Pic thanks to the Cheezburger. Click to embiggen.
Dr. Attaturk explains.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Our Nuremberg ...
EC writes what I feel:
It's time for our own Nuremberg, whether they impeach Bush/Cheney or proffer charges once they're out of office, it could be our only hope to rehabilitate whatever credibility we might have left.
Iraq is a crime scene --Bush's crime scene where the evidence against him is found. A war of naked aggression, what Bush did to Iraq is a capital crime under US Codes, prohibited by the Nuremberg Principles which loom like a specter over his criminal administration. Nuremberg remains the most effective and damning indictment of anyone who would hijack the apparatus of state to wage wars of aggression or to perpetrate mass murder and/or torture under the cover of a national sovereignty.
...
It's time for our own Nuremberg, whether they impeach Bush/Cheney or proffer charges once they're out of office, it could be our only hope to rehabilitate whatever credibility we might have left.
They write letters ...
Laury writes to the Chimp:
You don't think everybody over there wants to blow themselves up for Allah, do you?
As I've said before many times, after having lived on four continents, interacting with the locals, I've found one truism. People are more the same than different. They want the same things. Peace, security, a decent job, and more opportunities for their kids than they themselves were offered.
Dear Mr President (Bush)
Many of us citizens of the Middle East are fed up with the unbearable, crazy, absurd, ridiculous, bizarre situation in our region ...
You don't think everybody over there wants to blow themselves up for Allah, do you?
...
Us, Mr President are practical dreamers from every corner of the Middle East that are doing everything they can, and are using every mean[s] available to create some kind of a peaceful environment ...
As I've said before many times, after having lived on four continents, interacting with the locals, I've found one truism. People are more the same than different. They want the same things. Peace, security, a decent job, and more opportunities for their kids than they themselves were offered.
36 33
Think Progress
I'm glad he gets to go home, but it makes me wonder what the poor sonofabitch did to get sent to that shithole, and also just what the fuck Iceland thought one soldier could do to help. Maybe it was just to get subsidies from Bush for being part of the 'coalition'. I hope they kick some of it down to him. Fat chance.
In his Iraq speech last night, President Bush took a moment to thank “the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq.” TPMmuckraker’s Spencer Ackerman has been counting coalition members with troops on the ground and has been able to find only 34 — many of whom have just a minor presence in Iraq. In his search, Ackerman discovered that the total is about to drop to 33: Next month, Iceland is pulling out its one lone soldier.
I'm glad he gets to go home, but it makes me wonder what the poor sonofabitch did to get sent to that shithole, and also just what the fuck Iceland thought one soldier could do to help. Maybe it was just to get subsidies from Bush for being part of the 'coalition'. I hope they kick some of it down to him. Fat chance.
A booty like a freshly-made bunk...
From The Gist about Condilieza Rice:
Makes me wonder if a pallet of quarters would bounce off Bush's head...
After she became secretary of state, she came to a party at Blacker's house, kicked off her shoes, and began dancing through the night to rock and and roll. Blacker, who is gay, wanted to show his partner how tight her behind is; he postulated that if he aimed a quarter at her butt, it would bounce off like a rocket. He was right. Rice, who was dancing, didn't realize what he had done until everyone began laughing hysterically. She was flattered -- and proud.
Makes me wonder if a pallet of quarters would bounce off Bush's head...
Iraq, deep in your bones
From deep inside an undisclosed location at the EssEffChron, Matk Morford with today's 'must read' about Iraq. It's so good I present it here in toto, and, no, that doesn't mean it's up Dorothy's dog's ass. More like up Bush's.
[A war that isn't really a war, the great humiliation that's ours forever. Is there any upside?]
No.
[We are, of course, mostly fighting against ourselves.
It must be repeated every so often, just as a painful, necessary, ego-tweaking reminder: Iraq was never a war. Not really, not in any sense that mattered or that we could actually define and understand or to which we could truly submit ourselves or our national identity.
