your talking points ready.

Yes, they do. How many ways can you brand the B word into Hillary without speaking the word? That's the game plan besides just plain lyin' about her or chastisin' the little woman of the WH when she neglected her Stepford Wife housekeeping duties. My, my. How many Ward Cleavers still pine for the days of Leave It To Beaver? Or do they miss the days of the Puritans?

For the most vile attacks on Hillary, we can always rely on a bloodthirsty and brain-addled rabble to throw rotten tomatoes and other unsavory projectiles. Michael Savage slung an elephant-sized dungball of blame for increased hostility in the Senate on the likes of Hillary and female senators. Men are never at fault in the Savage magical kingdom. That's women's work.

Limbaugh resurrected his scurrilous suggestion that Hillary as First Lady conspired to murder Clinton's White House counsel Vincent Foster. When he's not characterizing Hillary as a screeching ex-wife and "men will know what [he] means by that," a woman who puts her pants on one leg at a time like every other guy does, then Rush peddles gay-baiting sexual innuendo about her supposed lesbianism, which elevates Hillary's stature, IMO. Or, he quakes about the perceived Hillary threat to male testicles:

LIMBAUGH: But a lot of Democrats are worried that, you know, she doesn't have what it takes. She doesn't connect on TV. We talked about this. She doesn't come across as friendly. She doesn't -- she, you know, she's like -- my favorite name for her is Nurse Ratched. I mean, we created this whole concept of a testicle lockbox in connection with Mrs. Clinton. I mean, she has that kind of appeal to people. She's -- you fill in the blanks here.

[...]

LIMBAUGH: If I were [Washington Post assistant managing editor] Bob Woodward, I would be on a lookout for Mrs. Clinton and her testicle lockbox, because she has just been snookered....

[...]

LIMBAUGH: Now if Hillary does become Kerry's VP, will she have to change her positions to be on the same page with Kerry or will Kerry have to change his? [laughter] Don't forget that testicle lockbox, folks. [laughter] Just 'cause we haven't talked about it in a while does not mean [laughter] that it's -- that it's been buried.

There's something Jeffrey Dahmer bizarre about a mind that fantasizes about women storing male body parts and the suggestion hints at a peculiar understanding of male bondage apparatus for who would know about such devices? Rush shouldn't worry about testicle lockboxes. But what makes Limbaugh think Hillary or lesbians would want to preserve male organs in a box?

Republican chest-pounding necessitates bashing Hillary and that's Sean Hannity's schtick. Comparing a vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) to a vote for Hamas or Hezbollah, Hannity jousted with a call-in critic.

CALLER: The [Iraq] war was the greatest mistake in my lifetime.

HANNITY: It was not. You know what? It may be the greatest success in our lifetime, if, in fact -- if Reagan was betting on the fact that it is inherent in the human spirit to be free, that we are endowed by our creator that all men are created equal, and that given an opportunity the people in the Eastern Bloc would ultimately rise up and help in the beginnings of freedom. So, too, can it happen in this part of the world.

CALLER: Well, so, too, can it happen that they vote for Hamas, like they just did.

HANNITY: Well, the Palestinians -- this could be the beginning of democratization, and liberty and freedom in that part of the world. Do you deny that's a possibility?

CALLER: No, I don't deny it, but they can also vote for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas on the West Bank --

HANNITY: Well, you could vote for Hillary Clinton tomorrow, too, for crying out loud, [caller], but, I mean, does that mean that we sit back and do nothing?

CALLER: Well, don't send American kids to die for democracy in some damn place -- god-forsaken place on the other side of the world. I'm not for filling up Walter Reed hospital with a bunch of Americans because Sean Hannity is frightened.

HANNITY: Nobody is for that. Well, with all due respect, [caller], it's not a matter of Sean Hannity being frightened, but maybe you forgot -- I haven't forgot that 3,000 people died. We were attacked. It was the worst attack in history. They were at war with us for 10 years, and we didn't do a darn thing, [caller], and 3,000 people perhaps died unnecessarily.

For 9/11 exploitus ad nauseum, one could assume that Hannity topped the WH payola list to personally parrot a Karl Rove concoction that liberals give aid and comfort to terrorists while real men make war. But media whores like Hannity lay down across the big brass bed for free. He enjoys bashing Hillary with homespun rhetoric, hyperbole worded for those god-fearing folks back home, for example, that Hillary would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself. Sometimes Hannity makes stuff up. When vanity rules, loyalty glitters bright on the air waves.

