Mojowire for 11.22; vol. 1, no. 33
MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
S9/ Supreme Beings of Leisure, Under the Gun
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master
intro with hendrix star spangled banner
J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire, Vol. 1, No. 33... I’m Mojo...
S. And I’m Sean, it’s Saturday, November 22, 2003, year 3 of the neocon captivity, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...
J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:
S. First this morning, it was not a PhiBetaKappa week for the neocon hive brain, starting with another run at discredited stories of Saddam and Osama as bed-buddies and ended with an outright admission by senior Defense Department adviser that the war was completely unlawful.
J. Next, with a court somewhere finally making the inevitable conclusion that Gays and Lesbians are people just like everyone else, the political landscape shifted treacherously under the feet of the left and the right. We say to our progressive brethren, chill out, this really *is* good news.
S. Then, with this week’s dose of horror, Dr. Strychnine explains why average Americans need to pay attention to the growing scandal in mutual fund trading, and reads the bones on what it could auger for middle class boomers and older ‘X’ers still delusional enough to think they’ll be able to retire on cue with 401k plans.
J. Finally, we have a go at the Republican’s “final solution” on medicare that was passed near dawn by a razor thin margin in the House of Represenatives and will, in all likelyhood spell the beginning of the end for one of the most successful social programs of all time.
So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...
fade in more hendrix star spangled banner for five or six count then back out again
AL-IRAQEDA REDUX
J. For those of you who missed it last week, The Weekly Standard in a fit of breathless euphoria waxed absolutely apoplectic regarding a memo from the Defense Department that absolutely, finally and once and for all detailed the complicated and in depth working relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Standard, went on FoxNews Sunday with his chest puffed out about as far as it would go in a primitive male dominance display whipped out his pathetic and flacid excuse for a news chalootie and proclaimed himself to be Yao-King-of-the-Rock!
And even on FoxNews, this kind of behavior was immediately the subject of derisive laughter... Why? Because even they knew that this would end with the story blowing up in Barnes’ face like a cheap Acme Road-Runner-Seeking-Dynamite-Rocket-Deluxe in the hands of the Coyote.
The wheels have officially come off the war in Iraq for the West Wing speechwriters passing themselves off as policy wonks. There is now nothing for them to do but put their heads down between their knees and wait for the wreckage to slide to a halt.
There have been a few developments in the past week that demonstrate the political chaos generated by the war and portrays the frightening level to which our political leadership is taking its cues from Tom Clancy novels and PlayStation first person shoot-’em-up games...
First, the aforementioned story on Iraq and Al Qaeda, which upon even cursory examination appears to be a cynical ploy at cherry picking unreliable and uncorroborated intel at best, and outright mendacity at worst.
Next generals on the ground in Iraq countering recent claims that foreign fighters are streaming across the border from Syria, and finally an outright admission from Richard Perle, of the Defense Policy Board that America’s war against Iraq was unlawful, but we did it anyway, because we can break any law we want...
To begin with, the memo the Standard based their reporting on was a justification from Doug Feith, Deputy SecDef for Iraqi exploitation when the Senate Intelligence Committee asked for an explanation for the constant harping on a possible Iraq-Bin Laden partnership.
The memo was nothing new, it was a restatement of the same vague and unsupported stories that had been flying around for years, and had already been discredited by the actual intelligence services that allegedly supplied them; not just CIA, but the National Security and the Defense Intelligence agencies, as well.
But that did not stop the Standard from proclaiming “Case Closed” in, like, 10,000 point type, on their front page about a week ago. Unfortunately, the defense department, in their own bellicose fashion, had to put out a terse press release telling the neocon community to cool it because their braying was embarassing to the President at, as it turned out to be, the beginning of an overall period of deep shame.
S. U.S. military commanders in Iraq quickly followed this faux pas by announcing to all and sundry that tales being spun by neocon thugs in Congress and their pet scribblers in their op-ed pages across the country, of an Army of Darkness streaming across the border from Syria bet on drinking the blood of young American servicemen and women was simply not the case.
From the New York Times on Wednesday: “I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces,” said, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.
His view was echoed by Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which controls northern Iraq and parts of its borders with Syria, Turkey and Iran.
And just as an aside -- “Gen. Patraeus?” Even our generals there are starting to have ancient Roman and Greek names...
Swannack went on to say that the largest group they had come across was a group of six guys crossing the border from Syria. One was armed with a knife, apparently, and was shot when he brandished it at U.S. troops.
Compare this record to the rhetoric of our Maximum Leader on Oct. 28: “The foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits.”
So then to have the actual military leaders say that there is little or no foreign involvement there outside of the U.S. and Britain puts a rather damp squib on the whole flypaper theory of the “War on Terror” the administration has been trying to sell.
You know, you’ve been hearing this one lately, let’s see, it goes a little something like this: “Instead of flying planes into buildings in America, we have drawn the terrorists to Iraq; subjecting the people we went there to liberate, to the violence, fear and blood of a prolonged asymetrical war of attrition, because, hey...better you than me...yea us...”
The theory itself is not only an amoral political ploy and an utterly criminal act of foisting violence on people who have not done anything to us, but now it appears that it is completely without factual foundation as well.
Nice job, Rummy, rock on!
But that is still nothing compared to the admission this week from the king of swing, Richard Perle, the top of the pyramid in the Neocon Hive brain inside the Pentagram.
Speaking in London last week, Perle made the astute observation that there was no legal precedent, much less international law to which the U.S. is signatory, that would allow a pre-emptive, unilateral war.
“I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing...international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone. [French intransigence] meant there had been no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein,” the Guardian UK reported Perle saying last week.
So it comes to that, just an open admission that when the law would otherwise prevent the U.S. from doing what it wants, the problem is not the U.S., it’s the law. And of course, we should just blow off any laws we don’t like, because all that legal mumbo-jumbo is just for the beatniks in the coffeehouses, and we’re talkin’ about terrorism here, hippy!
Remember, the only reason this is a big deal is that both Maximum Leader, and his punch and judy puppet across the pond, have been proclaiming in loud, authoritative voices that this war was not only just, it was completely legal and within due bounds of all commonly agreed upon norms of international conduct and law.
Of course, this was a thin tissue of lies, and many of us loudly denounced it as so, only to be called unpatriotic, pro-terrorist and a host of other mean, nasty names. But now, since it is all happening, and as they say in litigation circles, you can’t un-ring the bell, Perle and his pals can now crawl out of the Nazi cross-dressing closet, where we knew they were all along, and say that the war was unlawful on a scale that only those who lived through the Nixon administration can understand.
These are the augers this week for the Maximum Leader, his political advisers and other various flunkies, lackies and assorted hangers-on. It might be that the time is drawing nigh -- thanks to a combination of a politcal campaign season, the new found technology of blogs as new news media and a profound sense of doubt among the electorate as a whole -- that the Iraq war may just be the albatross that gets strung around Dubya’s neck.
Soon it will be impossible for people to not come to the realization that not only does the emperor have no clothes on, but that naked, the emperor is really a frightful sight, indeed a poster boy for indecency laws...
JUNE WEDDINGS
J. Well, we knew it was just a matter of time before some state court somewhere gets loose and makes the intellectual stretch to declare that gays and lesbians are real people and have the rights of other real people, including marriage.
And it also followed that immediately afterwards, the American Right’s tin-foil hat brigade will be entranced in an orgy of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing, while the left trembles in trepidation at the baleful legal artifact placed in their lap.
Okay...wireheads, we understand, so everyone, take a deep cleansing breath and repeat after me: “culture war issues always backfire on Republicans, gay marriage will not edge out the economic runiation and disastrous war in Iraq as the front burner issues in this election season.”
And you know, that’s sort of a shame, in a way. Right now, Judge Roy Moore of Alabama is being recruited by the Constitution Party to run for President. And we here at the wire say “oh please, oh please, oh please.” Tell us where to send the money, who to write to, what to say...please Judge, please run!
Why? Because whenever one of these guys gets loose on the American political landscape, the far right of the party gets extra wiggy, and then off come the human masks and out come the bat wings, and the rest of the electorate sees them for what they are, little incubi sent to lead us all astray...
You see, this way we see just where all these freaks are. It makes it tougher for them to hide, and right now, that’s what they have been good at. They have learned to blend in with the regular humans very well, especially during an election year. Fortunately, most of the time, one of the herd gets a head full of bad drink and ascends the soap box in the town square to get their Moses on and then they are revealed, and we can have a good laugh.
Then the likes of Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition came along, and took the rules of political insurgency perfected by progressives and applied them to his campaign and the rules began to change.
Remember how during the 2000 election, the GOP kept Tom Delay and other GOP subhuman lizard men away from the camera’s as much as possible? The Polls consistently show that the key to the Presidents popular support outside of the Dittoheads and Deliverance extras is the cultivation of his image as President Barney Fife.
All the White House needs is to have the Presidents nase revert into the freak mode and demand the White House support them as they rant about the encrouching hordes of gay couples threatneing America with a rash of tasteful weddings.
And lets not lose sight of what this is really about. This is the grotesque homophobia on the right, fed a steady diet of medieval biblical hysteria by a pack of fear mongers selling fundameltalist Christian snake oil. Recognizing the esssential rights and dignity of gay people will deprive the right of their key bogeymen.
It’s going to be increasingly difficult to scare the money and votes out of red blooded Americans if they accept gay people as worthy of their respect and inclusion. And the glue that holds the GOP electoral majority together, fear of a gay, feminist, black planet, will start to unravel. The bell is tolling for the GOP hate machine. And we’ll keep ringing that bell until George Bush has to pack up his Jesus Bobblehead in the Oval office and go back to his true calling, clearing brush in Texas.
S. Now, with that said, can we have a little heart to heart with some of our progressive Democratic bretheren, please?
When, exactly, did the progressive political movement in this country, become too timid to stand up and say that prejudice and bigotry is wrong? We should be celebrating this court decision from the rooftops, not cowering in fear in the some smoke filled backroom.
In the 40-some years since Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, we have gone from standing in the street taking it in the teeth from high pressure water hoses and police dogs because some troglodyte southern sherrif had the temerity to say our friends weren’t welcome in their cafes to skulking around private meetings expressing our outrage behind our hands lest the rest of the world should think we are taking an actual position on something.
Come on, we know right from wrong and we always have. But for the last 20-some years, we have been telling ourselves that winning elections was more important than fighting for our principles and even worse, that they were mutually exclusive goals.
We convinced ourselves that once we got into power then we would unveil the shining white light of our progressive policies. Well, we tried that with Bill Clinton and not only got blown out of the water for it by Republicans who believed, rightly, that the actual power base was not as committed to these concepts as we wanted them to be, we also then took one in the shorts from the rest of the party who turned on us for allegedly trying to queer their deal at the ballot box.
But the progressive movement is starting to wake up to the fact that they have to bring the party and electorate to the policy, not the other way around. Whatever happened to convincing the electorate you are right?
And moreover, it has to be done with a sense of strength and moral purpose, that will convince the rest of the party that we really do have something significant and real to bring to the political process, namely a message that will resonate with average Americans.
We know we won’t win every one of them, and with gay marriage, we know there are some who will turn us off. But at the end of the day, their only alternative is the 700 Club-addled Lizard Men of planet Republitron.
On balance, we are a better deal for the Democratic Party than the Republican Light gang in the Democratic Leadership Conference. The problem is that if we start to look wishy washy or like we are too poll driven in our politics, then we will be perceived as weak and will lose credibility with the rest of the party.
The proof of this is that the DLC has lost credibility with us. And why? Because they take the most cowardly, poll-driven, faux populist stands imaginable, which renders them politically impotent and out of touch with their base.
