Um, no. Not really.
But while we’re on the subject, batshit-crazy NRO-welfare recipient K-Lo opines:
A totally crazy Saturday-morning thought: Wouldn’t George W. Bush make an awesome high-school government teacher?
Once again, K-Lo is guilty of epic understatment when she describes this particular synaptic phenomena (which she mistakenly describes as “thought”) as “totally crazy.”
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.
McClatchy nee Knight-Ridder is once again out in front reporting on the Bush Administration’s malfeasance. On the front page of the Washington Bureau’s web page:
The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.
“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” he wrote.
Buried in the Washington Post’s site:
In a statement accompanying the report, retired Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Army’s first official investigation on Abu Ghraib, said the new evidence suggested a “systematic regime of torture” inside U.S.-run detention camps.
I guess that’s what happens when you suckle up to the powers that be, and later lay off many of your best reporters, especially the ones who didn’t join a myopic editorial staff which still maintains that Bush was telling the truth about those non-existent WMDs and honestly relied on faked and blatantly flawed evidence in pimping the war to the American people like a bunch of Madison Avenue ad men.
PREDICTION: If other major news media pick up this story, Taguba will be labeled by the Right as “disgruntled.” Just because, you know, he was fired by Rumsfeld for making too thorough an investigation.
Oh yes she did:
Clinton compares the Florida and Michigan fight to civil rights movement.
Hillary Clinton compared her effort to seat Florida and Michigan delegates to epic American struggles, including those to free the slaves and win the right to vote for blacks and women.
“This work to extend the franchise to all of our citizens is a core mission of the modern Democratic party,” she said. “From signing the Voting Rights Act and fighting racial discrimination at the ballot box to lowering the voting age so those old enough to fight and die in war would have the right to choose their commander in chief, to fighting for multi-lingual ballots so you can make your voice heard no matter what language you speak.”
Just appalling. There ought to a law similar to Godwin’s law when self-interested egomaniacs invoke the civil rights movement to further their own obsessive quests for power.
Call it “Sharpton’s Law,” or something.
According to the White House:
The White House on Tuesday dismissed an Israeli media report that President Bush intends to attack Iran before his term ends in January.
“An article in today’s Jerusalem Post about the president’s position on Iran that quotes unnamed sources — quoting unnamed sources — is not worth the paper it’s written on,” the White House said in a statement hours after the Israeli newspaper published the report on its Web site.
The Jerusalem Post article cited an Israeli Army Radio report that quoted a “senior official in Jerusalem” saying a “senior member of the president’s entourage” claimed Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney thought military action was called for against Tehran.
But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were opposed, the official told Army Radio, according to the newspaper.
The message from Press Secretary Dana Perino is here.
Sunday’s UK Times reported that Petraeus is expected to testify that Iran joined Sadr’s men fighting in Basra:
IRANIAN forces were involved in the recent battle for Basra, General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, is expected to tell Congress this week.
Military and intelligence sources believe Iranians were operating at a tactical command level with the Shi’ite militias fighting Iraqi security forces; some were directing operations on the ground, they think.
Petraeus intends to use the evidence of Iranian involvement to argue against any reductions in US forces.
Dr Daniel Goure, a defence analyst at the Lexington Institute in Virginia, said: “There is no question that Petraeus will be tough on Iran. It is one thing to withdraw troops when there is purely sectarian fighting but it is another thing if it leaves the Iranians to move in.”
~~~
A senior Iraqi official who met Petraeus last week said, “It will be difficult to show that the situation is improving.” Another Iraqi source described the US general as “furious” that al-Maliki moved against the militias into Basra without consultation and had to rely on US forces to bail him out.
Abu Ahmed, a senior military commander with the Awakening, the Sunni tribal movement cooperating with US forces, said progress was largely the result of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army ceasefire.
“When the Mahdi Army decides to resume its activities, neither the American troops nor the Iraqi government will be able to stop it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports that the British government — which bases its declining contingent in Basra province, near the Iranian border, is fearful that Petraeus will push for military action against Iran:
British fear US commander is beating the drum for Iran strikes
British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government.
A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment. In closely watched testimony in Washington next week, Gen Petraeus will state that the Iranian threat has risen as Tehran has supplied and directed attacks by militia fighters against the Iraqi state and its US allies.
~~~
“Petraeus is going to go very hard on Iran as the source of attacks on the American effort in Iraq,” a British official said. “Iran is waging a war in Iraq. The idea that America can’t fight a war on two fronts is wrong, there can be airstrikes and other moves,” he said.