On loyalty, Matthews aims to please:

On the September 19 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews, in a discussion on the prospects of a 2008 presidential bid by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), stated that Clinton "may not want to risk being another Dukakis -- this time in a dress," marking the third time Matthews has referred to the unsuccessful 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in describing Clinton's potential presidential bid, as noted by Media Matters for America (here and here). Matthews speculated that, like Dukakis, Clinton could lose "by eight points and humiliat[e] herself." Later, Matthews declared, "[G]o see Deer Hunter if you think [Clinton] can get elected president," adding that "Midwest guys" whose "idea of heaven is out hunting with the beer cans and shooting a pheasant or a bear" are "not up to modern women as president." The Deer Hunter was released in 1978.

[...]

In addition to his reference to Clinton as "Dukakis ... in a dress," Matthews has also called Clinton "witchy" and "sort of a Madame Defarge of the left," and pushed Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) to call Clinton a "socialist," as Media Matters has noted. Matthews also devoted a great deal of time to focusing on a May 23 New York Times article that addressed the state of the marriage between Clinton and former President Bill Clinton, asking at least 90 questions on the subject.

Evidently, Matthews joined one of dem thar beer-guzzling hunting trips and got freeze-dried in 1978 under a snowy avalanche. His paunch survived but not his mind. With John Boehner, Matthews again raised the Hillary is a socialist talking point. Don't you wonder if the RNC connected a dedicated fax machine for Tweety in the MSNBC green room?

Stuck on Hillary's marriage--what married women should focus on after all--curmudgeon David Broder was excitedly a-twitter. Funny, I don't recall fashion attention given to what men wear in the Senate but Broder channels an inner fashionista:

But the buzz in the room was not about her speech -- or her striking appearance in a lemon-yellow pantsuit -- but about the lengthy analysis of the state of her marriage to Bill Clinton that was on the front page of that morning's New York Times.

[...]

But for all the delicacy of the treatment, the very fact that the Times had sent a reporter out to interview 50 people about the state of the Clintons' marriage and placed the story on the top of Page One was a clear signal -- if any was needed -- that the drama of the Clintons' personal life would be a hot topic if she runs for president.

Does Broder have a gossip queen in his closet just dying to come out? Sounds like it. Oh, someone invite David to tea! Ken?

Amy Sullivan, who strangely doesn't want Hillary to run, wrote last year about Clinton's critics:

Sometimes they go far beyond reportorial cynicism.... More recently, on the Feb. 20, 2005, installment of “The Chris Matthews Show,” a panel discussed Hillary's candidacy while calling her “Nurse Ratched” and a “castrating female persona”; things really got going when journalist Gloria Borger mimicked Clinton's laugh and mannerisms while her colleagues sniggered.

And that's coming from members of the mainstream media. The conservative press—never shy when it comes to Hillary Clinton—has spent the spring teeing up for another game of Hillaryball. The trial of David Rosen, the fundraiser for Clinton's 2000 campaign, who was accused of hiding about $800,000 of costs for a campaign event held in Los Angeles, came first. In the three months leading up to the verdict (Rosen was acquitted), the FOX News Channel ran more than a dozen segments on Rosen, including a “Hannity & Colmes” segment titled “Are Hillary's Presidential Chances Over?” Rosen's eventual acquittal merited barely a hiccup on FOX, which simply replaced Rosen coverage with segments on the next Clinton scandal story—yet another bestselling book taking on the senator.

The pillory of Hillary began during Bill's presidency, but now that she's a bona fide contender, the usual conservative suspects have flung back the dungeon door in an antiquated patriarchal fortress where medieval instruments remain well-oiled, metallic and sharp, prepared to eviscerate women powerful enough to claim America's throne, the Oval Office. A woman holding the levers of the world's super power? "Bah! Humbug!" shout the men's hallelujah chorus.

What all the Hillary bashing boils down to is patriarchal resentment of powerful women. Primate brains just can't handle the presence of a modern woman treading upon the same sacred ground upon which the founding fathers once stood. The ingrained pattern to objectify the master's previously-held chattel manages to frog-leap DNA memory strands generation after generation despite women's liberation in the 20th century. White patriarchy dies hard and hopefully the younger generation will hasten its demise.

So let's leave the wacky doodles in their time warp to hunt witches while women work to take over the country and tune the chorus out. The best revenge is living well. And then there's justice. Hillary could win in 2008.

When Hurricane GOP hit Iraq

Rajiv Chandrasekaran writing for WaPo delivers a scathing critique on how Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq. Read it and then tell me how anyone with decency, integrity, or half a brain can vote Republican. One snip:

Many of those chosen by [Jim] O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

Jim O'Beirne is married to Kate O'Beirne, conservative pundit, Bush mouthpiece, Washington editor for the National Review, and neocon extraordinaire. She has a vested interest in spinning Republican propaganda as a bona fide member of the con-apparatchiki if you hadn't already ascertained why she chugs the GOP Kool-Aid.

Having read the WaPo article, Digby reasonably concluded, Before there was Katrina, there was the CPA, and then proposes:

Here's the question for the American people. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that you don't like Democrats. You have the vague feeling in the pit of your stomach that they just don't have the cojones to do "what needs to be done." You can't get over the feeling that they aren't serious enough.