Progressives are about ideals, about ensuring that our society protects the rights of all its members, including gays and lesbians. When did we start having to feel shamed about that?
Instead of just dwelling on our ability to get votes, we need to be out there talking about our ideas, and that includes extending the promise of the full rights and privleges of American citizenship to gays and lesbians.
Because if we don’t, if we run from our ideas in public, then we are just as bad or worse than the spineless centerists, because our ideals would be nothing more than a cheap facade.
cue JAMES music
And now the music is telling me that we have an incoming transmission from the redoubtable Dr. S9…
J. That’s right. It is time once again for our regular contributor Dr. Strychnine, reporting from his super-secret, ultra-dope, mega-cool, extra-jiggy, Mojohaus spy satellite of love high in geosynchronous orbit above Baghdad by the Bay…take it away S9…
PSST, WANNA SCORE SOME FUND?
S9 Greetings from high orbit, comrades. Now the the solar flares have lessened somewhat in frequency and intensity, we're not spending all our time in the freshwater reservoir biting our nails and fidgeting with our dosimeters. So we can spare a little love to help explain to our American audiences what all the fuss is about in the mutual fund industry.
First things first. If you're under forty, you're not so filthy rich you still have to work for a living, and you don't know what is a mutual fund, then you better learn. Because they're where a
substantial part of your retirement savings are parked. If you're worker with a pension account, or your employers are offering you a 401K plan, odds are good all that money is invested in the shares of mutual fund entities.
What is a mutual fund? It's like an artificial holding company that exists for no other purpose than to sell its shares to investors, and use the money raised to buy and sell stocks, bonds and other creatures of high finance. An awful lot of working class Americans have their retirement savings invested in mutual funds, and in most cases they didn't have any choice in the matter of where to park their money. Unions and employers often have retirement savings plans for their
employees that give them little or no discretion about where their savings are invested.
Now, for the last several months, the business section has been screaming about corruption in the mutual fund industry. What is that all about, you ask? If you've been reading the headlines and trying to get your head around what the papers are saying in the articles, you're probably concerned that somehow, some way, the filthy, greedy, bloodsucking moonbats on Wall Street have been caught with their greasy digits in the cookie jar with your retirement savings in it-- and you're just not sure how badly you've been ripped off.
By now, you've already dug out your statements and double-checked them to see if all the figures add up. I have no doubt they're impeccable. You will not see how much the greedheads stole from you by looking at your statements. The scams the greedheads used to skim from your precious retirement savings were more subtle than that.
Let's look at how one of them worked. Consider the practice of "late-day trading"-- if you were a friend of the fund manager, or one of his best customers, and you had a lot of money for playing around in the stock market, then you could buy shares in the fund after hours, when all the normal people like you and me were shut out. The price of mutual fund shares is set at the close of trading, so if a late-day trader gets wind after the market closes of some positive news about a stock the mutual fund holds, then he can trade on that news before anyone else can at a price that was set before the news broke. The net effect is to skim some of the profit off the top of the fund before it
even gets distributed into the shares.
Elliott Spitzer is the New York attorney general who is investigating the mutual fund industry, and here's how *he* describes the practice of "late-day trading": it's like being allowed to bet on yesterday's horse race after the winner has already been determined.
How much money are we talking about? For the individual worker with a 401K account balance at around $100,000, it could be anywhere from about a hundred dollars down to zero dollars, i.e. it's possible you didn't lose anything. It depends on the type of funds you're invested in, and which companies were managing them. Apparently, not all of the mutual funds were corrupt-- just the ones managed by Banc One, Strong Financial, Janus and Bank of America Nations (and whichever unnamed ones Spitzer has yet to uncover). International funds were the easiest to fuggle because of the larger timezone differences, so that's where the estimates say the most money has been lost.
The real problem, as I see it, with these mutual fund managers and their buddies (who skimmed off the retirement savings of working Americans) is *not* how much they took from each individual person. It's how much damage they do to the financial markets by cheating. They're like spammers, in a way. It doesn't cost the individual recipient of a spam message very much to download the spam and filter it. But the overall utility of the network is greatly eroded by the large volume of spam distributed so broadly across the entire population.
The mutual fund abuse creates the same kind of hits to the efficiency of the market/network as combating spam does. And it's the same sort of problem: a small number of people have figured out how to become obscenely wealthy by trashing the commons and skimming a little bit from everybody in the network. Does that sound like a familiar dynamic?
It should. It's the central theme of all our scandals of corporate and civil corruption. From Enron, Worldcom, and Global Crossing, to Harken Energy, Halliburton and the Iraqi CPA, to the California energy crisis and the budget process failure in Sacramento, to the problems of global
warming, ocean depletion and space junk, the central feature of all these scandals is that you can bank phat stacks of filthy lucre trashing the commons and looting the public wealth, and nobody has the power to stop it.
Cue James music for exit
Just remember that when the dark night comes and your government is trying to sell you on transferring all the money in your Social Security balance into private mutual funds. We've seen that gambit played a million times before, haven't we?
MEDICARE IS FOR HIPPIES
J. As you slept, Medicare reform was approved by the House of Representatives in a titanic struggle that included a three hour roll call vote on the floor, some knee breaking on the part of Majority Whip Mel Blount from Montana and a final 220 to 215 tally. Now the bill, touted as reform, will make it’s way for the Senate, where its future is still uncertain.
And it bears remembering that whenever Republicans want to reform something, you can be assured that someone wealthy will be wealthier, and someone poor will be substantantially more poor.
True to form, the Republican Party has created a masterpiece of subterfuge and cruel hypocrisy that makes you wonder if there is shred of human DNA left in the Republican Party.
The essential problems are these. Medicare was concieved before the pharmacology revolution, and so was created without a provision for paying for the drugs of Beneficiares. Medicare, part of which is funded by a payroll tax, and the rest paid out of general revenues, is due for the same train wreck that Social Security is headed to when the Boomers retire.
The time to deal with these problems is now. Either a huge infusion of new revenue sources, or a drastic cutback in benefits are the ugly choices awaiting anyone who wants to confront the issues.
But don’t worry folks, the same people who brought you the horror of California electricity deregulation and the annihilation of the Savings and Loan industry are bringing the plague of Market Fundamentalism to a doctor’s office near you. That’s right, Dr Republican is prescribing that classic snake oil, the free market.
The cruel irony of the particular brand of market fundamentalism embraced in the Republican party has little to do with the Free Market. It has everything to do with taking your hard earned tax dollars and raining them down on the campaign contributors. And this glorious philosopy is the guiding principle behind our new Medicare reform.
One of the principal causes of distres for Meidcare beneficiares is the obscenely high cost of presciption drugs. The market power of the pharmaceutical companies, powered by the new drugs, funded in part by you the taxpayer, and augmented by the patent system and a complete lack of any regulation in the market, have combined to put the grusome choice for Seniors between their prescrpiton and their rent or food.
Other less civilized countries, keep presciption drugs affordable for their populaitons, and thus have costs of half or less for many of their most commonly used medicines. But here in the city on the hill, we allow our pharmaceutical companies to gouge our parents and grandparents -- nice!
Unfortunately, grandma and grandpa kettle vote and through advocacy groups like the AARP, they swing a mighty big electoral stick. And they have been working Congress to come up with something to deal with the high cost of presciptions. Set this against the backdrop of the cruel elephant in the room that sits on every budget cycle.
Namely that the Mecicare and Social Security bomb is ticking, and some brave Congressional session is going to have to deal with it and the electoral consequences. Well apparently not this sesssion.
S. The current version of Medicare reform is sublime, in that it provides some relief for lower income seniors, and a massive stacks of benjamins for the insurance industry. Funny, but no effort is made to rein in drug prices, the driving force of the problem. Rather, the Mensa’s in the Republican party want to create “competition.”
Translation, the Republicns despise Medicare, and want to basiclly provide medical coverage through private insurers instead with vouchers. How unfortuante the party never got the soul or concsience voucher. It’s really a marvel when you consider it.
Seniors get enough from the bill to get them off the party’s back, their buddies in the insurance industry get mass jack, and they lay the foundation for the destruction of Medicare. I’m sure their enjoying that sense of accomplishment Governor Tarkin and Darth Vader felt when watched Alderaan go up in smoke.
The House has already passed the bill. Although you must consider the irony that many Conservatives are unhappy with the bill. It might help someone by accident, we suppose. Passage in the Senate is proving to be a more difficult issue.
Many Senate Demcrats and some Republicans who still are holding tenuously onto their humanity have indicated they will not vote for the issue. A fillibuster is possible, and it’s largely been conceded, at least for now, there are not enough votes to break a filibuster.
The really odd thing is that the AARP, the largest single association of retirees, has approved the current bill. The AARP has become largely a discount club for various services, and the current leadership of the AARP is either insane or a pack of retarded dupes.
They have sold Medicare, the single greatest achievement in improving the life of America’s elderly, down the river. How is it that the AARP is willing to allow the pharmaceutical companies to gouge their members for drugs they need?
Apparently they are, and instead of lancing the boil of unrestrained greed that pervades the drug market, they would rather pimp massive corporate giveaways and the subversion of medicare. Nice job...
But then again, according to Democratic leadership, they have also become part and parcel of the broken system, as a third-party broker for insurance and pharmaceutical services.
It was revealed that the AARP took in nearly $210 million in royalties from various insurance concerns such as United Health Care and MetLife, amounting to a third of the organizations money. Make no mistake, privitizing Medicare means big money for the AARP, and they are apparently not above selling their members into slavery to HMOs and large insurance companies.
Look, it’s very simple, Newt Gingrich, who has been the main player behind the scenes for the GOP planning on Medicare legislation has been one of its most outspoken detractors for 20 years and has never missed a moment to try to kill the thing; his stated goal on more than one occasion.
This is not about extending protection to seniors, it’s about killing a popular and necessary government program that protects health care of our most vulnerable population and turning it into a market-maker for yet more rich friends of the administration.
Seniors need to ignore the AARP commercials and exercise the common sense that comes with the wisdom of age, this is not the reform you were promised, this is about using you to make the rich even richer. Remember *that* come election time...
J. So our patriotic thought for the day: Obeying the law means the Terrorists win... or as John Ashcroft says... “I *am* the Law!”
exit theme: RENEGADE MASTER
S. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.
And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com.
J. This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...
Saturday, November 22, 2003
Saturday, November 15, 2003
Mojowire for 11.15; vol. 1, no. 32
PART I
MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
S9/ Supreme Beings of Leisure, Under the Gun
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master
intro with hendrix star spangled banner
J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire, Vol. 1, No. 32... I’m Mojo...
S. And I’m Sean, it’s Saturday, November 15, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...
J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:
S. First this morning, we are apparently taking the next steps in justifying war in Syria, by passing nonsense legislation that will nevertheless form the legalistic background for a military adventure on the Road to Damascus.
J. But then we are forced to ask the question: “Syria? What about Iraq?” The CIA apparently penned a little memo to the rest of the National Security gang this week detailing our many failings to deal with the situation in Iraq.
S. Then, in a complete shift in gears, we get on a little subject that has been working its way through the media lately: The electibility of a candidate, how it is measured and how much should it control their support within the party and the electorate.
J. Now a quick warning, this week’s dose of horror is not, repeat *not* for the faint of heart. Dr. Strychnine is going to peel the skin off the cheap veneer of civility in our National Defense policy and force Mr. and Mrs. Heartland to contemplate torture in the name of their security.
S. And in the unremitting war against the environment, the Bush administration has decided to spike clean air act violation inquiries into more than 50 coal-fired plants owned by 10 companies nationwide, but with an interesting political twist, wait til you hear this one.
