McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin for Vice President took place after his operatives nixed Tom Ridge and Joe Lieberman and after a rushed, half-assed vetting process which the McCain camp is now trying to correct:

A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

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Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state’s public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge.

Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin’s background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice. The campaign was still calling Republican operatives as late as Sunday night asking them to go to Alaska to deal with the unexpected candidacy of Ms. Palin.

It seems that McCain is trying to emulate the Bush information-free decision making process. The Decider II. And of course, under the Bush method, you follow the fuck up with the lies:

Mr. McCain’s advisers said repeatedly on Monday that Ms. Palin was “thoroughly vetted,” a process that would have included a review of all financial and legal records as well as a criminal background check. A McCain aide said the campaign was well aware of the ethics investigation and had looked into it.

How thoroughly vetted was she? Judge for yourself:

“They didn’t speak to anyone in the Legislature, they didn’t speak to anyone in the business community,” said Lyda Green, the State Senate president, who lives in Wasilla, where Ms. Palin served as mayor.

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Ms. Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

“I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called,” Ms. Phillips said. “I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.”

The current mayor of Wasilla, Dianne M. Keller, said she had not heard of any efforts to look into Ms. Palin’s background. And Randy Ruedrich, the state Republican Party chairman, said he knew nothing of any vetting that had been conducted.

State Senator Hollis French, a Democrat who is directing the ethics investigation, said that no one asked him about the allegations. “I heard not a word, not a single contact,” he said.

And per today’s Los Angeles Times, Sarah Palin was a member of a secessionist political party which has for years attempted to obtain a plebescite which would allow Alaska to become an independent country:

Palin could face questions in on other facets of her past, such as her 1990s membership in the Alaskan Independence Party, a group that has pushed for more than 30 years to give Alaskans a vote on whether to secede from the union.

From the Alaskan Independence Party’s web site:

The Alaskan Independence Party’s goal is the vote we were entitled to in 1958, one choice from among the following four alternatives:

1) Remain a Territory.
2) Become a separate and Independent Nation.
3) Accept Commonwealth status.
4) Become a State.

The call for this vote is in furtherance of the dream of the Alaskan Independence Party’s founding father, Joe Vogler, which was for Alaskans to achieve independence under a minimal government, fully responsive to the people, promoting a peaceful and lawful means of resolving differences.

A quote from Joe Vogler, the AIP’s self-described ‘founding father’: “I’m an Alaskan, not an American. I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions.”

Nice friends [add: and husband] ya got there, Sarah.

McCain picked an inexperienced politician who wants creationism taught in schools, who once aspired to have Alaska leave the very Union which, as Vice President, she would have to swear an oath to protect. This is clearly not the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.

McCain’s campaign is claiming that its hands were tied because of the need for secrecy — which is pretty obvious spin and bullshit. Obama managed to vet several possible choices for Vice President. It seems Johnny McFuckup was more interested in keeping his selection a surprise than insuring his selection was wise. No doubt he will point out he went 5 and a half years without a maid, let alone a vice presidential candidate.

Ineptitude, thy name is John McCain.

“Which is it going to be, that’s all? The conspiracy or the fuck-up?” - Le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy.

The New York Times has an article on Condi Rice’s visit to Georgia, just a month before that country made the unfortunate decision to roll its forces into South Ossetia.