But if you are a thoughtful person of any political persuasion who is concerned about national security or the economy, you simply cannot read that story above and have even the slightest faith that such people can be trusted to continue to run the government with no oversight.

The question is not whether the Democrats have a better plan to correct these grievous errors or whether they are hard enough to deal with hard issues. The question is how anyone could think Democrats could possibly be worse than an administration that ordered the US government to eschew all expertise and give billions of taxpayer dollars to inexperienced Republican functionaries to rebuild a foreign country from the ground up? Considering the stakes in all this, I don't see how anyone can think it's a good idea to let these people continue unchecked. They screw up everything they touch and they never, ever, learn from their mistakes.

I find it very hard to believe that anyone who isn't a purely faith-based voter can read this story in the Washington Post and come away believing that the Republicans are capable of running any government, much less the government of the most powerful country in the world. They are like children playing Risk and Monopoly.

If anyone thinks that political considerations will keep people like this from making more huge, irrevocable, catastrophic strategic blunders are kidding themselves. They are capable of anything. That's not hyperbole. Read the article and then bookmark it. We're going to need it to send to journalists and members of the press over the next few weeks to remind them about GOP "seriousness."

Republicans complain that big government is bad and then they prove it's true through their boneheaded leadership, blatant cronyism, and failed ideology. King FUBAR and his rubber-stamp Republican Congress have turned our government into a trough for their piggies and screwed American and Iraq in the process. How can anyone in their right mind continue to vote GOP? Well, I suppose con artists who fleece American taxpayers and partisan loyalists who suckle off the US of A teat will want to keep their buddies in power, and thus, remain free of congressional oversight. You want more broken government? Vote GOP for zero accountability and continued incompetence.

Tired of boneheaded Republican leadership...

In reading Bob Geiger's Friday post on the lazy press and the defeat of "a comprehensive security bill by Senate Democrats" (Since when does the con-apparatchiki media value telling the truth?), I come across Sen. Mary Landrieu's spot-on remarks in response to the tired and false Republican meme that Democrats don't know how to fight the war on terror.

Republicans have been overcome by a midterm election fever that causes them to expel excrement in mass quantities, pat it up into caca-pies, and toss their elephant dungballs at Democrats. Boehner howled as he threw his poo:

I listen to the questions today and I listen to my Democrat friends, and I wonder if they are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people.

Curious morality these Republicans entertain by smearing and bearing false witness against their Democratic opposition. So not Christ-like. How do sincere Christians who vote Republican sanction such hypocrisy?

Evan Derkacz from AlterNet wrote a few days ago:

Mere days after Majority Leader Bill Frist and Republican leadership ironically vowed to "rise above politics," Republican Senators Jim DeMint (S.C.) and John Ensign (NV) this morning echoed yesterday's scurrilous attack on Democrats from House Majority Leader John Boehner.

Replying to the GOP senators, DeMint and Ensign, U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) deflected the crapola with a truth bomb:

In light of the rantings that went on for 30 minutes by two colleagues from the other side, I'd like to state for the record that America is not tired of fighting terrorism; America is tired of the wrongheaded and boneheaded leadership of the Republican party that has sent six and a half billion a month to Iraq while the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. That led this country to attack Saddam Hussein, when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. Who captured a man who did not attack the country and let loose a man that did. Americans are tired of boneheaded Republican leadership that alienates our allies when we need them the most. Americans are most certainly tired of leadership that despite documenting mistake after mistake after mistake, even of their own party admitting mistakes, never admit they do anything wrong. That's the kind of leadership Americans are tired of.... I'm not going to sit here as a Democrat and let the Republican leadership come to the floor and talk about Democrats not making us safe. They're the ones in charge and Osama bin Laden is still at loose.

Are Americans tired of boneheaded Republican leadership incapable of 'fessin' up to mistakes? I hope so especially after Iraq, Katrina, the Abramoff lobbying scandal, the Duke Cunningham bribery scam, and so many more GOP debacles. I didn't think Republicans could get worse than Tricky Dick's regime but rarely does the modern GOP disappoint when it comes to misleadership, corruption, and incompetence. They need to go.