It never mattered how many little American flags appeared on how many bloated Chevy Avalanches, how many right-wing radio shows found a new reason to pule, how many furiously blindered uber-patriots happily ignored all the harsh words from all those naysaying generals or even all the "turncoat" anti-war Republicans and insisted we're really over there to fight some sort of great Islamic demon no one can actually see or locate or define but that we must, somehow, attempt to destroy -- even though doing so only seems to make the situation far, far worse.
There was never any coherent, justifiable heroic cause. Indeed, the truth about Iraq, as evidenced by Gen. David Petreaus' muted, bleak testimony before Congress just this week, is much more simple, nefarious, pathetic. Iraq is, was, and forever will be our very own massive strategic blunder, a failed land grab for position and power in a tinderbox region defined by furious instability and corruption and death.
It's the great unspoken subtext. Iraq has always been a war between our dueling national identities, a battle over how we are to move and breathe and behave in the new millennium. Are we really this violently paranoid bully, this rogue pre-emptive screw-em-all ideological war machine defined by the dystopian Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld vision of permanent, ongoing global conflict?
Or do we try, instead, to move forward and reinvent ourselves over and over again as the world's most commited, forceful peacekeeper, ever striving for balance and cooperation and tact, even in the face of hardship and fundamentalist rage, refusing to be taunted and dragged down lest we take the bait and lose our minds and engage in torture and misprision and ultraviolence and become little better, ideologically speaking, than our taunters? Have we already made our choice?
Because the truth is, we are well past the point of salvaging anything noble or honest from Bush's massive, historic debacle. We have only this brutal reality: Iraq is, and forever will be, one of the most extraordinary wastes in all of American history.
A waste of money. A waste of time. A stunning, almost unspeakable waste of life. A waste of resources and intellectual capital and a massive waste of national spirit. A waste of energy and hope and a giant squandering of any goodwill or empathy our former allies might've had for America in its post-9/11 state. Heard it all before? Sure you have.
Some scenes remain almost comical in their absurdity. Perhaps you saw that money, those enormous, ridiculous piles of American cash, the photos floating around of American soldiers guarding giant, shrink-wrapped pallets of U.S. currency known as "cashpaks," each reportedly containing about $1.6 million in stacks of $100 bills, all airlifted by the ton straight from the Federal Reserve and set down in the Iraqi sun like rotting fruit, small mountains of your tax dollars earmarked to buy off various warlords and pay for covert, unauthorized operations all over the Middle East in an attempt to buy our way into some sort of impossible, forced stability. Right.
Or maybe it's the bodies, the sheer waste of American flesh, not merely the thousands of U.S. dead or even the countless tens of thousands of dead Iraqi citizens but also the lesser-known horrors, like the epidemic of brain-damaged U.S. soldiers, thousands of them, so many that they're becoming their own category of study in medical textbooks given how they're beginning to exhibit combinations of trauma doctors have never seen before.
What a recruitment poster this is. Come fight in the American military. We're exhausted, overstretched, bewildered, have lowered our entrance barrier to accept D-grade students and former inmates, have almost zero idea what we're actually fighting for, and serve under a Commander in Chief who cares more about trying to shore up his wretched legacy than for the loss of American life. Oh and by the way, odds are extremely high you will return home permanently wounded, traumatized, or brain damaged. How very proud we are.
We all know the current reality: We are not safer. We are not better off in any measurable way. We are not stronger or more unified or prouder or more respected or healthier or wealthier or wiser and we have done exactly zero to stem the flood of radical Islam or the general outpouring of global disgust at what America has become under this president. This is our scar. This is our great American shame.
So, what do you do with it? Or with the prospect of still more weeks, months, even years of this dull slog of war? Because the fact is, as Petreaus' testimony essentially confirmed, we will be in Iraq at least through the (blessed) end of Bush's nightmare term, and likely well beyond, given how entrenched and ensnared our forces have become.
Perhaps we can take the long view, the wide view, the spiritual or karmic view, even, insofar as the short and linear view has become so stifling and deadly and useless. Perhaps this is the only way.
Because truly, many in the alternative set, the lightworkers and the gurus and the healers and the deep teachers, those who think outside the war room and beyond the bland academic platitudes, these people tend see Iraq, BushCo, the American right and all the sanctimonious bleakness surrounding them as merely the inky remnants of a passing disease, the last, vicious gasp of a dying ideology, the violent struggle of resistance that always erupts before any great cosmic shift.