J. So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...
fade in more hendrix star spangled banner for five or six count then back out again
THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
J. Syria, come on down, you’re the next contestant on “This Administration is a Bunch of Lying Dirtbags who will Bomb Anyone They Need to in order to be Reelected...
The greasy Euros at Agence France Presse managed to pick up on West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd’s criticism of a little heralded piece of legislation to scoot through the Senate on Tuesday; the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovreignty Act of 2003.
The deal is that the Senate has passed a piece of legislation that calls Syria on the carpet for a whole laundry list assorted evil deeds, such as giving money and support to terrorists in Hizzbollah, and calls on the administration to impose sanctions and so forth.
Would these be the same GOP senators that said sanctions are worthless in the fight against terror?
But no, we are getting sidetracked... The real issue here is that similar legislation was proposed, passed and signed in the year or so run up to the Iraq war, again with very little in the way of debate, much less public knowledge.
Again, the same laundry list of horror, the same demands and the same dubious claims of necessity for the common defense; the same kind of issues that were eventually brought up during the debate on the use of force resolution on Iraq.
So naturally, when Sen. Byrd saw this regarding Syria, he was more than a tad alarmed, and a bit dubious himself: “The bill speaks of 'hostile actions' by Syria against US-led forces in Iraq,” said Byrd. “I have not seen any evidence that would lead me to believe that it is the government of Syria that is responsible for the attacks against our troops in Iraq...Such insinuations can only build the case for military action against Syria, which, unfortunately, is a very real possibility because of the dangerous doctrine of pre-emption created by the Bush administration.”
To be fair, Byrd, is an outspoken critic of US Middle East policy, particularly in Iraq, and rarely misses a chance these days to launch a verbal scud down the street to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and moreover, there has been a version of this bill floating around the halls of power in the last couple of Congresses.
But compare this: “To halt Syrian support for terrorism, end its occupation of Lebanon, and stop its development of weapons of mass destruction, and by so doing hold Syria accountable for the serious international security problems it has caused in the Middle East, and for other purposes.”
To this slightly elided piece from the final Iraq force authorization: “Iraq's ongoing support for international terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and other United Nations Security Council resolutions make clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States...
Hell, they barely had to change the language, just swap out the names of the countries.
And it is worth noting that in the Use of Force resolutions, they speak about the previous resolutions, laws, UN action and everything that leads up to the use of force in the findings subheading of the act.
That’s the hook; one of the legislative requirements would be a findings section, which would have to “make the case” and lay out the history of why we need to go to war in Syria, and legislation like this would be a key piece of those findings.
S. This predictable piece of agitprop comes after several weeks of ratcheting up the tension against Syria for allegedly not doing enough to stem the flow of orcs into Iraq along their 400 mile border.
Some in the Congress and in the West Wing are saying that Syria might even be doing it intentionally, although no one can think of a good reason why they would want to.
And yet, for the past two years, the Maximum Leader, W, has opposed the legislation, but has decided at this time to sign it. It begs the question...why now?
There is nothing significantly changed in this year’s model of the Syria Accountability Act, as opposed to the one floated in the 107th Congress, other than a call for Syria to end it’s occupation of Lebannon.
And do you remember all that pre-Iraq war talk about what a bad guy Saddam Hussein was, and how poorly his army would perform in combat and what a pushover the country would be, and how happy they would be to see us invade?
Well, we remember, and so it is with a certain sense of deja vu that we read -- on the same day as the passage of the Syria Accountability Act -- this little gem from the National Review, one of the leading neocon war drum beaters... see if this sounds familiar:
“[Syrian President Bashar] Assad is an exceedingly dangerous man. Syria's army is large, but essentially an empty shell. Its equipment and personnel are inadequate, by any measure, to fight a conventional war against Israel. Our war planners say Syria wouldn't last three days against American forces. So why is Assad so dangerous? Because he makes decisions that cannot be explained in the context of his nation's strengths and weaknesses.”
Again, it’s like they just changed the names of some of the players and reprinted their Iraq war cheerleading.
So, it looks like we are going after the weakest link, yet again. A nation about the size of North Dakota with about 2.5 million men fit for military service and a robust oil industry making up 70 percent of their exports.
And it’s all just in time for an election year, don’t you know. Now would it really surprise anyone if right after the first of the year, the President started to make some bad noise about how all the disrupption in Iraq is not just on-going terrorism, but directly state-sponsored terrorism with a “made in Bekka” label on the inside of the death shrouds.
Of course there would be the garden variety denials from Syria, but it would be clear by that time to all but the most hardned America-hating liberals that the road home from Bagdad has to go through Damascus.
That will be the major selling point. All you hippies complaining that we’re not doing enough to ensure the security situation on the ground in Iraq, fine...we’ll take some assertive action towards securing Iraq by invading Syria, you happy now?!
Kansas Republican Senator, and neocon mouthpiece, Sam Brownback, a longtime critic of Damascus, said the time for negotiation is over, and advocated that the administration quickly move to impose sanctions.
“They should use these sanctions to the strongest degree possible...our troops are dying facing terrorist coming in from Syria. Given what Syria is doing today, I think they should throw the book at them.”
Thanks Sam, that’s great advice. I think we can lob that one up their in the annals of great foreign policy doctrines like “bring ‘em on.” Good job, boiling down the complexity and nuance of international relations to the end of a 60 minute cop show...
“Book ‘em Dano.”
MOJOSTRADAMUS
J. For the past several weeks, we've been laying out a case that the Iraqi situation is consistently deteriorating, and that the Presidents efforts to claim all was bread and roses in Iraq, and that the Liberal Media was deceiving the American public with their sissy lies was obscene and an affront to the young men and women who are giving their lives there every day.
Secretary Rumsfeld, and the usual cast from the NeoCon Legion of Doom, and their right wing minions at the Wall Street Journal Asylum for the conservatively Insane, have consistently perpetuated this fantasy, that things were improving every day.
Don't mind the dead bodies behind the curtain folks, those sissies on the left don't have the stomach for War. Even the so called secret memo that Rummy penned, where he described the occupation as a long slog, was hailed as a realist vision of the situation, but not at odds with the improvement theory.
Just a matter of the worst case scenario being tossed around the water cooler by those visionaries at the Pentagram.
Sometimes it seems that the Mojowire isn't really being broadcast from a University Radio Station, but from a smokey Greek Cave by three guys chewing Eucalyptus leaves and speaking with the voice of Apollo. Well it seems that way after a few pints at the Harp Inn anyway. And then things like this come down the pipe, and you really wonder..
The Philadelphia inquirer reported this week that the CIA officers in Baghdad authored a report on the state of affairs in Iraq. And Shock and Awe! It completely contradicts the sunshine and happy story being pimped by the President and the White House. This from the Philidelphia Inquirer:
“A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq warns that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the insurgents. The report paints a bleak picture of the political and security situation in Iraq and cautions that the U.S.-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately. L. Paul Bremer, leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who arrived unexpectedly in Washington for strategy sessions yesterday, essentially endorsed the CIA's findings, a senior administration official said.”
The CIA report identifies what those of us who have not been sedated by Fox News already knew, the war never ended, it just turned from fisticuffs governed by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, into a rude, dirty guerilla war, run by elements of the Baathist military that faded away as we marched to victory in Badgad.
The President’s awful spectacle on that aircraft carrier is now revealed as the disgrace it really was. Mission not Accomplished, Junior, Mission just became a serious problem.
A shooting pain starting to take shape behind your eyes..brace yourselves..there's more..again the PI:
“The report landed on the desks of senior U.S. officials on Monday. Disclosures on the report's findings suggested senior policymakers want to make sure the assessment reaches Bush. Some senior policymakers have expressed frustration in efforts to provide Bush with more somber analyses of the situation in Iraq than the optimistic views presented by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and other hard-liners”
S. That’s right, the CIA had to leak a classified assessment of the occupation because the Vice President and his NeoCon flying monkeys were opening the Presidents mail and excising anything that might disturb his carefully constructed fantasy of the Iraqi occupation. Is there anybody driving this train?
Hello, out there, the President's national security team cannot be trusted to tell the President the truth! They are so absolutely committed to not telling the truth to anyone, they now have to be outed by their own intelligence agencies.
This is incredible. And this is not the usual snitching by pissed off partisans in the Beltway, who run to the press like a crying 8-yea-old whenever their superiors make a decision they don't like. This is an intelligence agency afraid that even it's own superiors cannot be trusted to tell the truth.
Maximum ProConsul Bremer was summoned back to Rome, err, Washington, to discuss this awful news with the President. I'm sure the Prez was quite miffed to have to give up his morning cartoons to talk about this nasty Iraq business.
Didn't Uncle Dick say he would take care of it? Now the Administration is going to accelerate it's hanover of power to the Iraqi's, which sounds to us suspiciously like the plan the Cheese eating surrender monkeys in France were floating at the UN a few months ago.
The U.S. military is convinced that more aggressive action in whacking the guerrillas will yield positive results. Uhh..yeah, I'm sure blowing up more buildings and shooting more people will really turn the tide of public opinion. It works really well for Ariel Sharon. The Palestinians really respect him for it.
The CIA report indicated the dearth of actionable intelligence on the ground in Iraq. Yet no plan seems to be forthcoming to change that. When in doubt, hold your finger down on the fire button. Playstation is now the official War doctrine of the United States...Yahoo...
Maybe the changes the White House have made will work. No one really knows, and no strategy is guaranteed success. Well, the Mojowire’s suggestion in February that building a real International coalition with UN approval and support from the UN's civilian support agencies would have worked, but what do we know.? Just pass the eucalyptus leaves and send in the next supplicant asking for a prophecy.
THE CANDIDATE
J. The Democratic Party, suffers from a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome that causes them to behave in odd ways towards certain candidates. With rememberances of McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis, they are walking away from their best chance at beating George Bush in November next year.
Is there anyone who really believes that when Bill Safire, official chimp of the RNC comes out and taunts Democrats with “please elect Howard Dean, he’s the guy we want to run against” that he is doing it out of evil glee or a primal notion of fairness?
Hell no, it’s because the RNC is legitimately worried about Howard Dean! He is not only an unknown quantity, unlike the Gephardt, Kerry and Lieberman, he is also increasingly popular; and not just in a grassroots sense, but also in a realpolitck sense as evidenced by a few high profile union endorsements last week.
The bottom line here is that “electability” is yet another one of those myths, like the compassionate conservative” that parties use to shape public opinion.
How many times have we heard each of the candidates open a statement with a version of “I’m the one guy who can beat Bush?” That seems to be the only benchmark anyone wants to run with. And it’s a good one as far as it goes. Right now, electing cousin Eddy who lives under the sink seems preferable to Bush. Hell, even electing the Devil himself would be preferable. Even Satan has to live by a set of pre-determined universal rules...
Yet, the concept is held up as a reason to bar candidates as well. It seems that when you can’t outdebate a candidate and your ideas are not as sharp, original or well-argued, then you come up with the ol’ “Well, he just can’t win, because I said so and I should know because I am in the party elite.”
Perhaps a little history lesson would be in order for all you poli-sci students nursing hangovers right now... Run to the big bookstore across the street here and pick a little tome called “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972,” by Hunter S. Thompson, the father and spiritual guide of the Mojowire.
In it’s hallowed pages you will read of the treachery that awaited George S. McGovern, the Democratic insurgency candidate who ran the establishment boys, Ed Muskie and Hubert Humphrey like wounded wildabeasts, with a grassroots campaign fueled by guts, brains and compassion.
The campaign was ultimately doomed for a number of reasons, namely McGovern’s own inability to deal with his emergence as “the real thing,” but mostly because that after he was nominated, the Democratic party machine simply walked away from him a fit of teen angst and pique and let his campaign get drowned in the bathtub by John Mitchell.