Hate speech of the week

Just when I didn't think that sexism could regress more into petulant adolescent territory, Dr. Michael "Waa-Waa" Weiner, AKA, Michael Savage demonstrates how puerile a man in his sixties can appear when intimidated. Who knew the fountain of youth existed? Whatever is in Savage's aquifer preserves one's emotional and intellectual capability at about age 14 or earlier. Imagine the resentment that must stir in a patriarchal cockadoodle such as Savage who crows as if he's tough and macho even as he nears retirement age and wisdom evades him. How threatening to a throwback the new women's radio network, Greenstone Media, must be. Listen to Waa-Waa's seething sexist rhetoric courtesy Media Matters. You can almost hear Mikey's inner angry juvenile voice crack an octave in the transcript:

SAVAGE: You're listening to The Savage Nation. You're listening to [Jane] "Barbarella" Fonda, who's created a new radio network for women. Here is a girl who's learned nothing in 30 to 40 years, in the last 30 to 40 years. Here's [an] idiot who says that because 85 percent of general managers in radio are men, women don't listen. And she says in order to know how to program for your audience, you need to put women in there.

Let me pause for a moment. A 60-something woman such as Jane Fonda no longer qualifies as a girl, particularly in the context of the extraordinary struggles Ms. Fonda has had to overcome. But Mikey's mind, stuck in a 1950s Twilight Zone adolescence, trivializes maturity and denigrates powerful females especially women who threaten his turf. His 1968 Barbarella reference hints at his backward irrelevant thinking about Jane Fonda today and makes him sound like a plaintive toddler waddling around in wet diapers. But, because he can string together syllables that sound somewhat more sophisticated than a bedwetting tot, I'll up his mental age to between, um, 12 to 14. When I hear a 60-something man call a 60-something woman a girl, I figure he's a hopeless male chauvinist transported by infantile rage over women beyond his control. Waa. Now grow up. To quote a conservative favorite, high priestess of unbridled free market enterprise, Ayn Rand, "Change or perish."

On how to market to and program for the female audience, on who it is that learned nothing and who is the idiot, Savage denies his disowned shadow by projecting it onto Ms. Fonda. Savage, a male, broadcasts to a male-dominated audience. No big deal. But women catering to a female audience is somehow wrong in Waa-Waa's magical double-standard kingdom. Ever scrutinized the ratings for his show (PDF)? I dare you to find the word, female or women in the demographics. C'mon, all you ad buyers out there. You know how the game is played. Media publishes only demos that they want you to see. You never get the full truth about how fragmented into teensy-weeny splinters an audience composition really is unless your agency or company subscribes to ratings research and can slice and dice the demographics to evaluate exactly who you will reach with your ad investment. Advertisers complain about paying big bucks to hit a small target with a lot of waste. Right? Yeah, I know it's true. Having worked in advertising and marketing for 20+ years as an advertiser client, an ad agency executive, and a news media professional, I know the numbers shell game from all sides of the table. Ineffectively reaching an audience delivers bad news for most advertisers who desire to influence the actual buyers of their wares.

Maybe those actual buyers is what gored Savage's approaching obsolescent ox and made him wail his shrill misogynist strawman at Fonda. What's a primo demographic that advertisers covet? Women. Women control 80 t0 85% of household purchases, transact trillions of dollars in sales, and account for most of the buying decisions for so many advertiser products and services that, by Juno, I do believe Fonda and her fellow board member, Gloria Steinem, are on to something big. Go google the stats on the clout of the female consumer and women business decision makers. They're quite impressive. So in the almighty arena of logic and reason--an area that males like Waa-Waa boast they're better at than women--Jane Fonda wins over the po' wittle Savage's irrational brain-jerk reaction. Advocating that women run a female-oriented radio network is just smart business, and in an industry dominated by male GMs, Greenstone will have no problem with the EEOC. I hope Fonda, Steinem, and Greenstone laugh with the rest of us women all the way to the bank. Ha!

For what it's worth on women and listening habits, personally I switched off my radio in 1990. I preferred my own tapes and CDs for my listening pleasure. I am not alone according to Greenstone Media's third-party research. But I have already tuned in to the women's radio network especially since I can download broadcasts via iTunes or stream it live on the Internet. Fonda proposes a good reason to again turn on the radio. OTOH, sexist hate speech, chimp howling, and circle jerk grunts are as boring, infantile, and regretfully as common as... *yawn* ...well, who needs it? Other brittle male egos frozen in a glacier from a time long, long ago perhaps do. Let them commiserate together. Buh-bye. Click. Buzz.

Of course, Savage didn't stop his "I hate women" tantrum with Jane Fonda. Next up, he waxed verklempt over female Democratic senators. Notice how he mentions no Republican females by name yet doesn't his vomit splat upon them as well?

I think I've heard this before. Weren't we told before Barbara Boxer became a U.S. senator, before Dianne Feinstein became a U.S. senator, before Hillary Clinton became a U.S. senator, that when women became senators, we'd have a kinder, gentler Senate, a more compassionate Senate? Well, I think the results are quite clear. The Senate is not kinder and gentler or more compassionate. In fact, it's more vicious and more histrionic than ever, specifically because women have been injected into the Senate.

