So he’s too busy scratching himself to write any more of this bullshit. For the good of the country.
The only question is whether Brooks is wise and self-aware enough to know that, and still able to periodically extract his cranium from his transverse colon.
Why this putz thinks he has any credibility with respect to who Obama might pick as a running mate. . . .
By GOP political operatives attempting to seize the US Department of Justice, who are not going to be prosecuted:
Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Tuesday rejected the idea of criminally prosecuting former Justice Department employees who improperly used political litmus tests in hiring decisions, saying he had already taken strong internal steps in response to a “painful” episode.
Two recent reports from the Justice Department inspector general and its internal ethics office have found that about a half-dozen officials at the Justice Department — all but one now gone — systematically rejected candidates with perceived “liberal” backgrounds for what were supposed to be non-political jobs and sought out conservative Republicans.
Meanwhile, the ground seized by this illegal invasion is being gifted to the invaders:
Mr. Mukasey also said it would be unfair, and possibly illegal, for the department to go back and reassign or dismiss those lawyers and other employees who were hired in part because they were seen as trusted conservatives. “Two wrongs do not make a right,” he said.
Got that? Mukasey is not going to prosecute the political hacks who violated the law and hired less qualified political cronies selected for their political views and loyalty to the GOP cause — sort of a retarded Fuhrer principle. And he’s going to protect the illegally-hired underqualified cronies and GOP loyalists, thereby insuring that the original objectives of the illegal scheme are enduring achievements, because they are now protected by the same Civil Service laws which their very hiring violated.
“Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”
“That’s some catch, that catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
– Joseph Heller, Catch-22
(via Sadly, No!)
THE SOLUTION! (from Phoenician in comments):
“Don’t fire them. Reassign them to the Green Zone.”
Somebody write Mukasey. . .
“McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence” = “John McCain is Lying his ass off”
McCain’s latest attack ad accuses Obama of trying to turn a visit to troops into a media circus — despite the fact that Obama planned to visit troops in Germany unaccompanied by reporters, cameras, or campaign staff. So how does the press report the untruthfulness of McCain’s scurrilous attacks?
McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence
For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.
The essence of McCain’s allegation is that Obama planned to take a media entourage, including television cameras, to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany during his week-long foreign trip, and that he canceled the visit when he learned he could not do so. “I know that, according to reports, that he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers,” McCain said Monday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”
The Obama campaign has denied that was the reason he called off the visit. In fact, there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser, whose status as a campaign staff member sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event.
“Absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said in an e-mail after McCain’s comments to Larry King.
There’s plenty of evidence, however — the problem is the evidence all points to the fact that McCain is lying and — like his honorless predecessor — is using the troops as political pawns. Even after the “lack of evidence” to support the allegation, i.e., the falsity of McCain’s attack, has become clear, the word from the McCain camp is:
McCain’s advisers said they do not intend to back down from the charge, believing it an effective way to create a “narrative” about what they say is Obama’s indifference toward the military.
Got that? Johnny McStraightalk’s campaign believes that lying to the American People is an effective way to create a narrative.
At least the New York Times is starting to notice:
Like Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain confuses opposition to an unnecessary war with a lack of spine and an unwillingness to use force when the nation is truly in danger. Obviously, Mr. Obama is untested as a commander in chief and his trip was intended to reassure voters. But Mr. McCain is as untested in this area as Mr. Obama, and it is hard to imagine a worse role model than the one Mr. McCain seems to be adopting: President Bush.
Many voters are wondering whether a McCain presidency would be an extension of Mr. Bush’s two disastrous terms. If the way Mr. McCain is running his campaign these days is an indication, Americans don’t have to wait until next January for the answer to that one.
Though early in the campaign, McCain is reaching the very lows Bush strived for, in terms of loathesomeness and dishonesty. I wonder how McCain’s illegitimate mulatto love child feels about that?
Shorter Verbatim Bill Kristol:
Life may be full of disappointments. But it’s also full of surprises.
Kristol engages is a classic logical fallacy: False Dilemma.
A false dilemma occurs when a limited number of options (usually two) is given, while in reality there are more options.
Here, Kristol implicitly postulates between the options of disappointment or surprises. With characteristic obtuseness, our neocon twit fails to account for a third obvious possiblity — an outcome that is both a surprise and a disappointment.