Which is to say: The screeching of the Christian right, the shrill alarmism from cultural conservatives regarding everything from sex and drugs and music to gays and nipples and creationism, the rejection of science, the attacks on women's rights, the abuse of the environment, all the way up to the bleakest and ugliest manisfestation of all, a brutal and unwinnable war -- taken as a whole, these can, if you so choose, be seen as merely the embers of a hugely failed -- and yes, nearly extinct -- worldview.
Here is the hesitant optimism, the hint of the new, the tentative suggestion that all is not lost: By many measures, the worst of it is over. There really is light coming, a new awareness, a shift away from the bleakness and the rot and the wallowing in bland violence. Perhaps you can feel it. Or perhaps you need to be ready to feel it. Either way, it's there. You have but to do the most easy/difficult thing of all: you must look behind the veil, see the two dueling Americas, and make your choice.]
I'm 'hesitantly optimistic' about Iraq the same way I'm optimistic about the aftermath of a car crash: If we survive the impact, perhaps the injuries will heal over time. Maybe we'll just be crippled for life.
[A war that isn't really a war, the great humiliation that's ours forever. Is there any upside?]
No.
[We are, of course, mostly fighting against ourselves.
It must be repeated every so often, just as a painful, necessary, ego-tweaking reminder: Iraq was never a war. Not really, not in any sense that mattered or that we could actually define and understand or to which we could truly submit ourselves or our national identity.
It never mattered how many little American flags appeared on how many bloated Chevy Avalanches, how many right-wing radio shows found a new reason to pule, how many furiously blindered uber-patriots happily ignored all the harsh words from all those naysaying generals or even all the "turncoat" anti-war Republicans and insisted we're really over there to fight some sort of great Islamic demon no one can actually see or locate or define but that we must, somehow, attempt to destroy -- even though doing so only seems to make the situation far, far worse.
There was never any coherent, justifiable heroic cause. Indeed, the truth about Iraq, as evidenced by Gen. David Petreaus' muted, bleak testimony before Congress just this week, is much more simple, nefarious, pathetic. Iraq is, was, and forever will be our very own massive strategic blunder, a failed land grab for position and power in a tinderbox region defined by furious instability and corruption and death.
It's the great unspoken subtext. Iraq has always been a war between our dueling national identities, a battle over how we are to move and breathe and behave in the new millennium. Are we really this violently paranoid bully, this rogue pre-emptive screw-em-all ideological war machine defined by the dystopian Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld vision of permanent, ongoing global conflict?
Or do we try, instead, to move forward and reinvent ourselves over and over again as the world's most commited, forceful peacekeeper, ever striving for balance and cooperation and tact, even in the face of hardship and fundamentalist rage, refusing to be taunted and dragged down lest we take the bait and lose our minds and engage in torture and misprision and ultraviolence and become little better, ideologically speaking, than our taunters? Have we already made our choice?
Because the truth is, we are well past the point of salvaging anything noble or honest from Bush's massive, historic debacle. We have only this brutal reality: Iraq is, and forever will be, one of the most extraordinary wastes in all of American history.
A waste of money. A waste of time. A stunning, almost unspeakable waste of life. A waste of resources and intellectual capital and a massive waste of national spirit. A waste of energy and hope and a giant squandering of any goodwill or empathy our former allies might've had for America in its post-9/11 state. Heard it all before? Sure you have.
Some scenes remain almost comical in their absurdity. Perhaps you saw that money, those enormous, ridiculous piles of American cash, the photos floating around of American soldiers guarding giant, shrink-wrapped pallets of U.S. currency known as "cashpaks," each reportedly containing about $1.6 million in stacks of $100 bills, all airlifted by the ton straight from the Federal Reserve and set down in the Iraqi sun like rotting fruit, small mountains of your tax dollars earmarked to buy off various warlords and pay for covert, unauthorized operations all over the Middle East in an attempt to buy our way into some sort of impossible, forced stability. Right.