Pardon me, dear readers, for the proverbial Bwahahahahaha! Ha! Savage can be such a clown, can't he? As he pulls a string of knotted fabricated hankies out of his ignorant wazoo, someone cue up the laugh track. Whew! What a load. OK, who injected these women into the Senate as if they were tasty sensations!? Who injected Bush-Cheney into the Oval Office? Who injected all those Republicans into Congress? Is there a secret injector button? Hmmm, maybe with Diebold, but in most parts of the USA, it's something called e-l-e-c-t-i-o-n-s. And I'm thinking the Senate has turned more vicious and more histrionic than ever, specifically because of Republicans. Yup. Ramped up about 1994 with the GOP takeover of the House and Newtie Poot's acrid pomposity, and then worsened when Democrats lost the Senate majority. Anyone remember the useless and embittered Clinton impeachment, plus the ruthless pursuit of Bill and Hillary via Ken Starr? Who led that event of hand-wringing melodrama and wasted mega-millions of taxpayer dollars? What kind of histrionics made men wet their boxers and briefs over Saddam's imaginary WMDs? Who also spearheaded the Iraq War killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians and who callously deflected the atrocities of Abu Ghraib as the acts of a few bad apples? To witness the kinder, gentler, compassionate side of Republican politics today, examine the National Republican Congressional Committee's dirt-digging campaign. WaPo reported last Sunday:

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.

[...]

The memo recommended that vulnerable incumbents spend $20,000 on a research "package" to find damaging material about challengers and urged that they "define your opponent immediately and unrelentingly."

[...]

This will be a "very negative campaign and probably a more negative campaign than any in recent memory," Geer said.

Sheesh. And Waa-Waa wants to specifically blame the lack of a kinder, gentler, and compassionate Senate on women--Democrats by name, and in general, Republican female senators included--as he totally disregards the ruthless dirty political tricks that mostly conservative men play. Waa. Waa. Waa.

For further evidence that Savage lacks mental capacity and emotional maturity, read his rant about putting Saddam back into power, an assertion made previously by another intellectual giant, Bill O'Reilly.

Bottom-line, if I could tell Savage about my support of the new women's radio network, Greenstone Media, and the significance of women in Congress, I would use language someone like him could comprehend....

Now, watch this drive.

UPDATE: Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's Countdown concurs. He picked Michael Savage as runner-up for his nightly "Worst Person in the World." Olbermann:

Our runner-up, Michael Savage. Wagged that cheap wig of his and announced that the U.S. Senate is now, quote, "more vicious and more histrionic then ever, specifically because women have been injected into it." Bulletin to Mr. Weiner Savage, there have been women in the U.S. Senate since 1922. Not that you'd need to know stuff like that or anything.

UPDATE II: Savage has totally gone off his meds. Rosie O'Donnell is a lesbian fascist who deserves to be spat upon for hating the Church, part of some homosexual mafia conspiracy ...waa, waa, waa, harumph... the supremacy of white male viciousness, and nuke Iran.

Seriously, someone take him to see a psychoanalyst.

King FUBAR and Iran

Here we go again:

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Sound familiar? It should:

The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents.

What a fine bunch of wacky doodles we have in the executive branch. How many ways can a president screw up a war, um, actually two wars, Iraq being the distraction from Afghanistan, you know, where Al Qaeda and bin Laden were? The short answer: Just look at George. He's the King of FUBAR. And he's vindictive:

After no such weapons were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to building nuclear weapons in secret. At one point, the administration orchestrated a campaign to remove the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. It failed, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

Sweet. The King of FUBAR screws the pooch and attempts to harm the people who said he was wrong before we all found out the king was wrong. Yeah, that's our Dubya. So what's new?

Yesterday's letter, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, was the first time the IAEA has publicly disputed U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. The agency noted five major errors in the committee's 29-page report, which said Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.

In other words, Iran is years and years away from having a bomb. Oh, but that doesn't stop the King of FUBAR from sending in his court jester to whip up hysteria. Enter Hoekstra, stage right:

When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said his intent was "to help increase the American public's understanding of Iran as a threat." Spokesman Jamal Ware said yesterday that Hoekstra will respond to the IAEA letter.

Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a committee member, said the report was "clearly not prepared in a manner that we can rely on." He agreed to send it to the full committee for review, but the Republicans decided to make it public before then, he said in an interview.

The report was never voted on or discussed by the full committee. Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the vice chairman, told Democratic colleagues in a private e-mail that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire -- and the Intelligence Community's assessments as more certain -- than they are."

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

Negroponte's spokesman, John Callahan, said in a statement that his office "reviewed the report and provided its response to the committee on July 24, '06." He did not say whether it had approved or challenged any of the claims about Iran's capabilities.

"This is like prewar Iraq all over again," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."

And there you have it. The King of FUBAR wants his war with Iran, dammit! Forget reality. "Me King. Me want war! Harumph!" But wait:

The committee report, written by a single Republican staffer with a hard-line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for not providing evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons.