That is a mistake that the Democratic Party paid for dearly for the next 20-some years. It was finally excised by a rogue Southern Governor and horn-dog-emeritus Bill Clinton. (Yes, I know many of you irate, knee-jerk American History types are jumping up and down screaming “Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter” -- there was certain abberation to that, and he was even less than a one term president, but we will get to his example in a moment.)
When Clinton got into office, the Party officially dumped the McGovern Monkey off it’s back, but only after suffering through Dukakis and Mondale; one too boring and the other too wounded to actually take the fight to the bad guys...
But here we are, ready to run and hide from the brutish realities of this foul year of our Lord two-thousand-and-three. And we are being told that in order to avoid another four years of the Neocon captivity, we must look to our Crecy, our Agincourt, our Waterloo and avoid a “mistake” of the past.
S. But that would ignore the reality of at least the one candidate this is most often aimed at: Howard Dean. Now to come correct, we are Dean supporters, and we are not ashamed of it either. We like the guy, what he has to say, how he says and his willingness to hang it all out in an audacious attempt to defeat the evil hoardes of Neocon orcs fattening themselves our Nation’s still twitching carcass.
For us, he combines a strong force of politics governed by moral purpose, like Jimmy Carter, with the excitement of a Bill Clinton campaign, a guy who can really connect with people and get them excited. So the we ask the question, if you have a guy who can create this kind of energy with a strong populist message, why isn’t the party rallying around him?
There we come to crux of the matter: It would appear that many in the party have either a) not learned the lesson of the McGovern years, or b) would rather doom the party, and hence the country to anothe two decades of treachery and desolation and the hands of the neocons than to have to adjust their own political dealings and back the guy they had not originally chosen and ordained.
That does not auger well for the Democratic Party.
Let’s set the record straight. Electability, assuming we actually have honest, open and fair elections, is a myth. Here it is -- If enough people vote for the guy, he wins! The end!
Electability is yet another one of those debating tools of the desparate, that come out only when their own rhetoric and ideas have failed to excite and the only thing they can run on is their own name recognition because the only thing they have been able to generate in their entire times in Washington have been copies of their names in print.
The issue has never been one of electability. Electability should flow from the candidate’s ability to articulate a vision and a sense of purpose and direction. That sounds a tad polyanic and, of course, we are adults and understand how this game is played.
All we are asking is that people who are looking for a candiate look at this issue of electability and give it its due course and then choose the candidate you want to see win, not the candidate who you think simply represents the lesser of evils.
That is how we end up with guys like Al Gore giving it away or a Michael Dukakis who, while a pretty good guy, still didn’t really have the game to carry a national campaign, yet he was the most middle of the road, inoffensive guy the Democrats had to offer at that time.
Enough of this! We want to brawl, and we want a brawler and if Howard Dean is ready to strip down to his skivies and step into the ring with W and start throwing elbows and stop telling people to feel bad for being Democrats, then he is the guy.
Because otherwise, we return to a time where we know the Republicans in power are in the midst of destroying education, healthcare and the military in this country, we know we have better ideas for guiding America to a safer, more prosperous future where we are respected and admired among the nations of the world, but instead, we will hide back in the corner and whine “please don’t hurt us...”
No, that time is over...it’s on!
SEE PART II
PART I
MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
S9/ Supreme Beings of Leisure, Under the Gun
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master
intro with hendrix star spangled banner
J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire, Vol. 1, No. 32... I’m Mojo...
S. And I’m Sean, it’s Saturday, November 15, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...
J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:
S. First this morning, we are apparently taking the next steps in justifying war in Syria, by passing nonsense legislation that will nevertheless form the legalistic background for a military adventure on the Road to Damascus.
J. But then we are forced to ask the question: “Syria? What about Iraq?” The CIA apparently penned a little memo to the rest of the National Security gang this week detailing our many failings to deal with the situation in Iraq.
S. Then, in a complete shift in gears, we get on a little subject that has been working its way through the media lately: The electibility of a candidate, how it is measured and how much should it control their support within the party and the electorate.
J. Now a quick warning, this week’s dose of horror is not, repeat *not* for the faint of heart. Dr. Strychnine is going to peel the skin off the cheap veneer of civility in our National Defense policy and force Mr. and Mrs. Heartland to contemplate torture in the name of their security.
S. And in the unremitting war against the environment, the Bush administration has decided to spike clean air act violation inquiries into more than 50 coal-fired plants owned by 10 companies nationwide, but with an interesting political twist, wait til you hear this one.
J. So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...
fade in more hendrix star spangled banner for five or six count then back out again
THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
J. Syria, come on down, you’re the next contestant on “This Administration is a Bunch of Lying Dirtbags who will Bomb Anyone They Need to in order to be Reelected...
The greasy Euros at Agence France Presse managed to pick up on West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd’s criticism of a little heralded piece of legislation to scoot through the Senate on Tuesday; the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovreignty Act of 2003.
The deal is that the Senate has passed a piece of legislation that calls Syria on the carpet for a whole laundry list assorted evil deeds, such as giving money and support to terrorists in Hizzbollah, and calls on the administration to impose sanctions and so forth.
Would these be the same GOP senators that said sanctions are worthless in the fight against terror?
But no, we are getting sidetracked... The real issue here is that similar legislation was proposed, passed and signed in the year or so run up to the Iraq war, again with very little in the way of debate, much less public knowledge.
Again, the same laundry list of horror, the same demands and the same dubious claims of necessity for the common defense; the same kind of issues that were eventually brought up during the debate on the use of force resolution on Iraq.
So naturally, when Sen. Byrd saw this regarding Syria, he was more than a tad alarmed, and a bit dubious himself: “The bill speaks of 'hostile actions' by Syria against US-led forces in Iraq,” said Byrd. “I have not seen any evidence that would lead me to believe that it is the government of Syria that is responsible for the attacks against our troops in Iraq...Such insinuations can only build the case for military action against Syria, which, unfortunately, is a very real possibility because of the dangerous doctrine of pre-emption created by the Bush administration.”
To be fair, Byrd, is an outspoken critic of US Middle East policy, particularly in Iraq, and rarely misses a chance these days to launch a verbal scud down the street to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and moreover, there has been a version of this bill floating around the halls of power in the last couple of Congresses.
But compare this: “To halt Syrian support for terrorism, end its occupation of Lebanon, and stop its development of weapons of mass destruction, and by so doing hold Syria accountable for the serious international security problems it has caused in the Middle East, and for other purposes.”
To this slightly elided piece from the final Iraq force authorization: “Iraq's ongoing support for international terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and other United Nations Security Council resolutions make clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States...
Hell, they barely had to change the language, just swap out the names of the countries.
And it is worth noting that in the Use of Force resolutions, they speak about the previous resolutions, laws, UN action and everything that leads up to the use of force in the findings subheading of the act.
That’s the hook; one of the legislative requirements would be a findings section, which would have to “make the case” and lay out the history of why we need to go to war in Syria, and legislation like this would be a key piece of those findings.
S. This predictable piece of agitprop comes after several weeks of ratcheting up the tension against Syria for allegedly not doing enough to stem the flow of orcs into Iraq along their 400 mile border.
Some in the Congress and in the West Wing are saying that Syria might even be doing it intentionally, although no one can think of a good reason why they would want to.
And yet, for the past two years, the Maximum Leader, W, has opposed the legislation, but has decided at this time to sign it. It begs the question...why now?
There is nothing significantly changed in this year’s model of the Syria Accountability Act, as opposed to the one floated in the 107th Congress, other than a call for Syria to end it’s occupation of Lebannon.
And do you remember all that pre-Iraq war talk about what a bad guy Saddam Hussein was, and how poorly his army would perform in combat and what a pushover the country would be, and how happy they would be to see us invade?
Well, we remember, and so it is with a certain sense of deja vu that we read -- on the same day as the passage of the Syria Accountability Act -- this little gem from the National Review, one of the leading neocon war drum beaters... see if this sounds familiar:
“[Syrian President Bashar] Assad is an exceedingly dangerous man. Syria's army is large, but essentially an empty shell. Its equipment and personnel are inadequate, by any measure, to fight a conventional war against Israel. Our war planners say Syria wouldn't last three days against American forces. So why is Assad so dangerous? Because he makes decisions that cannot be explained in the context of his nation's strengths and weaknesses.”
Again, it’s like they just changed the names of some of the players and reprinted their Iraq war cheerleading.
So, it looks like we are going after the weakest link, yet again. A nation about the size of North Dakota with about 2.5 million men fit for military service and a robust oil industry making up 70 percent of their exports.
And it’s all just in time for an election year, don’t you know. Now would it really surprise anyone if right after the first of the year, the President started to make some bad noise about how all the disrupption in Iraq is not just on-going terrorism, but directly state-sponsored terrorism with a “made in Bekka” label on the inside of the death shrouds.
Of course there would be the garden variety denials from Syria, but it would be clear by that time to all but the most hardned America-hating liberals that the road home from Bagdad has to go through Damascus.
That will be the major selling point. All you hippies complaining that we’re not doing enough to ensure the security situation on the ground in Iraq, fine...we’ll take some assertive action towards securing Iraq by invading Syria, you happy now?!
Kansas Republican Senator, and neocon mouthpiece, Sam Brownback, a longtime critic of Damascus, said the time for negotiation is over, and advocated that the administration quickly move to impose sanctions.
“They should use these sanctions to the strongest degree possible...our troops are dying facing terrorist coming in from Syria. Given what Syria is doing today, I think they should throw the book at them.”
Thanks Sam, that’s great advice. I think we can lob that one up their in the annals of great foreign policy doctrines like “bring ‘em on.” Good job, boiling down the complexity and nuance of international relations to the end of a 60 minute cop show...
“Book ‘em Dano.”
MOJOSTRADAMUS
J. For the past several weeks, we've been laying out a case that the Iraqi situation is consistently deteriorating, and that the Presidents efforts to claim all was bread and roses in Iraq, and that the Liberal Media was deceiving the American public with their sissy lies was obscene and an affront to the young men and women who are giving their lives there every day.
Secretary Rumsfeld, and the usual cast from the NeoCon Legion of Doom, and their right wing minions at the Wall Street Journal Asylum for the conservatively Insane, have consistently perpetuated this fantasy, that things were improving every day.
Don't mind the dead bodies behind the curtain folks, those sissies on the left don't have the stomach for War. Even the so called secret memo that Rummy penned, where he described the occupation as a long slog, was hailed as a realist vision of the situation, but not at odds with the improvement theory.
Just a matter of the worst case scenario being tossed around the water cooler by those visionaries at the Pentagram.
Sometimes it seems that the Mojowire isn't really being broadcast from a University Radio Station, but from a smokey Greek Cave by three guys chewing Eucalyptus leaves and speaking with the voice of Apollo. Well it seems that way after a few pints at the Harp Inn anyway. And then things like this come down the pipe, and you really wonder..
The Philadelphia inquirer reported this week that the CIA officers in Baghdad authored a report on the state of affairs in Iraq. And Shock and Awe! It completely contradicts the sunshine and happy story being pimped by the President and the White House. This from the Philidelphia Inquirer:
“A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq warns that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the insurgents. The report paints a bleak picture of the political and security situation in Iraq and cautions that the U.S.-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately. L. Paul Bremer, leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who arrived unexpectedly in Washington for strategy sessions yesterday, essentially endorsed the CIA's findings, a senior administration official said.”
The CIA report identifies what those of us who have not been sedated by Fox News already knew, the war never ended, it just turned from fisticuffs governed by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, into a rude, dirty guerilla war, run by elements of the Baathist military that faded away as we marched to victory in Badgad.