Or maybe it's the bodies, the sheer waste of American flesh, not merely the thousands of U.S. dead or even the countless tens of thousands of dead Iraqi citizens but also the lesser-known horrors, like the epidemic of brain-damaged U.S. soldiers, thousands of them, so many that they're becoming their own category of study in medical textbooks given how they're beginning to exhibit combinations of trauma doctors have never seen before.
What a recruitment poster this is. Come fight in the American military. We're exhausted, overstretched, bewildered, have lowered our entrance barrier to accept D-grade students and former inmates, have almost zero idea what we're actually fighting for, and serve under a Commander in Chief who cares more about trying to shore up his wretched legacy than for the loss of American life. Oh and by the way, odds are extremely high you will return home permanently wounded, traumatized, or brain damaged. How very proud we are.
We all know the current reality: We are not safer. We are not better off in any measurable way. We are not stronger or more unified or prouder or more respected or healthier or wealthier or wiser and we have done exactly zero to stem the flood of radical Islam or the general outpouring of global disgust at what America has become under this president. This is our scar. This is our great American shame.
So, what do you do with it? Or with the prospect of still more weeks, months, even years of this dull slog of war? Because the fact is, as Petreaus' testimony essentially confirmed, we will be in Iraq at least through the (blessed) end of Bush's nightmare term, and likely well beyond, given how entrenched and ensnared our forces have become.
Perhaps we can take the long view, the wide view, the spiritual or karmic view, even, insofar as the short and linear view has become so stifling and deadly and useless. Perhaps this is the only way.
Because truly, many in the alternative set, the lightworkers and the gurus and the healers and the deep teachers, those who think outside the war room and beyond the bland academic platitudes, these people tend see Iraq, BushCo, the American right and all the sanctimonious bleakness surrounding them as merely the inky remnants of a passing disease, the last, vicious gasp of a dying ideology, the violent struggle of resistance that always erupts before any great cosmic shift.
Which is to say: The screeching of the Christian right, the shrill alarmism from cultural conservatives regarding everything from sex and drugs and music to gays and nipples and creationism, the rejection of science, the attacks on women's rights, the abuse of the environment, all the way up to the bleakest and ugliest manisfestation of all, a brutal and unwinnable war -- taken as a whole, these can, if you so choose, be seen as merely the embers of a hugely failed -- and yes, nearly extinct -- worldview.
Here is the hesitant optimism, the hint of the new, the tentative suggestion that all is not lost: By many measures, the worst of it is over. There really is light coming, a new awareness, a shift away from the bleakness and the rot and the wallowing in bland violence. Perhaps you can feel it. Or perhaps you need to be ready to feel it. Either way, it's there. You have but to do the most easy/difficult thing of all: you must look behind the veil, see the two dueling Americas, and make your choice.]
I'm 'hesitantly optimistic' about Iraq the same way I'm optimistic about the aftermath of a car crash: If we survive the impact, perhaps the injuries will heal over time. Maybe we'll just be crippled for life.
Housekeeping ...
I'm gonna be doing some major blogroll maintenance this weekend. If I haven't linked you and you feel it's an injustice or feel that I'm just a 'no short term memory pothead' and I forgot, drop me an email or leave a link in comments and I'll be happy to. Conservatives need not apply.
And while I'm maintaining, the Uniform of the Day will change to Woodland Digital for the fall.
And while I'm maintaining, the Uniform of the Day will change to Woodland Digital for the fall.
Saturday whorage
The last chapter of my novel The Fourth Estate is up at The Practical Press. Please don't forget to vote on which story I should post next. Also, if you're interested, my previous story The Captains is still available.
Whore your own in comments if you wish.
Whore your own in comments if you wish.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Why ...
Don't they listen to us? Or, The Beltway Three-Step. The Fabulous Mr. Greenwald has a great post up looking up our "blathering" punditocracy:
We know why the Chimp wants to drag this out. I just wonder why the press is helping him. Is it all about saving face? That went away a long time ago and the shit stains have become permanent.
...
And on and on. Everything they said in unison was completely false. And they do not even have the defense that it was difficult back then to see that it was false. Go read what virtually every blogger was saying back in May and it was painfully obvious that the Establishment was both deceiving itself and deceiving the country yet again. What they fear and hate more than anything is withdrawal from Iraq because staying at least allows them to avoid their own Day of Reckoning: when they are forced to accept how disastrous was the war that they all enabled. [my em]
...