Ah, blame it on the intel community who aren't (this time) fixing the facts around the king's policy to kill, kill, kill, bomb, bomb Iran. "Wah, wah, wah," cries the king. "I want to bomb those Islamo freedom-hating Iranian fascists back into the stone age!"

Ha! We've seen this movie before. We don't need to see it again. And that's another reason to put Democrats in charge of Congress this November. To stop the King of FUBAR from starting yet another unnecessary war.

Bush sees a 'Third Awakening'

Is Bush drunk again? We haven't had our First Great Awakening, not in the true sense of the descriptor.

Nowhere in history can you point to a time when religiously-devoted people vanquished poverty, hunger, sexism, racism, intolerance, and scorn for anyone other than their own church's country club and its peculiar brand of bigotry and exclusivity. Ever. When America wakes up to the sexist, racist, and anti-Christ attitudes infused in religious institutions, then we can say we have awakened. Until then, my ears bleed assaulted by jibber-jabber from hypocrites and false prophets patting themselves on their backs because they allegedly see good and evil. Bah! Whose good? Whose evil? They know not what they see and they surely don't see their own evil perpetrated in the name of God. Such vanity and blasphemy mocks the Creator.

When a war criminal talks about "awakening" and good and evil, be very concerned. Another disastrous war must be in the making. Tristero thinks Bush is itching to push the nukular button. That will be some awakening.

Farewell, Ann Richards

The best thing about Texas was Ann Richards. Now she's gone. Former Texas governor Ann W. Richards died of esophageal cancer yesterday.

We will miss you, Ann.

Terribly.

UPDATE: Digby takes us down memory lane.

Here come the jackhammers: Bush to resubmit extreme right-wing nominees

How do you chip away at the Democratic lead in election polling? Whip up the radical GOP base into a voting frenzy by re-nominating five extremist judges for Senate confirmation:

Included on the list is District Court Judge Terrence Boyle, a former aide to Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who was blocked by Democrats when he was first nominated to serve on the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush. Boyle, one of President Bush’s most controversial nominees, has issued numerous opinions hostile to affirmative action, women’s rights, fair employment, and voting rights. The most recent controversy surrounding Boyle is a report that reveals that he failed to recuse himself from nine cases in which he had a conflict of interest....

Bush will also resubmit the nomination of William J. Haynes II for the 4th Circuit. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) wrote about Haynes in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “Nominations do not get much worse than this…Haynes does not come anywhere close to the commitment to fundamental rights and the principle of separation of powers that we all expect from the federal courts. He would be a poster boy on the 4th Circuit for denying the rule of law…”

The third on this list of five nominees is Norman Randy Smith of Idaho, who has a long history of representing Idaho’s large corporate interests, according to Alliance for Justice. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the only woman on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has vowed to block from a seat on the 9th Circuit that is traditionally held by a Californian according to the Legal Times. William Myers III, also from Idaho and to be nominated to the 9th Circuit, was previously blocked by a Democratic filibuster and then re-nominated. Patrick Leahy, (D-VT), ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said that Myers was blocked for being “the most anti-environmental nominee sent to the Senate...”

Bringing up the rear is the nomination of Michael B. Wallace to the 5th Circuit. Wallace, a former aide to Senator Trent Lott (D-MS), has the distinction of being the first appellate court nominee in 25 years to be given a rating of “unqualified” to sit on the federal bench by the American Bar Association.

Why bring these lackluster nominations to the Senate now when America faces more pressing issues? I imagine the invisible hand of Dr. James Dobson, key to turning out the extreme fundamentalist vote for the GOP this November, must have issued yet another fatwa to augment his threat in May:

Some of President Bush's most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion.

[...]

Christian conservative leaders have often threatened in the months before an election to withhold their support for Republicans in an effort to press for their legislative goals. In the 1990's, Dr. Dobson in particular became known for his jeremiads against the Republican party, most notably in the months before the 1998 midterm elections.

But the complaints this year are especially significant because they underscore how the broad decline in public approval for Mr. Bush and Congressional Republicans is beginning to cut into their core supporters. The threatened defections come just two years after many Christian conservatives — most notably Dr. Dobson — abandoned much of their previous reservations and poured energy into electing Republicans in 2004.

[...]

Midterm Congressional elections tend to be won by whichever side can motivate more true believers to vote. Dr. Dobson and other conservatives are renewing their complaints about the Republicans at a time when several recent polls have shown sharp declines in approval among Republicans and conservatives. And compared with other constituencies, evangelical Protestants have historically been suspicious of the worldly business of politics and thus more prone to stay home unless they feel clear moral issues are at stake.

[...]

According to people who were at the meetings or were briefed on them, Dr. Dobson has made the same point more politely in a series of private conversations over the last two weeks in meetings with several top Republicans, including Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser; Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader; Representative J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the House speaker; and Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the majority leader.