The President’s awful spectacle on that aircraft carrier is now revealed as the disgrace it really was. Mission not Accomplished, Junior, Mission just became a serious problem.
A shooting pain starting to take shape behind your eyes..brace yourselves..there's more..again the PI:
“The report landed on the desks of senior U.S. officials on Monday. Disclosures on the report's findings suggested senior policymakers want to make sure the assessment reaches Bush. Some senior policymakers have expressed frustration in efforts to provide Bush with more somber analyses of the situation in Iraq than the optimistic views presented by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and other hard-liners”
S. That’s right, the CIA had to leak a classified assessment of the occupation because the Vice President and his NeoCon flying monkeys were opening the Presidents mail and excising anything that might disturb his carefully constructed fantasy of the Iraqi occupation. Is there anybody driving this train?
Hello, out there, the President's national security team cannot be trusted to tell the President the truth! They are so absolutely committed to not telling the truth to anyone, they now have to be outed by their own intelligence agencies.
This is incredible. And this is not the usual snitching by pissed off partisans in the Beltway, who run to the press like a crying 8-yea-old whenever their superiors make a decision they don't like. This is an intelligence agency afraid that even it's own superiors cannot be trusted to tell the truth.
Maximum ProConsul Bremer was summoned back to Rome, err, Washington, to discuss this awful news with the President. I'm sure the Prez was quite miffed to have to give up his morning cartoons to talk about this nasty Iraq business.
Didn't Uncle Dick say he would take care of it? Now the Administration is going to accelerate it's hanover of power to the Iraqi's, which sounds to us suspiciously like the plan the Cheese eating surrender monkeys in France were floating at the UN a few months ago.
The U.S. military is convinced that more aggressive action in whacking the guerrillas will yield positive results. Uhh..yeah, I'm sure blowing up more buildings and shooting more people will really turn the tide of public opinion. It works really well for Ariel Sharon. The Palestinians really respect him for it.
The CIA report indicated the dearth of actionable intelligence on the ground in Iraq. Yet no plan seems to be forthcoming to change that. When in doubt, hold your finger down on the fire button. Playstation is now the official War doctrine of the United States...Yahoo...
Maybe the changes the White House have made will work. No one really knows, and no strategy is guaranteed success. Well, the Mojowire’s suggestion in February that building a real International coalition with UN approval and support from the UN's civilian support agencies would have worked, but what do we know.? Just pass the eucalyptus leaves and send in the next supplicant asking for a prophecy.
THE CANDIDATE
J. The Democratic Party, suffers from a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome that causes them to behave in odd ways towards certain candidates. With rememberances of McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis, they are walking away from their best chance at beating George Bush in November next year.
Is there anyone who really believes that when Bill Safire, official chimp of the RNC comes out and taunts Democrats with “please elect Howard Dean, he’s the guy we want to run against” that he is doing it out of evil glee or a primal notion of fairness?
Hell no, it’s because the RNC is legitimately worried about Howard Dean! He is not only an unknown quantity, unlike the Gephardt, Kerry and Lieberman, he is also increasingly popular; and not just in a grassroots sense, but also in a realpolitck sense as evidenced by a few high profile union endorsements last week.
The bottom line here is that “electability” is yet another one of those myths, like the compassionate conservative” that parties use to shape public opinion.
How many times have we heard each of the candidates open a statement with a version of “I’m the one guy who can beat Bush?” That seems to be the only benchmark anyone wants to run with. And it’s a good one as far as it goes. Right now, electing cousin Eddy who lives under the sink seems preferable to Bush. Hell, even electing the Devil himself would be preferable. Even Satan has to live by a set of pre-determined universal rules...
Yet, the concept is held up as a reason to bar candidates as well. It seems that when you can’t outdebate a candidate and your ideas are not as sharp, original or well-argued, then you come up with the ol’ “Well, he just can’t win, because I said so and I should know because I am in the party elite.”
Perhaps a little history lesson would be in order for all you poli-sci students nursing hangovers right now... Run to the big bookstore across the street here and pick a little tome called “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972,” by Hunter S. Thompson, the father and spiritual guide of the Mojowire.
In it’s hallowed pages you will read of the treachery that awaited George S. McGovern, the Democratic insurgency candidate who ran the establishment boys, Ed Muskie and Hubert Humphrey like wounded wildabeasts, with a grassroots campaign fueled by guts, brains and compassion.
The campaign was ultimately doomed for a number of reasons, namely McGovern’s own inability to deal with his emergence as “the real thing,” but mostly because that after he was nominated, the Democratic party machine simply walked away from him a fit of teen angst and pique and let his campaign get drowned in the bathtub by John Mitchell.
That is a mistake that the Democratic Party paid for dearly for the next 20-some years. It was finally excised by a rogue Southern Governor and horn-dog-emeritus Bill Clinton. (Yes, I know many of you irate, knee-jerk American History types are jumping up and down screaming “Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter” -- there was certain abberation to that, and he was even less than a one term president, but we will get to his example in a moment.)
When Clinton got into office, the Party officially dumped the McGovern Monkey off it’s back, but only after suffering through Dukakis and Mondale; one too boring and the other too wounded to actually take the fight to the bad guys...
But here we are, ready to run and hide from the brutish realities of this foul year of our Lord two-thousand-and-three. And we are being told that in order to avoid another four years of the Neocon captivity, we must look to our Crecy, our Agincourt, our Waterloo and avoid a “mistake” of the past.
S. But that would ignore the reality of at least the one candidate this is most often aimed at: Howard Dean. Now to come correct, we are Dean supporters, and we are not ashamed of it either. We like the guy, what he has to say, how he says and his willingness to hang it all out in an audacious attempt to defeat the evil hoardes of Neocon orcs fattening themselves our Nation’s still twitching carcass.
For us, he combines a strong force of politics governed by moral purpose, like Jimmy Carter, with the excitement of a Bill Clinton campaign, a guy who can really connect with people and get them excited. So the we ask the question, if you have a guy who can create this kind of energy with a strong populist message, why isn’t the party rallying around him?
There we come to crux of the matter: It would appear that many in the party have either a) not learned the lesson of the McGovern years, or b) would rather doom the party, and hence the country to anothe two decades of treachery and desolation and the hands of the neocons than to have to adjust their own political dealings and back the guy they had not originally chosen and ordained.
That does not auger well for the Democratic Party.
Let’s set the record straight. Electability, assuming we actually have honest, open and fair elections, is a myth. Here it is -- If enough people vote for the guy, he wins! The end!
Electability is yet another one of those debating tools of the desparate, that come out only when their own rhetoric and ideas have failed to excite and the only thing they can run on is their own name recognition because the only thing they have been able to generate in their entire times in Washington have been copies of their names in print.
The issue has never been one of electability. Electability should flow from the candidate’s ability to articulate a vision and a sense of purpose and direction. That sounds a tad polyanic and, of course, we are adults and understand how this game is played.
All we are asking is that people who are looking for a candiate look at this issue of electability and give it its due course and then choose the candidate you want to see win, not the candidate who you think simply represents the lesser of evils.
That is how we end up with guys like Al Gore giving it away or a Michael Dukakis who, while a pretty good guy, still didn’t really have the game to carry a national campaign, yet he was the most middle of the road, inoffensive guy the Democrats had to offer at that time.
Enough of this! We want to brawl, and we want a brawler and if Howard Dean is ready to strip down to his skivies and step into the ring with W and start throwing elbows and stop telling people to feel bad for being Democrats, then he is the guy.
Because otherwise, we return to a time where we know the Republicans in power are in the midst of destroying education, healthcare and the military in this country, we know we have better ideas for guiding America to a safer, more prosperous future where we are respected and admired among the nations of the world, but instead, we will hide back in the corner and whine “please don’t hurt us...”
No, that time is over...it’s on!
SEE PART II
MojoWire for 11/15/03
PART II
cue S9 music
And now the music is telling me that we have an incoming transmission from the redoubtable Dr. S9…
J. That’s right. It is time once again for our regular contributor Dr. Strychnine, reporting from his super-secret, ultra-dope, mega-cool, extra-jiggy, Mojohaus spy satellite of love high in geosynchronous orbit above Baghdad by the Bay…take it away S9…
ARE THEY SOUP YET?
S9 Okay, space adventurers-- I know you're having a great time watching Operation Iron Hammer attempt to address the problem of guerilla insurgents in Iraq by dropping quarter-ton bombs on the towns and cities where they live; I know you're excited about seeing ancient date palm groves bulldozed as a collective punishment for the residents of Falluja and Tikrit; I know it feels good to see the U.S. military demonstrating its teeth and claws once again, after so many years of taking it in the gut from hippie peacenik losers like the Mojowire.
But. Can we talk? About the torture, I mean. Can we talk about the torture?
Specifically, can we talk about the torture of innocent Iraqi civilians, just ordinary people like you and me, who just wanted to live happy lives, raise healthy families and make a decent name for
themselves-- and instead they were raped, maimed and murdered in untold numbers every year by the Hussein regime.
Yeah, that torture.
Here's what I want to know: how come patriotic Americans are supposed to be outraged about the torture of Iraqi civilians? I mean, even after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch spent *decades* cataloguing the incidents of torture and other human rights abuses in Iraq, patriotic Americans *still* needed to be provided with the flimsy pretexts of phantom connections to al-Qaeda and spooky lies about uranium yellowcake from Niger before they could countenance doing
anything "bold and decisive" about it.
Can we please stop pretending to be outraged by scary stories about people being dropped alive into industrial meat shredders? We weren't outraged by these kinds of stories when the Hussein regime was on friendly terms with us. We aren't outraged now about similar stories about our good friends in Uzbekistan, who the reports are saying have a tendency to "boil people alive" if they don't cooperate in interrogations of our enemies.
Here, let's see if *this* story will generate some outrage... this was on the front page of the Washington Post the Wednesday before last. Last year, immigration officials at JFK International mistakenly arrested a Canadian man named Maher Arar, classified him as an "enemy combatant," and secretly deported him. On the spot. No lawyer. No phone call. No warning.
Apparently, the Canadians fingered him without having enough evidence. They've apologized repeatedly for the mistake. But wait. Arar wasn't deported to Canada. He was put on a jet to Washington, then Jordan, and finally Syria. Where he spent the next ten months in a prison
cell. And, he says, he was made to give false confessions under torture.
To quote Dana Priest and DaNeen Brown in the Post: "Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the Arar case fits the profile of a covert CIA 'extraordinary rendition' -- the practice of turning over low-level, suspected terrorists to foreign intelligence services, some of which are known to torture prisoners."
Syria swears up one side and down the other that it doesn't torture anyone. Do you believe them? The Hussein regime said the same thing, you know.
Continuing from the article: "Renditions are a legitimate option for dealing with suspected terrorists, intelligence officials argue. The U.S. government officially rejects the assertion that it knowingly
sends suspects abroad to be tortured, but officials admit they sometimes do that. 'The temptation is to have these folks in other hands because they have different standards,' one official said. 'Someone might be able to get information we can't from detainees,' said another.
"Syria, where use of torture during imprisonment has been documented by the State Department, maintains a secret but growing intelligence relationship with the CIA, according to intelligence experts."
So how do we all feel about that? Are we outraged yet? No? I didn't think you'd be outraged. It's all good with you patriotic Americans if it's the *CIA* that gets to be on the receiving end of all that raw, crude intelligence product.
Of course, Syria isn't exactly on the Most Favored Torturing Nations list anymore, now that the U.S. has escalated the occupation of Iraq. But that's okay. Not to worry. There are plenty of other friendly countries where the CIA can deposit 'extraordinary renditions' into the tender mercies of foreign torturers.