Like, say, finding out that the notion that Shia may have difficulty coexisting Sunnis in Iraq and violent sectarian struggle could break out in that country is not merely “pop sociology.” Presumably, even to an immoral asshole like Kristol that would be both a disappointment and a surprise — even if the disappointment, from Kristol’s standpoint, stems more from the fact he was made to look like a fucking imbecile than the tens of thousands of lives wiped out by his and his fellow neoconservatives’ miscalculation.
Especially poignant because deconstructing Kristol, he’s referring to an Obama victory as the “disappointment” and a McCain win as a “surprise.”
Pattycakes is upset because others aren’t grieving over the death of vicious, unrepentant, racist assholes he admires:
P.S. I firmly believe “TBogg” wouldn’t be this happy if the dead man were Osama bin Laden, instead of Jesse Helms.
P.S.: I firmly believe that Patterico is a vapid, soulless cocksucker who breathes new meaning into Samuel Johnson’s old saying, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Of course, if I’m wrong, it’s easily proven. All you need to do is dig up all his old posts denouncing vapid, soulless douchebag cocksuckers who hijack patriotism like a methed-out wise guy to use it like a cudgel.
Of course Patterico, being the disingenuous prick that he is, ignored the prefatory quotes to TBogg’s eulogy:
“The University of Negroes and Communists” - Jesse Helms 1950
“They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro.” - Jesse Helms 1968
( …but he wasn’t a racist )
“The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian.” - Jesse Helms 1995
“Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.” - Jesse Helms 1995
“Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING and MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.” - Jesse Helms 1996
Confronted with evidence that D’Aubuisson directed death squads to murder civilians, Helms made it clear that some things are more important than human life. “All I know,” he replied, “is that D’Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious.”
Assholes like Patterico are deeply averse to context, aren’t they?
Scott adds:
The symbols that stick most prominently in my mind are his use of the blue slip to prevent the integration of the Fourth Circuit and “whistling ‘Dixie’ while standing next to Senator Carol Moseley-Braun.
Just the kind of spirited racist scumbaggery that tugs at a faux-patriot’s heart.
Trainwreck Media lead dumbkopf Roger Simon:
Whatever one thinks about the neocons, they had virtually the only program, the only idea of how to right the world after 9/11.
Me:
If they have such a program of how to right the world, as Simon claims, it’s about time they tell us what it is, and try to implement it in place of the humongous clusterfuck of death, incompetence, and costly ruin they’ve inflicted on the US and the world the last 7 years.
My suspicion, however it that the program of how to right the world about which Simon speaks is every bit as imaginary as the non-existent Iraqi WMDs Roger claimed was transported through the mythical tunnels into Syria with the help of the Russians.
Via Instaputz.
The invasion of Iraq has destabilized Iraq and brought Shiite political parties with long and close ties to Iran into power in Iraq, while destroying the power of the Sunni and Baathist enemies of Iran. So all in all, it’s worked out pretty well for the mullahs, but was this awful result mere serendipity?
Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?
WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.
A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.
The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.
Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.
This follows the classic pattern of the Bush administration: the fuck-up (being the stooge of a foreign intel op) followed by the cover-up (killing the investigation into the matter).
Front and center as the witless conduits of foreign intelligence efforts are the familiar names of two of the leading dimbulb warpimps responsible for pushing the Iraq invasion:
According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein’s archenemy.
Ledeen, who regularly receives foot massages from Trainwreck’s Roger Simon, was really on top of things, though:
When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen’s contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were “nefarious and unreliable,” the Senate committee reported.
Bear this in mind the next time Ledeen advocates nuclear strikes on Iran.
The name Ahmed Chalabi should fit into this story. Chalabi was the Iraqi exile who was promoted by the Neocon numbnuts at the Project for a New American Century (Bill Kristol’s intellectual sewer) as Iraq’s George Washington. As I write today, I find the PNAC’s website reads:
“This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible,”
but the site once contained the PNAC’s lengthy hagiography of Chalabi, and an homage to his integrity and the value of his intelligence apparatus.
Of course, this was before it was determined that the information Chalabi provided to gullible neocon warhawks was purposely false and misleading, based on unreliable (and often drunken) sources, before Chalabi was accused of spying for Iran, and before Chalabi’s most recent notoriety, when earlier this month he was fired from his government post due to “his murky ties to Iran, including leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country’s internal security force.” An earlier Salon.com piece on “How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons” touched upon both Chalabi’s influence with the PNAC hawks who steered administration towards invading Iraq, and his ties with Iran’s leadership. A money quote: “”Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat,” from former ally Marc Zell.
Bellicose, feckless and duped is no way to run our foreign policy.
But “Janus-faced” and “hypocritical” don’t begin to describe this person.