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

~~~~

In the five days since the simmering conflict between Russia and Georgia erupted into war, Bush administration officials have been adamant in asserting that they warned the government in Tbilisi not to let Moscow provoke it into a fight — and that they were surprised when their advice went unheeded. Right up until the hours before Georgia launched its attack late last week in South Ossetia, Washington’s top envoy for the region, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, and other administration officials were warning the Georgians not to allow the conflict to escalate.

But as Ms. Rice’s two-pronged visit to Tbilisi demonstrates, the accumulation of years of mixed messages may have made the American warnings fall on deaf ears.

So Condi’s flunkies are insisting she warned Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili not to use force in Ossetia and provoke the Russians — not during any formal meeting but at a “private dinner.” How does that work? “This wine is lovely — but be careful if you roll your spetsnatz into Ossetia.”

And when signs appeared that a Georgian military move into Ossetia was in the offing, of course Rice immediately took personal action to prevent a catastrophic clash between Georgia and its massive neighbor, right? Well, um, no — not personally.

Ms. Rice did not get on the phone with her Georgian counterpart on Thursday, but left it to Mr. Fried to deliver the “don’t go in” message, a senior administration official said. “I don’t think it would have made any difference if she had,” the official said. “They knew the message was coming from the top.”

Well, fuck me. They “knew the message was from the top,” and yet Rice was too busy (was she shopping for shoes again?) to pick up a phone and call Saakashvili, who in just a day or so was on television delivering an impassioned plea for Western intervention against the Russians. You think the actual Secretary of State engaging in an actual discussion might have made a difference?

Maybe so, maybe not. But Georgia’s action shortly upon the heels of Madame Secretary’s visit has all the markings of yet another Rice fuck up.

I wonder if all the Rightwingers who give sole credit to Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War, which was the culmination of 40 years of policies of containment originated by Truman and Marshall, and a decade of detente initiated by Nixon and continued by Carter, are going to be so quick, in light of the former Soviet Union’s reemergence as a aggressivie, hegemonic militaristic power, to blame Bush and his epic failure of leadership for losing the post-Cold War? After all, by fracturing the Western Alliance, and squandering US military and diplomatic capital on Iraq, while reifying the legitimacy of using unilateral military force against non-threat nations for the furtherance of national interest, he has certainly made Putin’s decision to attack the Georgian Republic a far easier one. With America’s political capital in the world depleted, and it’s military stretched to continue a 5+ year war in Iraq, Bush has eliminated potential obstacles to Putin’s policies.

Not if Neocon-warmonger and Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol is any indication. Kristol, whose predilection for fatuous prediction was epitomized by his assurances that warnings of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia Iraqis was mere “pop sociology” not only fails to mention the contribution of Bush’s successive failures in Iraq as placing the US at any disadvantage vis-a-vis the Russian invasion, he vapidly claims that Iraq has strengthened America’s ability to project power and succor democracy:

The further good news is that 2008 has been, in one respect, an auspicious year for freedom and democracy. In Iraq, we and our Iraqi allies are on the verge of a strategic victory over the jihadists in what they have called the central front of their struggle.

Of course he neglects to mention that there were no jihadists in Iraq prior to our invasion, save those hiding in the North outside the control of Saddam’s regime, or those hiding from Saddam’s brutal but sectarian Baathist secret police — not when he can claim another Mission Accomplished moment.

Rather than assign any blame to Bush’s witless and counterproductive policies — which of course he and his PNAC cronies urged upon the administration — Kristol is quick to assign blame to the next country he wants President McBushII to invade — Iran:

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

Kristol mendaciously ignores the other elephant in the Cooper article — the role which Iraq has played in dissipating US influence and resources:

Russia’s emerging aggressiveness is now also timed with America’s preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan, and the looming confrontation with Iran. These counterbalancing considerations mean that Moscow is in the driver’s seat, administration officials acknowledged.

“We’ve placed ourselves in a position that globally we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything,” Mr. Friedman of Stratfor said. “One would think under those circumstances, we’d shut up.”

Of course the “We” here who placed the US in a position where “we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything” is George Bush and feckless neocons like Bill Kristol, who insisted we’d be greeted as liberators, that the Iraq war would pay for itself, and that centuries-old sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions which still threaten to tear Iraq asunder were mere pop sociology.

So it’s this for Reagan, and that for Bush. Reagan won the Cold War, but then Iran lost it.

MORE: Kristol, of course, trotted out the standard Munich analogy, or rather mis-analogy, and fellow PNAC-traveller Robert Kagan does the same in the WaPo, only with a bizarre twist — he can’t recall the details of Nazi Germany’s pretextual accusations against Czechoslovakia which precipitated the Sudetenland crisis, ostensibly because Nazi Germany’s contrived dispute with the Czechs was “morally ambiguous.”

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

I recall the details of the Sudeten Crisis — and they weren’t morally ambiguous in the slightest. Nazi agents organized a minority of ethnic Germans with the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia into bands of thugs who simultaneously terrorized politically opponents and Slavic neighbors, while lodging false reports of political oppression and physical brutality by Czech police and groups against Czech citizens of German descent, which were sensationalized and amplified by the Nazi propaganda machine in papers like Der Sturmer. The ostensible leader of the Czech Sudeten Germans, Konrad Heinlein, was taking orders directly from the Nazis with an eye towards the Nazis’ ultimate goal of stripping Czechoslovakia of its formidable border fortresses in the mountains, and thus facilitating its ultimate dismemberment and absorption into the Reich. As Rob points out, the situation with respect to South Ossetia actually is beset with considerable ambiguity.

The fact that Kagan views Hitler’s contrived accusations against the Czechs and the dispute largely manufactured by Nazi agent provocateurs which precipitated Munich as “morally ambiguous” could have enormous explanative potential, given the moral vacuousness of neoconservative policies.

Seven years after the fact, an untidy and unsolved terrorist attack is seemingly resolved in a neat, tidy, dead and silent bundle.

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

Maybe it just is this simple: a man with a God complex playing with anthrax. But if he sent the letters, wouldn’t the writing be identifiable? And why, if all this evidence was so compelling, was there all the effort to pin it on the other (fall) guy?

The sad thing is that, after 8 years of this fucking bullshit, after Monica Goodling-gate, after Alberto Gonzalez, after the complete and illegal politicization of law enforcement and the Justice Department, after lie after lie coming from this administration, we cannot take a fucking thing they say at face value.

If Bush can lie about wiretaps needing warrants, and Rove can order a Democratic Governor prosecuted on flimsy charges and imprisoned beyond any sensible period of time on those charges, who is to say these people can’t pin a crime on a nobody and drive him to suicide. Or even worse.

Add McMakingShitUp: Think Progress reminds us that McCain said at the time, on national televsion, that the anthrax came from Iraq:

MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine …. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase — if I could just make one, very quickly — the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.

And he’s trying to sell us on trusting his leadership? Our own ISG confirmed that Iraq had no anthrax or other bioweapons program at the time. Was there ever even a shred of evidence to support McCain’s allegation?

Astronaut Edgar Martin says “I Want to Believe”:

Moon-walker claims alien contact cover-up

FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens exist.
And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as ‘little people who look strange to us.’