Like for example: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel and those are just the ones that the U.S. State Department officially *knows* about. The list at Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is as long as your arm.
So please, you patriotic Americans-- enough with the fake outrage. You might as well admit it: you actually get a secret thrill out of knowing that Iraqi and Arab men, women and children are being tortured, raped, maimed and killed in the name of protecting your freedom. You like it.
Cue James music for exit
It makes you feel safe and secure. Now you know how Saddam Hussein got away with it for so long.
CLEAN AIR IS FOR HIPPIES
J. You know, it nearly gags a goat everytime some hack from the Bush cabal or their pet chimps on the hill get up and start railing about how “this President has the strongest environmental record of any Chief Executive in a 1,000 years...”
The bald faced mendacity of that statement is itself enough to trigger a grand mal seizure. I’d be lucky to come out of that without having gnawed my own head off...
But then to have to come to grips with the grim reality that Mike Leavitt, the newly coronated EPA commissar, in his first move, guts the Clean Air Act relative to coal-fired power plants and summarily halts all pending investigations into CAA violations.
That amounts to about 50 plants owned by 10 companies nationwide, who all just got a get out of jail free card, and told that they can now pollute to their hearts content, because modernizing their plants to create more pollution is just more efficient and saves more money for them.
No lie...that’s the line; “Under the old rules, plants that were modernized in ways that increased harmful emissions generally had to install more pollution controls. Under the new rules, any renovation costing no more than one-fifth of a power-generating unit's value would be exempted from the requirement for new pollution-control devices,” according to a New York Times story early last week.
This has left many of the states attorneys generals in places like New York and New Jersey with their heads spinning. They had been counting on a vigorous federal prosecutions in these matters, and were proceding on the assumption that although the EPA was under the firm control of malevolent aliens from the Dog Star, they would at least follow through on what has already been started.
We have seen, time and again, no matter what the issue, that this administration has no shame, sense of consequence and no compunction about chagning gears in midstream on anything and then daring anyone to notice that they are a gang lying scumbags who don’t have the integrity to work a traveling circus, much less run the Washington D.C. Superpower Tilt-a-Whirl.
Seriously, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney or Andy Card shows up at the midway, the rest of the carnies start reaching for their wallets and avoiding direct eye contact...
There are, of course, those of us who saw this coming from a long way off. We are remembered of an article in the Wall Street Journal in June of 2000 which detailed how the coal mining industry in West Virginia decided to throw their lot in with W.
But for a price, namely an relxation on prohibitions of blasphemous Earth-scarring mining practices as well as Clear Air regulations that threatened to slow the pace of coal consumption in the United States, despite the prevalence and maturity of clean-coal technologies, like carbon-sequestration.
Carbon sequestration is -- in a layman’s nut shell -- the net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere into long-lived pools of carbon such as trees, roots, soils and microorganisms.
S. But aside from the obvious need for the administration to fullfill their end of the regulations futures contracts for the mining and energy industry, there is another, deeper, uglier political game being played here.
The basic fact is that while these 50 lucky big coal plants and their companies have been effectively let off the hook, there are several plants in California, identical in nature and output to these others, including several just yards across the border in Arizona, who will still be the subject of EPA Clean Air Act violations inquiries.
Get that cold chill up yer spine?
Look, the average wirehead, who’s brain is the size of a regulation basketball and operates 250 times faster than the average human brain has already run this terrible fact out to it’s inevitable conclusion.
The administration is going to turn the heat up under California utilities, while making less and less expensive for other states to generate large amounts of energy that California will have to buy at greatly inflated prices on a closed and opaque market.
Hey Conan the Gropenator, did you really think W was going to cut this state any slack whatsoever? I mean, we know you are a neophyte in the world of realpolitick and all, but did you really believe this Administration was going to let you have any run.
We told you this was going to be the case when Maximum Leader gave you the stiff arm here a couple of weeks ago out in Redneckistan. And now, it is California’s turn to get the the horse’s head for refusing a favor to Don Cheney.
Again, we see that our Maximum Leader will have no love for a state that ran him by a million votes in the last election, and already he is signaling his political hatred for California, planning to have the Army get out the massive buzz saw and just cut the thing loose after he steals the next election...
This goes beyond just a tampering with federal regulations to get your way, or more to the point, make sure your pimp gets their way. This is using the rule of law as a cudgel to mete out political payback.
I mean, really, this Administration has finally just completely degenerated into the dynamics of a third grade recess. What’s next, running around on the playground shaking down kids for their milk money, giving wedgies and Indian burns, pushing the smaller kids off the swings?
To hijack the nation’s energy and environmental policy in a blatant move to punish political opponents, is really just the sort of infantile temper tantrum one would expect out of this Administration.
There needs to be some adult intervention here pretty soon... otherwise, this whole nation is going to turn into some deranged neocon Lord of the Flies summer camp fantasy...
J. So our patriotic thought for the day: A politically independent CIA means the Terrorists win... or as John Ashcroft says... “Uncle Sam wants you...to shut the hell up!”
exit theme: RENEGADE MASTER
S. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.
And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com.
J. This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...
PART II
cue S9 music
And now the music is telling me that we have an incoming transmission from the redoubtable Dr. S9…
J. That’s right. It is time once again for our regular contributor Dr. Strychnine, reporting from his super-secret, ultra-dope, mega-cool, extra-jiggy, Mojohaus spy satellite of love high in geosynchronous orbit above Baghdad by the Bay…take it away S9…
ARE THEY SOUP YET?
S9 Okay, space adventurers-- I know you're having a great time watching Operation Iron Hammer attempt to address the problem of guerilla insurgents in Iraq by dropping quarter-ton bombs on the towns and cities where they live; I know you're excited about seeing ancient date palm groves bulldozed as a collective punishment for the residents of Falluja and Tikrit; I know it feels good to see the U.S. military demonstrating its teeth and claws once again, after so many years of taking it in the gut from hippie peacenik losers like the Mojowire.
But. Can we talk? About the torture, I mean. Can we talk about the torture?
Specifically, can we talk about the torture of innocent Iraqi civilians, just ordinary people like you and me, who just wanted to live happy lives, raise healthy families and make a decent name for
themselves-- and instead they were raped, maimed and murdered in untold numbers every year by the Hussein regime.
Yeah, that torture.
Here's what I want to know: how come patriotic Americans are supposed to be outraged about the torture of Iraqi civilians? I mean, even after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch spent *decades* cataloguing the incidents of torture and other human rights abuses in Iraq, patriotic Americans *still* needed to be provided with the flimsy pretexts of phantom connections to al-Qaeda and spooky lies about uranium yellowcake from Niger before they could countenance doing
anything "bold and decisive" about it.
Can we please stop pretending to be outraged by scary stories about people being dropped alive into industrial meat shredders? We weren't outraged by these kinds of stories when the Hussein regime was on friendly terms with us. We aren't outraged now about similar stories about our good friends in Uzbekistan, who the reports are saying have a tendency to "boil people alive" if they don't cooperate in interrogations of our enemies.
Here, let's see if *this* story will generate some outrage... this was on the front page of the Washington Post the Wednesday before last. Last year, immigration officials at JFK International mistakenly arrested a Canadian man named Maher Arar, classified him as an "enemy combatant," and secretly deported him. On the spot. No lawyer. No phone call. No warning.
Apparently, the Canadians fingered him without having enough evidence. They've apologized repeatedly for the mistake. But wait. Arar wasn't deported to Canada. He was put on a jet to Washington, then Jordan, and finally Syria. Where he spent the next ten months in a prison
cell. And, he says, he was made to give false confessions under torture.
To quote Dana Priest and DaNeen Brown in the Post: "Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the Arar case fits the profile of a covert CIA 'extraordinary rendition' -- the practice of turning over low-level, suspected terrorists to foreign intelligence services, some of which are known to torture prisoners."
Syria swears up one side and down the other that it doesn't torture anyone. Do you believe them? The Hussein regime said the same thing, you know.
Continuing from the article: "Renditions are a legitimate option for dealing with suspected terrorists, intelligence officials argue. The U.S. government officially rejects the assertion that it knowingly
sends suspects abroad to be tortured, but officials admit they sometimes do that. 'The temptation is to have these folks in other hands because they have different standards,' one official said. 'Someone might be able to get information we can't from detainees,' said another.
"Syria, where use of torture during imprisonment has been documented by the State Department, maintains a secret but growing intelligence relationship with the CIA, according to intelligence experts."
So how do we all feel about that? Are we outraged yet? No? I didn't think you'd be outraged. It's all good with you patriotic Americans if it's the *CIA* that gets to be on the receiving end of all that raw, crude intelligence product.
Of course, Syria isn't exactly on the Most Favored Torturing Nations list anymore, now that the U.S. has escalated the occupation of Iraq. But that's okay. Not to worry. There are plenty of other friendly countries where the CIA can deposit 'extraordinary renditions' into the tender mercies of foreign torturers.
Like for example: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel and those are just the ones that the U.S. State Department officially *knows* about. The list at Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch is as long as your arm.
So please, you patriotic Americans-- enough with the fake outrage. You might as well admit it: you actually get a secret thrill out of knowing that Iraqi and Arab men, women and children are being tortured, raped, maimed and killed in the name of protecting your freedom. You like it.
Cue James music for exit
It makes you feel safe and secure. Now you know how Saddam Hussein got away with it for so long.
CLEAN AIR IS FOR HIPPIES
J. You know, it nearly gags a goat everytime some hack from the Bush cabal or their pet chimps on the hill get up and start railing about how “this President has the strongest environmental record of any Chief Executive in a 1,000 years...”
The bald faced mendacity of that statement is itself enough to trigger a grand mal seizure. I’d be lucky to come out of that without having gnawed my own head off...
But then to have to come to grips with the grim reality that Mike Leavitt, the newly coronated EPA commissar, in his first move, guts the Clean Air Act relative to coal-fired power plants and summarily halts all pending investigations into CAA violations.
That amounts to about 50 plants owned by 10 companies nationwide, who all just got a get out of jail free card, and told that they can now pollute to their hearts content, because modernizing their plants to create more pollution is just more efficient and saves more money for them.
No lie...that’s the line; “Under the old rules, plants that were modernized in ways that increased harmful emissions generally had to install more pollution controls. Under the new rules, any renovation costing no more than one-fifth of a power-generating unit's value would be exempted from the requirement for new pollution-control devices,” according to a New York Times story early last week.
This has left many of the states attorneys generals in places like New York and New Jersey with their heads spinning. They had been counting on a vigorous federal prosecutions in these matters, and were proceding on the assumption that although the EPA was under the firm control of malevolent aliens from the Dog Star, they would at least follow through on what has already been started.
We have seen, time and again, no matter what the issue, that this administration has no shame, sense of consequence and no compunction about chagning gears in midstream on anything and then daring anyone to notice that they are a gang lying scumbags who don’t have the integrity to work a traveling circus, much less run the Washington D.C. Superpower Tilt-a-Whirl.
Seriously, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney or Andy Card shows up at the midway, the rest of the carnies start reaching for their wallets and avoiding direct eye contact...
There are, of course, those of us who saw this coming from a long way off. We are remembered of an article in the Wall Street Journal in June of 2000 which detailed how the coal mining industry in West Virginia decided to throw their lot in with W.
But for a price, namely an relxation on prohibitions of blasphemous Earth-scarring mining practices as well as Clear Air regulations that threatened to slow the pace of coal consumption in the United States, despite the prevalence and maturity of clean-coal technologies, like carbon-sequestration.
Carbon sequestration is -- in a layman’s nut shell -- the net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere into long-lived pools of carbon such as trees, roots, soils and microorganisms.