You can expect the boys in Congress to carry water by the bucketfuls for the special interests of evangelical fundamentalists. They've got a lot of 'splainin' to do. After June's defeat in the Senate, in July the House failed to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment that would have codified gay discrimination into U.S. Constitution. The setback couldn't have pleased Mullah Dobson and perhaps provoked some horse trading during the congressional break. Forget about taking care of America's needs. The GOP's true god, Politics, will hijack the Senate under the aegis of Bill Frist lest a plague of poll inertia descend upon House and Senate Republicans, O ye breakers of the commandments.

Yeah, Congress is so very broken. The legislative branch acts more like a partisan wooden puppet animated from strings held by GOP lobbyists, special interests, and the Bush Administration. With Bush's five judicial nominees up for review by the Senate Judicial Committee, Republicans like Mike DeWine of Ohio, who's behind Democrat Sherrod Brown by 2 points among registered voters, can strut his stuff for the camera and Dobson will have reason to mobilize evangelical extremists to the polls. The political ploy could backfire if Democrats use the opportunity to GOTV in an appeal to moderate and swing voters by painting Republicans "Apple Polisher Red," the hottest fall color for jackboots a go-go.

Had enough?

Hate speech of the week

I knew eventually Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh would join Hate Speech of the Week together. Imagine their love child. No, don't! Stick needles in my eyes.

First up, Rush stereotypes African-American males. Black men can't swim:

Limbaugh originally asserted that saying "blacks can't swim" "is not a racial or racist comment at all" while "handicap[ping]" the new season of Survivor. He also stated that Hispanics have "probably shown the most survival tactics," that they "have shown a remarkable ability to cross borders," and that they can "do it without water for a long time. They don't get apprehended, and they will do things other people won't do."

In the context of reporting on Limbaugh's remarks about African-Americans and swimming, Costello noted recent comments by Tramm Hudson, a Republican candidate for a Florida congressional seat, who stated that "blacks are not the greatest swimmers or may not even know how to swim." Hudson has apologized for his comments, calling them "stupid."

Denial, denial, denial is Rush's main calling card. His remarks about African-American quarterback Donovan McNab got him booted from ESPN, and now according to Rush, black men can't swim. On race, you can rely on Limbaugh to espouse what hooded klansmen would salute.

Not to be outdone, Ann Coulter turned the channel to V is for Violence by advocating murder:

Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter titled her August 30 syndicated column on the Rhode Island Senate race: "They Shot the Wrong Lincoln." The headline is a reference to Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), whom she excoriated throughout the piece -- calling him a "half-wit" and a "silver-spooned moron[] -- while expressing her support for his challenger in the September 12 Republican primary, Stephen Laffey.

This is not the first time Coulter has alluded to killing those she disagrees with:

• Commenting on radio host Melanie Morgan's assertion that if New York Times executive editor Bill Keller were convicted of treason she "would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber," Coulter said, "I prefer a firing squad, but I'm open to a debate on the method of execution." She later suggested that Times staff members should be "executed."
• Coulter said of the media: "Would that it were so! ... That the American military were targeting journalists."
• Coulter suggested that Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA) is "the reason soldiers invented fragging," -- military slang meaning the intentional killing of a member of one's own unit.
• Coulter argued that the national debate during the Monica Lewinsky controversy should not have focused on whether former President Bill Clinton "did it," but rather "whether to impeach or assassinate" him.
• Coulter said of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens: "We need somebody to put rat poison in Justice Stevens's créme brulée.''

You can count on Ann for the most outrageous hate speech next to, oh, I don't know, maybe the lunatic ravings of a terrorist madman. And America publishing and media reward Coulter with book deals and TV appearances for exactly why? How come she isn't in jail?

Spittle sightings courtesy Media Matters of America.

To no longer walk in fear

Click the link to watch Olbermann's broadcast on Rumsfeld who, with a stomp of his boot heels, attacked American dissent by likening administration critics to fascist appeasers (Olbermann's transcript at Crooks and Liars). Unsurprisingly, Bush has been spinning, fascist , in his speeches as if the label is the new Republican buzz word. With a majority of Americans now in opposition to the Iraq War and favoring troop withdrawal, the administration desperately trots out the smear of appeasement. Ha!

How conveniently they forget:

IN HIS MOST recent justification of his Pentagon stewardship, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reached back to the 1930s, comparing the Bush administration's critics to those who, like US Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy, favored appeasing Adolf Hitler. Rumsfeld avoided a more recent comparison: the appeasement of Saddam Hussein by the Reagan and first Bush administrations. The reasons for selectivity are obvious, since so many of Hussein's appeasers in the 1980s were principals in the 2003 Iraq war, including Rumsfeld.