“Petraeus has put emphasis on America having to fight the battle on behalf of Iraq. In his report he can frame it in terms of our soldiers killed and diplomats dead in attacks on the Green Zone.”
Tension between Washington and Tehran is already high over Iran’s covert nuclear programme. The Bush administration has not ruled out military strikes.
In remarks interpreted as signalling a change in his approach to Iran, Gen Petraeus last week hit out at the Iranian leadership. “The rockets that were launched at the Green Zone were Iranian-provided, Iranian-made rockets,” he said. “All of this in complete violation of promises made by President Ahmadinejad and the other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts.”
Just what the doctor ordered — another war in the Middle East!
If Petraeus does make the claim that Iranians were involved in the Basra fighting, it better be backed with hard evidence. Like a prisoner or a body, maybe. No torpedo boat attacks on the Maddox after Bush’s track record for phony casus belli.
I can’t wait until this dumb son of a bitch is out of office:
President George W. Bush will acknowledge on Wednesday the Iraq war has been fought at a high cost but will insist a U.S. troop buildup has opened the door to a “major strategic victory” against Islamic militants.
“The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable,” Bush will say in an upbeat assessment of the U.S.-led campaign in a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the war, according to excerpts released on Tuesday.
~~~
“The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around — it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror,” Bush will say.
Mission fucking accomplished all over again.
Obviously, President Dumbshit hasn’t a clue about what the word “strategic” means. He invaded a country with no connection to al Qaida and its network of Islamic terrorists in order to topple a regime which was both frightened of and hostile to radical Islamists it viewed as a serious threat, and who in turn viewed Iraq’s corrupt, brutal, Baathist dictator as a heretic marked for death.
By toppling the regime and destabilizing the country and the region, Bush ignited a series of violent reactions which, according to our own National Intelligence Estimate, inspired a new series of Islamist militants and eased al Qaida’s task of recruiting more jihadists by the thousands.
Now, after an investment numbering in the trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, the commitment of the vast majority of our military has marginally stabilized a largely failed political state in Iraq, a country which is still beset by widespread violence which can be viewed as a positive development only in light of the even more appalling levels of violence during the prior year of our occupation.
So, basically, vis a vis the Islamic militants, we’ve killed many of those our actions helped to create, we’re still militarily bogged down in Iraq, and the numbers of terrorist attacks as tallied by our own counterterrorist agencies worldwide are now measured by the tens of thousands, geometrically higher than the two hundred and eight terrorist attacks which occurred world wide in 2002, before we invaded Iraq.
So, to sum up, we’ve expended a ton of resources, turned millions of Iraqis into refugees, lost 4000 of our finest young people, and the number of terrorist attacks world wide jumped from 208 in 2002 to over 14,000 by our own last tally.
And this stupid motherfucker calls this a strategic victory?
MORE: As Bush chumbles moronically about “strategic victory” in Iraq, another strategic failure there — the latest attempt at reconciliation between warring factions is an utter failure:
A no-reconciliation conference
Influential Shiite and Sunni groups boycotted a conference on Iraqi reconciliation Tuesday, as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney traveled north to meet with Kurdish leaders.
Members of the main Sunni Arab parliament coalition, Tawafiq, refused to attend the two-day meeting because of complaints about the Shiite-dominated government.
Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr’s bloc walked out of the conference, saying it did not want a ceremonial presence. The same went for a contingent led by Sheik Ali Hatem Sulaiman, a representative of Sunni Muslim tribes that rose up against the Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The boycott was symptomatic of the rifts and enmity among Iraqi parties, which are organized along ethnic and religious lines and have delayed progress in power sharing between the country’s Shiite majority and the formerly ruling Sunnis.
~~~
Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government has dwindled since last summer to a core group of Shiite and Kurdish politicians. But the Shiite prime minister’s relationship with the Kurds has become strained over matters such as Iraq’s stalled oil legislation and the country’s northern boundaries.
Maliki’s detractors describe him as being hindered by an inner circle that does not like to share power and is fiercely sectarian. His supporters argue that he is trying to build a strong government and that other parties are standing in the way for selfish reasons.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Igor Volodin believes vodka is no more harmful than chocolate. He is proud to be the first Russian to produce the spirit in a special women’s version, designed to be sipped with salad after a workout in the gym.
Touted as a glamour product for upwardly mobile women in booming Russia, Damskaya or “Ladies” vodka worries doctors, who fear a fresh wave of female alcoholics in a country already suffering one of the world’s worst drink problems.
Or, Tim Russert, buffoon or dupe?