S. But aside from the obvious need for the administration to fullfill their end of the regulations futures contracts for the mining and energy industry, there is another, deeper, uglier political game being played here.
The basic fact is that while these 50 lucky big coal plants and their companies have been effectively let off the hook, there are several plants in California, identical in nature and output to these others, including several just yards across the border in Arizona, who will still be the subject of EPA Clean Air Act violations inquiries.
Get that cold chill up yer spine?
Look, the average wirehead, who’s brain is the size of a regulation basketball and operates 250 times faster than the average human brain has already run this terrible fact out to it’s inevitable conclusion.
The administration is going to turn the heat up under California utilities, while making less and less expensive for other states to generate large amounts of energy that California will have to buy at greatly inflated prices on a closed and opaque market.
Hey Conan the Gropenator, did you really think W was going to cut this state any slack whatsoever? I mean, we know you are a neophyte in the world of realpolitick and all, but did you really believe this Administration was going to let you have any run.
We told you this was going to be the case when Maximum Leader gave you the stiff arm here a couple of weeks ago out in Redneckistan. And now, it is California’s turn to get the the horse’s head for refusing a favor to Don Cheney.
Again, we see that our Maximum Leader will have no love for a state that ran him by a million votes in the last election, and already he is signaling his political hatred for California, planning to have the Army get out the massive buzz saw and just cut the thing loose after he steals the next election...
This goes beyond just a tampering with federal regulations to get your way, or more to the point, make sure your pimp gets their way. This is using the rule of law as a cudgel to mete out political payback.
I mean, really, this Administration has finally just completely degenerated into the dynamics of a third grade recess. What’s next, running around on the playground shaking down kids for their milk money, giving wedgies and Indian burns, pushing the smaller kids off the swings?
To hijack the nation’s energy and environmental policy in a blatant move to punish political opponents, is really just the sort of infantile temper tantrum one would expect out of this Administration.
There needs to be some adult intervention here pretty soon... otherwise, this whole nation is going to turn into some deranged neocon Lord of the Flies summer camp fantasy...
J. So our patriotic thought for the day: A politically independent CIA means the Terrorists win... or as John Ashcroft says... “Uncle Sam wants you...to shut the hell up!”
exit theme: RENEGADE MASTER
S. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.
And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com.
J. This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...
Saturday, November 08, 2003
Mojowire for 11.08; vol. 1, no. 31
PART I
MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
S9/ Supreme Beings of Leisure, Under the Gun
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master
intro with hendrix star spangled banner
J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire, Vol. 1, No. 31... I’m Mojo...
S. And I’m Sean, it’s Saturday, November 8, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...
J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:
S. First this morning, it would appear that some re-education is in order. Namely, the neocons have started to get loose again regarding the reasons for war in Iraq. Everyone get out your thinking caps and swat-paddles...
J. But in the immortal words of Shakespeare, “Should disdain die, when she has such mete food to feed her...” And indeed, our Maximum Leader was again a font of ineffable, or at least highly amusing, tidbits of wisdom at his Oct. 28 press conference.
S. After you get past the rhetoric, though, you come up with these grim tidings, such as a nation wide call for volunteers to sit on local draft boards. There is only one reason to start generating lists of draft board volunteers... you fill in the rest...
J. With this week’s horror forecast,
S. Next week, when you are glued to the idiot box version of the Private Jessica Lynch story, remember that the real Private Lynch has been none too happy about the way the Defense Department has concocted a mythology surrounding her situation to beat the pro-war drums.
J. And then on this week’s Presidential roundup, Howard Dean has had a big week of ups and downs and come out on top, while Sen. John Kerry is running to play catch up and Wesley Clark ratchets up his own campaign rhetoric a notch.
So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...
fade in more hendrix star spangled banner for five or six count then back out again
REPEAT AFTER ME
J. It has become apparent that the new fallback position from the Iraq War apologists to avoid talking about the complete lack of Iraqi Flying Saucers and death rays, is to claim that the President never used the work imminent in describing the threat posed by Iraq.
This is quite a retreat from the heady pre-war days, when the media was chock full of sage experts predicting that American Forces would find a Death Star's worth of bubbling Toxins produced in Dexter Hussiens Labs, Soviet style nerve toxins capable of scorching the eyeballs off GI's by just reading the label, and of course, a thriving Nuclear weapons program patched together with aluminum artillery tubes, yellowcake Uranium from Niger, and whatever Iraqi scientists could dig up in their backyards.
Unrepentant Administration drone blogger Andrew Sullivan offers a fair example of the new spin..
“No member of the administration used the term ‘imminent threat’ to describe Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. No one.”
For an Administration known for its “Through the Looking Glass” tautology, this one is a masterpiece of semantic subterfuge. Let's ponder a few statements by the President and his “news sources,” and see if you can detect the imminent threat?...Shall we?
First and most glaringly, the administration had to certify to our NATO allies that Iraq was an “imminent threat” when they attempted to invoke Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty to drag Turkey into the war. The verbage “imminent threat” is a key legal phrase that triggers NATO action, and the administration has to claim an “imminent threat” to go there.
Last October, a reporter put this to Ari Fleischer: “Ari, the president has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth.”
Fleischer's answer? “Yes.”
Try this.. In January, Wolf Blitzer asked Dan Bartlett: "Is [Saddam] an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home."
Bartlett's answer? “Well, of course he is.”
Of course, let's not forget the Uber Lie that regularly flows from the dread lips of Vice President “Dick” -- May I call you “Dick” Mr. Vice President -- Cheney. Remember his line: “We believe that Iraq has reconstituted it's Nuclear Weapons Program.”
And now, because Dubya could not figure out how to pronounce the word imminent, we are supposed to believe that the notion pimped mercilessly by the Administrations and it's NeoCon Lackeys, that Iraq posed a direct and imminent threat to the United States to answer the question posed by those hippie commie peaceniks “Why Iraq, Why now” was just a false assumption on our part.
This high school freshman debating trick only works when you have the sort slavish constituency that would sell their own children to Al Qaeda if the RNC decreed it would help get G2 reelected.
S. Not only did these freaks pimp that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the security of the United States, but they subtly implied he was connected to 9/11, by having, what a shock, The Vice President constantly harp on some rumor about a secret meeting in Prague between Mohammand Atta and a Hussien official.
The fact that the FBI places Atta in Florida during the alleged time of the meeting doesn't matter to Dick, once the lie is downloaded into his twisted cranium, only a complete harddrive swap will erase it.
Here's a tip at your next smackdown at the Watercooler, The administration claimed Saddam had a cache of Bio Weapons, particularly Anthrax. They found none. They claimed he had VX Nerve Gas. Not a drop was found. They claimed he had a working nuke program. They found no evidence of that.
The only question that remains on the table is: Did they perpetuate the greatest national Security lie of the modern age since the Gulf of Tonkin, or are just so spectacularly stupid that a smooth talking Iraqi Expat like Ahmad Chalabi was all it took to convince a bunch of draft dodging losers drunk on Leo Strauss and old episodes of Hogans Heroes that Saddam was one of those honey bee looking aliens from a Godzilla movie, ready to use his alien Planet X technology to open the gates on Monster Island and invade America with Baby Godzilla and that pissed-off Turtle.
Okay...Deep cleansing breaths...repeat after me: There were no WMD’s, as rightly suspected by the majority of the American and European Intelligence services. Iraq posed no threat to the United States. Iraq was not involved in 9/11. Iraq was not in league with Al Queda. Iraq was an oppressed, financially ruined nation run by a ruthless, evil despotic tyrant who committed a litany of human rights atrocities.
The sort of dictator NeoCon brainiac Condi Rice decreed was too far off the National Interest path to be worthy of an American intervention. “American Soldiers should not be escorting children to school.”...Sound familiar Condi?
Now all the Administration can do is shake it's Fu Manchu looking finger at us for obsessing over the deaths of American serviceman, while trying to cheer us up with the fine news that American serviceman are enabling Iraqi children to go to school. A 180-degree headspin unsurpassed since Linda Blair soiled the britches of America in the Exorcist. Nice Job Condi.
Don't forget Wireheads. You were right. They were wrong. If George Bush never said the word imminent, it does not matter in the slightest. His centrally controlled flunkies did. The Administration was wrong about virtually everything on Saddam, possibly lied about it all, and deserves nothing less than our cynical worst when evaluating their decisions.
Send the Dittoheads skulking back to their cubicles in tears to refill their Oxycontin prescription. They are deluded scum who aren't worth the free air they breathe, while you stride the earth like a Socratic Giant, knocking over cheap rhetorical constructs from Conservative hacks like LiberalZilla. Fire up the radioactive breath and lets run these bums...
J. You know, with a true artist, there is usually one performance or one piece that will define a body of artistic work. With Andy Worhol it was the soup cans, with Van Gogh it was Starry Night, with Barishnikov it was his Nutcracker...
Right then...
With George W. Bush, we are likely to look back on the press conference of October 28, 2003 as the moment all the artistry came together in a moment to define the Presidency in an opus of unprecendented language twisting that topologists are still trying to determine can exist in our current framework of geometry and spacetime.
For instance, take this precious gem from near the beginning: “Mr. President, you just spoke about the suicide bombers in Iraq as being desperate. But as yesterday's attack show, they're also increasingly successful and seem to be trying to send a warning to institutions like the police and the Red Cross not to cooperate with the United States. Has the United States been able to identify who's behind this surge of attacks, where they come from, and how to stop them?
“THE PRESIDENT: Yes. I think it's a very interesting point you make in your question, "they're trying to send a warning." Basically, what they're trying to do is cause people to run. They want to kill and create chaos. That's the nature of a terrorist, that's what terrorists do. They commit suicide acts against innocent people and then expect people to say, well, gosh, we better -- better not try to fight you anymore...”
A sawbuck to anyone who can actually identify an answer to the questions posed...
But wait, W’s just getting warmed up... After making some general statements in his introduction, that were themselves of a highly dubious nature, such as trying to sell his failure in Madrid to get international support for the war as a masterstroke of diplomacy and others, he was asked this very pointed question: “Mr. President, In recent weeks, you and your White House team have made a concerted effort to put a positive spin on progress in Iraq. At the same time, there's been a much more somber assessment in private, as with Secretary Rumsfeld's memo. And there are people out there who don't believe that the administration is leveling with them about the difficulty and scope of the problem in Iraq.”
And the President’s intellectually stunning rejoinder? “Yes, I can't put it any more plainly, Iraq is a dangerous place. That's leveling. It is a dangerous place. What I was saying is there's more than just terrorist attacks that are taking place in Iraq. There's schools opening, there are hospitals opening. The electricity -- the capacity to deliver electricity to the Iraqi people is back up to pre-war levels...”
Fine, but be that as it may, less than a minute after the Maximum Leader was bragging about “pre-war” levels he was also saying that the pre-war levels were horrible, dehumanizing conditions; “economy that has been wrecked by Mr. Saddam Hussein. I mean, he just destroyed their economy and destroyed their infrastructure...”
S. But here were a couple of zingers that actually made it past the censors: “Mr. President, if I may take you back to May 1st when you stood on the USS Lincoln under a huge banner that said, “Mission Accomplished.” At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?
THE PRESIDENT: Nora, I think you ought to look at my speech. I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we've still got hard work to do, there's still more to be done...The "Mission Accomplished" sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff -- they weren't that ingenious, by the way.”
Nice job, blame it all on the sailors, what’s up with those guys.
And then there was this comment on the people who voted for Al Gore by a million more votes than Bush in 2000: “Well, I think the American people are patient during an election year, because they tend to be able to differentiate between politics and reality. As a matter of fact, the American people are -- the electorate is a heck of a lot smarter than most politicians.”