In 1983, President Reagan initiated a strategic opening to Iraq, then in the third year of a war of attrition with neighboring Iran. Although Iraq had started the war with a blitzkrieg attack in 1980, the tide had turned by 1982 in favor of much larger Iran, and the Reagan administration was afraid Iraq might actually lose. Reagan chose Rumsfeld as his emissary to Hussein, whom he visited in December 1983 and March 1984. Inconveniently, Iraq had begun to use chemical weapons against Iran in November 1983, the first sustained use of poison gas since a 1925 treaty banning that.

Rumsfeld never mentioned this blatant violation of international law to Hussein, instead focusing on shared hostility toward Iran and an oil pipeline through Jordan. Rumsfeld apparently did mention it to Tariq Aziz, Iraq's foreign minister, but by not raising the issue with the paramount leader he signaled that good relations were more important to the United States than the use of poison gas.

This message was reinforced by US conduct after the Rumsfeld missions. The Reagan administration offered Hussein financial credits that eventually made Iraq the third-largest recipient of US assistance. It normalized diplomatic relations and, most significantly, began providing Iraq with battlefield intelligence. Iraq used this information to target Iranian troops with chemical weapons. And when Iraq turned its chemical weapons on the Kurds in 1988, killing 5,000 in the town of Halabja, the Reagan administration sought to obscure responsibility by falsely suggesting Iran was also responsible.

MSNBC adds this detail from 2004:

Washington helped Saddam obtain intelligence and military equipment and, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control document in the Senate record, Iraq also obtained from the United States biological agents that could have been turned into weapons.

The United States was at the time supporting Iraq in its war against the old U.S. foe Iran, at a time when Saddam used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Iraqi Kurds.

Video clip of Rummy and Saddam from 1983 is here.

Remember when John Dean said a cancer was growing on the presidency? Well, maybe not. Too many people forgot that lesson and swallowed the Bush lie that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Strangely, almost a third of Americans still believed the lie in February of this year. Fourteen percent were "Not sure." Besides a gullibility in authority, many citizens unfortunately lack an efficacy in basic civics. Politics? Oh, they couldn't be bothered. Granny needs her flu shot, mom's shopping at the mall, and daddy's riveted to the idiot box. Well, if they're too lazy or time-starved to catch up on the homework, they'll have to take the word of say, conservatives with a conscience like John Dean.

Since Dean made his famous remark about the Nixon presidency, a malignancy has spread throughout U.S.A. The cancer is Republican authoritarianism that dutifully and self-righteously oppresses women and minorities while lying to the public that it is good, moral, and just. Complicit Americans who act like herded sheep--voting GOP jackboots into office, extolling them as honest and decent leaders--shoulder responsibility for the mess we're in along with the thugs themselves. I don't recognize some of "my fellow Americans." They have x's over eyes that only light up with racist speech dripping from the lips of conservatives George Allen, Trent Lott, and talk show punditry or sexist tripe published as if it's reasonable discourse in the financial press.

Meanness, tribalism, rampant patriarchy, and blind loyalty has infected not only Washington, D.C., but the Bible Belt, the Midwest, and all four corners of the land. It advances daily with every chance it's given. Immense neediness drives blind obedience and incurious spectators--more interested in watching football than the government decisions that affect us all--allow our democracy to be hijacked. Like victims of ID theft, if citizens don't proactively protect themselves, they won't realize they've been injured until the damage appears stuffed in their mailboxes or on their records. Such crimes haunt for years.

The condition of our national malaise existed long before the 9/11 hijackers fueled the march to war. Somewhere, somehow, Americans overlooked that education continues after the diploma and is paramount to becoming self-aware and mature. Courage plays a role too. Instead, conformity, the abdication of personal responsibility, and American superiority that entitles itself to exceptionalism permits some groups of our citizenry to excuse all manner of evil. Some even call it God's Will. Ignorance and fear disguised behind the red-white-and-blue curtain as religion and so-called family values causes many to live in dis-ease. Some of us were immune or had already recovered. More will follow. Others never will realize that human decency withers when patriotism and religion defines itself as you are either fer us or agin us.

People who subscribe to this motto don't think twice about ramming their flagpoles and crucifixes into places where they don't belong. They respect no one's boundaries. Like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their cronies, they violate the principles of democracy and freedom in forgetting that elected officials are "our employees," not our rulers or our daddies. From those who put the Republican authoritarians in office, I want an apology; voters who will owe us a debt of gratitude if we accept their penitence. I won't hold my breath because denial provides a powerful defense mechanism.

Go to sleep behind the wheel and you can run off the road. For those who are awakening, how do we begin to climb out of the muddy ditch? How do we dissipate the Fog of Fear? At the very least... remember, remember, the 7th of November.

Hat tip to Digby for the Keith Olbermann interview.