We know why the Chimp wants to drag this out. I just wonder why the press is helping him. Is it all about saving face? That went away a long time ago and the shit stains have become permanent.
Surge 'n Stab
Good name for a cocktail, huh? Paul Krugman with today's 'must read':
Shorter: Bush's bros are going around him and his failed policy to get theirs.
Please read the rest. See also Dolchstoss Republicans.
To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.
Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”
No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.
Shorter: Bush's bros are going around him and his failed policy to get theirs.
Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.
Please read the rest. See also Dolchstoss Republicans.
This is why we'll never leave ...
Because you know we're only there for one reason:
Because, you know, the people of the region have seen how we'veexploited them shared their oil for the last century. They've seen how our policies have empowered dictators and robber barons enlightened leaders to govern the region.
Of course it's one of thedemands benchmarks the Chimp has insisted on to assure Iraq is a 'democracy'. It's obvious as we see how big corporations suck the capital from our fleeting democracy make the standard of living in our model democracy so high.
Pay no attention to the demands for withdrawal. We're staying until wesuck every drop of oil out from under the sand are assured the Iraqis have a working democracy so Halliburton, Exxon/Mobil the Iraqi people can experience how it feels to be fucked dry by the super rich who need more of our money to prolong their lifestyle the benefits of a democratic republic, just as we have over the past 6 years.
Fuck going home. The lives of our troops and innocent Iraqismean nothing compared to the profits to be realized by stealing the oil are a small price to pay to assure an American hegemony freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
BAGHDAD, Sept. 12 — A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government here.
...
Because, you know, the people of the region have seen how we've
...
The oil law — which would govern how oil fields are developed and managed — is one of several benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressing the Iraqis to meet as a sign that they are making headway toward creating an effective government.
...
Of course it's one of the
Pay no attention to the demands for withdrawal. We're staying until we
Fuck going home. The lives of our troops and innocent Iraqis
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Petraeus tries to un-step on weenie...
An Offer He Couldn't Refuse?
Talking Points Memo:
No shit.
Talking Points Memo:
Remember that unrehearsed flash of candor where Gen. Petraeus said he didn't know whether being in Iraq was making America safer? And then later he 'set the record straight'?
Joe Klein told Chris Matthews that he thought that during the recess in testimony Petraeus got an angry call from the White House telling him to set the record straight. Take a look ...
It sounds like this was an inference on Klein's part. But it sounds like a sound one.
No shit.
Can Rep. McHenry's Hostel for Strapping Young Republican Lads survive this?
Go read Jesus' General's letter to Mitch McConnell. Liquid alert.
Do we know if JC Christian is just Rude Pundit with his collar on backwards?
I'm going to be blunt. By buying into the libislamunistfascist spin about Larry Craig being a homosexual, you are destroying the party's ability to retake the Senate for decades to come. Larry Craig is not a homosexual. He's told us that. He's just as heterosexual as you and Lindsey Graham. You shouldn't have tried to force him to resign. He deserved to be treated the same way you treated Sen. Vitter, who admitted to breaking the law by paying a harlot to change his diaper--that is to say, you should have given Sen. Craig your full support.
I understand that after hearing stories about Sen. Craig sucking anonymous little soldiers in restrooms across this great nation, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that he might be dancing with Dorothy. But think about it. Isn't it just as likely that this very heterosexual married man was looking for something his wife was unable to provide for him: a hot, throbbing slab of hard salami to swallow? We've all been there haven't we? We want something that our wives can't give, so we exercise our patriarchal privilege to get it elsewhere.
But now that you've adopted the Democratic frame that such behavior is homosexual in nature, you've jeopardized the careers of a lot of good, anti-homosexual politicians who are also rumored to be looking outside their marriage for a little sausage slurping action, good men like Sen. Lindsey Graham, Representatives David Dreier and Patrick McHenry, and even yourself.
Do we know if JC Christian is just Rude Pundit with his collar on backwards?
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