First of all, hola to Martini Revolution readers. I’ve been on sabbatical, hiatus, vacation, winter break, busy doing important shit which actually pays the bills for my magnificent estate. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I have a job, of sorts, and was moving to a new office. So I haven’t had time to enlighten you with my brilliant commentary, okay? I feel bad about this, but not as bad as I would feel if my daughter’s tuition came due and I couldn’t cut a check.
But back to the topic at hand: John McCain’s de-evolution from a principled maverick into a Neocon-propaganda spewing caricature.
Juan Cole spends a bit of time deconstructing McCain’s pitiful and disingenuous attempt at a gotchya on Obama’s response to a Russert hypothetical postulating al Qaeda’s seizure of Iraq at some point in the future:
‘ MR. RUSSERT: . . . do you reserve a right as American president to go back into Iraq, once you have withdrawn, with sizable troops in order to quell any kind of insurrection or civil war?
SEN. OBAMA: . . . Now, I always reserve the right for the president — as commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad. So that is true, I think, not just in Iraq, but that’s true in other places. That’s part of my argument with respect to Pakistan. . .’
As Cole points out, the question was a hypothetical about future events occurring after an American withdrawal from Iraq, a nuance Sen. Corkscrew blithely ignored. Cole also points out the disingenousness of Russert’s hypothetical and McCain’s premise that al Qaeda was capable of establishing or sustaining a viable regime in Iraq, or even a friendly regime similar to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the allegation that he makes about there being ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ that could well take over the country is part lie and part insanity. The Sunni Arabs are no more than 20% of the Iraqi population. How could a tiny minority from within them take over the whole?
The technical definition of al-Qaeda is operatives who have sworn fealty to Usama bin Laden. There were only a few hundred of them. I doubt whether more than a handful of such individuals are in Iraq.
But McCain’s intellectual dishonesty or sheer, mind-numbing stupidity goes deeper than that, because even among Iraq’s Sunnis, Osama bin Ladin and al Qaeda are widely despised.
Polls conducted at the end of 2006 showed that:
Overall 94 percent [of Iraqis] have an unfavorable view of al Qaeda, with 82 percent expressing a very unfavorable view. Of all organizations and individuals assessed in this poll, it received the most negative ratings. The Shias and Kurds show similarly intense levels of opposition, with 95 percent and 93 percent respectively saying they have very unfavorable views.
~~~
Views of Osama bin Laden are only slightly less negative. Overall 93 percent have an unfavorable view, with 77 percent very unfavorable. Very unfavorable views are expressed by 87 percent of Kurds and 94 percent of Shias. Here again, the Sunnis are negative, but less unequivocally—71 percent have an unfavorable view (23% very), and 29 percent a favorable view (3% very).
Get that? Iraqis as a whole hate al Qaeda and Osama. And for good reason: al Qaeda views Iraq’s 80% Sunni Shia (thanks Andrew) and Kurdish populations as apostates and enemies.
But even among the 20% Sunni population which Osama might troll for support, he and his organization are mainly reviled. This is predictable, as many Iraq Sunnis were Baathists, or simply more secular than the fundamentalist al Qaeda, and also because Iraq’s Sunnis grew to resent being murdered by al Qaeda’s small contingent of foreign cutthroats and murderers. While the administration and its pro-war flacks like McCain have tried to portray the “Anbar Awakening” to the surge or increased American military activity in those regions, this is simply untrue. Sunni rejection of Al Qaeda is typically accompanied by more of a hands off approach, turning away from confrontation with Sunni groups, and arming their former enemies while giving them more autonomy and less interference from US or Iraqi Central government forces. The awakening movements have succeeded largely by lowering our profile in those areas.
As the mission in Iraq grew more costly, more bungled, and more protracted, Bush and the few remaining war pimps like McCain have struggled to put forward a rationale for the fiasco, stubborn and unwilling as they are to admit the most monumental fucking mistake in the history of American foreign policy. The rationales which were put forward before the war, destroying the phantasmagorical WMDs, and liberating a grateful population to establish a secular, pro-western democracy are, as the late William F. Buckley not, irretrievable failures.
The last resort is fear — and the attempt to tie the whole misbegotten, ill-executed Iraq failure into the meme of 9/11 and the war against terror. It may be disingenuous, and unconscionably stupid for Bush and McCain to present the war in this light, but it is all too predictable given the complete absence of remorse for ruinous decisions and utter lack of intellectual integrity. McCain, for better or worse, has saddled himself to being pro-war, and he intends to ride it into the ground.