~~~

“I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we’ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real,” Dr Mitchell said.

“It’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

“I’ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it’s been happening quite a bit.”

From Ben Smith. While the Bush Administration hurriedly pushed out a statement through Centcom claiming that Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s 16-month timeline for withdrawal which appeared in Der Spiegel was the result of a “mistranslation,” there’s one wee little problem: Der Spiegel has a policy of issuing transcripts to interviewees, like al Maliki, and allowing them to correct any mistakes prior to publication.

BushCo’s attempt to brush al Maliki’s statement under the rug reminds me of the indignant declaration of the title character in Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy:

Ah, you’ll have to learn to tell a lie properly. What’s the good of a lie if it’s seen through? When I tell a lie, no one can tell it from the gospel truth.

And that’s in English, so no translation needed.

The exact sort of thing McCain and his neocon advisors insist is impossible and will undermine all the “progress” 5+ years and $3,000,000,000,000 has bought. But this particular politician is the Prime Minister of Iraq:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has for the first time suggested establishing a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, a step that the Bush administration has long opposed.

Maliki raised the idea Monday during a visit to the United Arab Emirates, where he spoke with Arab ambassadors about a security pact being negotiated to determine the future U.S. military role in Iraq.

“The current trend is to reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or a memorandum of understanding to put a timetable on their withdrawal,” Maliki said, according to a statement released by his office. “In all cases, the basis for any agreement will be respect for the full sovereignty of Iraq.”

The comments reflect the political dilemma confronting Maliki and other members of his Shiite-led government. Their primary rival in upcoming provincial elections, Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is a leading critic of the American presence who has long called for a timetable, a position that is widely popular among Iraq’s majority Shiites.

Meanwhile, in a masterpiece of ill-timing, the WaPo’s increasingly pathetic editorial page applauds Obama for a supposed retreat from a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq — a position which Obama has not yet taken — which timetable, of course is what Maliki is seeking in order to allay domestic concerns among his constituents that the absence of a timetable augurs a permanent American presence, and threatens to undermine thin support for his government. Heckuva job, WaPo.

Associated Press: Iraq insists on withdrawal timetable for US troops

Iraq’s national security adviser said Tuesday his country will not accept any security deal with the United States unless it contains specific dates for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces.

The comments by Mouwaffak al-Rubaie were the strongest yet by an Iraqi official about the deal now under negotiation with U.S. officials. They came a day after Iraq’s prime minister first said publicly that he expects the pending troop deal with the United States to have some type of timetable for withdrawal.

McCain says that withdrawal cannot be be set “by an artificial timetable.” But the Iraqis are now insisting on a timetable. Maybe we can invade Iraq all over again, if McCain becomes president.

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.”

David Brooks:

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Winston Wolf:

Well, let’s not start suckin’ each other’s dicks quite yet. Phase one is complete, clean the car, which moves us right along to phase two, clean you two.

Reading Brooks’ column today, it’s clear that (put into The Wolf’s terms) he’s disregarded the advice of The Wolf and gone straight to sucking Bush and every other surge enthusiast’s dick. Phase one is complete — we’re now down to hundreds of political murders each month, instead of 2-3 thousand — but Iraq remains a patchwork of tribal, sectarian and ethnic divisions which the weak central government (from which Juan Cole reports another coalition party has withdrawn) remains unable to reconcile. The reduction of violence in Anbar has been accomplished by arming and paying former Sunni insurgents who have no fealty to the Shiite government in Baghdad. And never mind that the reduction in violence has been achieved in part due to the completion of ethnic cleansing which has resulted in 2.5 million internally displaced refugees, and a series of truces and ceasefires which periodically threaten to dissolve into more fratricidal violence on a massive scale. Pay no attention to the central government we are backing in Baghdad canoodling with Iran’s leadership and Iran exerting increasing influence in Iraq, by giving and withholding support for the various Iraqi Shiite factions, despite our emphasis on excluding Iran from Iraq’s power structure.

So here we are, with more troops in Iraq than we had pre-surge, negotiating an agreement to expand our presence from 30 to 58 bases on a indefinite basis, with no clear plan or clear path to ending our commitment in American lives and treasure in the foreseeable future.

Bush and Brooks are standing like Jules and Vincent, drenched in Marvin’s blood and brains, still without a plan that will get the car and Marvin out of sight and their own sorry asses cleaned up — or our troops out of Iraq in the next 10 years. Phase II or Phase III?? They’re too busy congratulating each other — not how The Wolf put it — to bother with that. . .

MORE: Right Blogostan is having an orgy of fellatial self-congratulation, but at least one conservative isn’t buying it. At the same time, a GAO report sheds more light on the administration’s ongoing political failures in Iraq:

While agreeing with the administration that violence has decreased sharply, a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many other goals Bush outlined a year and a half ago in the “New Way Forward” strategy remain unmet.

The report, after a bleak GAO assessment last summer, cited little improvement in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to act independently of the U.S. military, and noted that key legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament had not been implemented while other crucial laws had not been passed. The report also judged that key Iraqi ministries spent less of their allocated budgets last year than in previous years, and said that oil and electricity production had repeatedly not met U.S. targets.

I’ve been busy, but there are just too many worthy candidates, so I’ll go quickly

1. Steny Hoyer for enacting the Nuremburg Defense into US law for the first time.

2. Kalra Mauerova. I think we can rule out Mother-of-the-Year.

3. President Dumbshit, for his whole body of work. Oh, and the fact he’s a War Criminal.

4. The Boston Celtics. We hates them. May all their future draft picks be named “Len Bias.”

5. Bernard Goldberg. What a fucking tool.

6. Fred Hiatt. There aren’t enough cockpunches for the WaPo’s OpEd crew.

7. Jonah Goldberg. For being an idiot and an admitted viewer of bestiality pornography. We’d cock-punch Pantload more often, but hitting a target that small requires too much concentration and precision. We’re not Bruce Lee here, you know.

8. Larry Johnson. It’s not only all the crock of shit about the “Whitey” tape, it’s the ugliest fucking haircut in the history of humanity.

9. George Bush, again. For being an ignorant bastard with no manners. Without a dook of an idea about how to comport yourself public-wise.

10. Joe Lieberman. If he has a cock anymore.

11. Assrocket.

What do YOU think? Who do YOU think needs a good cock-punching?