That one just left the press gaggle misty eyed and staring in mute wonder...
As a final bit of Dada from the Dadaist in Chief, we are left with this, and ask you to remember this bit of surreality when you stand in the voting booth next year thinking about the life and death decisions a President makes: “...Mr. President. You recently put Condoleezza Rice, your National Security Advisor, in charge of the management of the administration's Iraq policy. What has effectively changed since she's been in charge? And the second question, can you promise a year from now that you will have reduced the number of troops in Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: The second question is a trick question, so I won't answer it. The first question was Condoleezza Rice. Her job is to coordinate interagency. She's doing a fine job of coordinating interagency. She's doing -- the role of the National Security Advisor is to not only provide good advice to the President, which she does on a regular basis -- I value her judgment and her intelligence -- but her job is also to deal interagency and to help unstick things that may get stuck, is the best way to put it. She's an unsticker. And -- is she listening? Okay, well, she's doing a fine job.”
Thank you Bobo the Simpleminded...Oh God, we’re doomed!
HELL NO, WE WON’T GO...
J. The Defense Department made a move last week that sent a scary chill up the spine of all Amercian men and women ages 18 to 29 years-olds. They put out a general call for volunteers to sit on local draft boards.
Now for those of you unfamiliar with how selective service would work, go ask your local aging stoner or ex-hippy, and if they are cogent long enough, they will tell you that the draft board is a local board of the citizenry in charge of receiving the manpower requests from the Defense Department for your neighborhood, then conducting the lottery, determining draft status, as well as maintaining the records of who’s fit to serve, served already, skipped to Canada, etc...
This would be the first call for draft board volunteers since Selective Service was deactivated in 1973, and by itself, it has made a lot of people very nervous about what the hell is going on in Iraq and at the Pentagon.
But before we get all aflutter, supplamental expenditures for the current fiscal for Selective Service carry the magic phrase: “Provided that no funds provided herein shall be used in any way for the induction of anyone into the Armed Services.”And yet, there is this interesting little piece of incongruity, like a blood stain in the carpet where you didn’t remember there being one before.
“This is significant. What the department of Defense is doing is creating the infrastructure to make the draft a viable option should the administration wish to go this route,” said Ned Lebow, a presidential scholar at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and former professor of strategy at the National War College in Washington.
Looking at the numbers in Iraq alone, 130,000 U.S. troops with increasing pressure to bring the boys home and now Turkey being the most recent Ally to balk at sending their army to help us, is creating a bit of a manpower utilization problem.
This becomes even more problematic when you consider our positions in Afghanistan and a Korean penninsula that could go completely sideways with little or no warning.
So when you start crunching the numbers, suddenly it is understandable how a draft starts to look like a viable option, indeed even a desirable option, for manpower wonks in the basement of the Pentagon.
S. But that would ignore the all-important political question. I mean, how would it be possible in less than year for the President to go from “we will stroll through Bagdad on the road of Baathist bones, to the cheers and flowers of the populace freed from the evil of Saddam and the legion of doom...” -- to -- “Sorry about ongoing war we can’t seem to win in Iraq, you don’t mind sending us all your sons and daughters between 18 and 29, do you?”
This is not the political happy ending the Bush people wanted going into an election year with at least a few of the Democrats having enough of a right arm to bring the nasty heat to Bush in an all-out campaign rut.
No, the West Wingers are throwing a shoe over this issue right now. They don’t care if there’s a draft or not, just please no draft until after Nov. 2, 2004. This would be tantamount to an admission of failure, stupidity and lies on the part of the administration. Political suicide for the President and his gang.
Perhaps this is why some notable Democrats are trotting out the whole pro-draft thing, like Charles Rangel of New York, who is this year’s lucky sponsor of the Universal National Service Act of.
And suddenly, instead of languishing in a committee on committees in a disused cloakroom of the Rayburn building, this thing is in the manpower subcommittee House Armed Services and the committee is actively soliciting comments from the Department of Defense.
Again, this might not mean very much to those who don’t watch regularly, but it is a step up in the activity ladder for this kind of legislation, and a sign that some on the manpower subcommittee at least are taking it seriously.
What if, and we must stress this is nothing more than grotesque conjecture, Congress gets weird and decides to actually bring a Draft resolution to the floor for a real vote. What does the President do? Does the President reinstitute the draft?
Hard to say at this point. On the one hand, he just might, especially as the force utilization in Iraq and Afghanistan spreads U.S. troops way too thin. But if he does, then he is back to explaining why this was necessary, and then why it took Democrats in Congress to do what had to be done by pushing the bill only for the President to come crawling at the end to sign their legislation.
No, I think at this point, the President needs to be disavowing any plans for a national draft, and then get on the phone to Rummy and tell him to cool out with the bad noise emmanating from the Pentagon about draft boards.
If not, then this time next year, they’ll be out on the street looking for real jobs.
SEE PART II
PART I
MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
S9/ Supreme Beings of Leisure, Under the Gun
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master
intro with hendrix star spangled banner
J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire, Vol. 1, No. 31... I’m Mojo...
S. And I’m Sean, it’s Saturday, November 8, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...
J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:
S. First this morning, it would appear that some re-education is in order. Namely, the neocons have started to get loose again regarding the reasons for war in Iraq. Everyone get out your thinking caps and swat-paddles...
J. But in the immortal words of Shakespeare, “Should disdain die, when she has such mete food to feed her...” And indeed, our Maximum Leader was again a font of ineffable, or at least highly amusing, tidbits of wisdom at his Oct. 28 press conference.
S. After you get past the rhetoric, though, you come up with these grim tidings, such as a nation wide call for volunteers to sit on local draft boards. There is only one reason to start generating lists of draft board volunteers... you fill in the rest...
J. With this week’s horror forecast,
S. Next week, when you are glued to the idiot box version of the Private Jessica Lynch story, remember that the real Private Lynch has been none too happy about the way the Defense Department has concocted a mythology surrounding her situation to beat the pro-war drums.
J. And then on this week’s Presidential roundup, Howard Dean has had a big week of ups and downs and come out on top, while Sen. John Kerry is running to play catch up and Wesley Clark ratchets up his own campaign rhetoric a notch.
So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...
fade in more hendrix star spangled banner for five or six count then back out again
REPEAT AFTER ME
J. It has become apparent that the new fallback position from the Iraq War apologists to avoid talking about the complete lack of Iraqi Flying Saucers and death rays, is to claim that the President never used the work imminent in describing the threat posed by Iraq.
This is quite a retreat from the heady pre-war days, when the media was chock full of sage experts predicting that American Forces would find a Death Star's worth of bubbling Toxins produced in Dexter Hussiens Labs, Soviet style nerve toxins capable of scorching the eyeballs off GI's by just reading the label, and of course, a thriving Nuclear weapons program patched together with aluminum artillery tubes, yellowcake Uranium from Niger, and whatever Iraqi scientists could dig up in their backyards.
Unrepentant Administration drone blogger Andrew Sullivan offers a fair example of the new spin..
“No member of the administration used the term ‘imminent threat’ to describe Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. No one.”
For an Administration known for its “Through the Looking Glass” tautology, this one is a masterpiece of semantic subterfuge. Let's ponder a few statements by the President and his “news sources,” and see if you can detect the imminent threat?...Shall we?
First and most glaringly, the administration had to certify to our NATO allies that Iraq was an “imminent threat” when they attempted to invoke Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty to drag Turkey into the war. The verbage “imminent threat” is a key legal phrase that triggers NATO action, and the administration has to claim an “imminent threat” to go there.
Last October, a reporter put this to Ari Fleischer: “Ari, the president has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth.”
Fleischer's answer? “Yes.”
Try this.. In January, Wolf Blitzer asked Dan Bartlett: "Is [Saddam] an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home."
Bartlett's answer? “Well, of course he is.”
Of course, let's not forget the Uber Lie that regularly flows from the dread lips of Vice President “Dick” -- May I call you “Dick” Mr. Vice President -- Cheney. Remember his line: “We believe that Iraq has reconstituted it's Nuclear Weapons Program.”
And now, because Dubya could not figure out how to pronounce the word imminent, we are supposed to believe that the notion pimped mercilessly by the Administrations and it's NeoCon Lackeys, that Iraq posed a direct and imminent threat to the United States to answer the question posed by those hippie commie peaceniks “Why Iraq, Why now” was just a false assumption on our part.
This high school freshman debating trick only works when you have the sort slavish constituency that would sell their own children to Al Qaeda if the RNC decreed it would help get G2 reelected.
S. Not only did these freaks pimp that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the security of the United States, but they subtly implied he was connected to 9/11, by having, what a shock, The Vice President constantly harp on some rumor about a secret meeting in Prague between Mohammand Atta and a Hussien official.
The fact that the FBI places Atta in Florida during the alleged time of the meeting doesn't matter to Dick, once the lie is downloaded into his twisted cranium, only a complete harddrive swap will erase it.
Here's a tip at your next smackdown at the Watercooler, The administration claimed Saddam had a cache of Bio Weapons, particularly Anthrax. They found none. They claimed he had VX Nerve Gas. Not a drop was found. They claimed he had a working nuke program. They found no evidence of that.
The only question that remains on the table is: Did they perpetuate the greatest national Security lie of the modern age since the Gulf of Tonkin, or are just so spectacularly stupid that a smooth talking Iraqi Expat like Ahmad Chalabi was all it took to convince a bunch of draft dodging losers drunk on Leo Strauss and old episodes of Hogans Heroes that Saddam was one of those honey bee looking aliens from a Godzilla movie, ready to use his alien Planet X technology to open the gates on Monster Island and invade America with Baby Godzilla and that pissed-off Turtle.
Okay...Deep cleansing breaths...repeat after me: There were no WMD’s, as rightly suspected by the majority of the American and European Intelligence services. Iraq posed no threat to the United States. Iraq was not involved in 9/11. Iraq was not in league with Al Queda. Iraq was an oppressed, financially ruined nation run by a ruthless, evil despotic tyrant who committed a litany of human rights atrocities.
The sort of dictator NeoCon brainiac Condi Rice decreed was too far off the National Interest path to be worthy of an American intervention. “American Soldiers should not be escorting children to school.”...Sound familiar Condi?
Now all the Administration can do is shake it's Fu Manchu looking finger at us for obsessing over the deaths of American serviceman, while trying to cheer us up with the fine news that American serviceman are enabling Iraqi children to go to school. A 180-degree headspin unsurpassed since Linda Blair soiled the britches of America in the Exorcist. Nice Job Condi.
Don't forget Wireheads. You were right. They were wrong. If George Bush never said the word imminent, it does not matter in the slightest. His centrally controlled flunkies did. The Administration was wrong about virtually everything on Saddam, possibly lied about it all, and deserves nothing less than our cynical worst when evaluating their decisions.
Send the Dittoheads skulking back to their cubicles in tears to refill their Oxycontin prescription. They are deluded scum who aren't worth the free air they breathe, while you stride the earth like a Socratic Giant, knocking over cheap rhetorical constructs from Conservative hacks like LiberalZilla. Fire up the radioactive breath and lets run these bums...
J. You know, with a true artist, there is usually one performance or one piece that will define a body of artistic work. With Andy Worhol it was the soup cans, with Van Gogh it was Starry Night, with Barishnikov it was his Nutcracker...
Right then...
With George W. Bush, we are likely to look back on the press conference of October 28, 2003 as the moment all the artistry came together in a moment to define the Presidency in an opus of unprecendented language twisting that topologists are still trying to determine can exist in our current framework of geometry and spacetime.
For instance, take this precious gem from near the beginning: “Mr. President, you just spoke about the suicide bombers in Iraq as being desperate. But as yesterday's attack show, they're also increasingly successful and seem to be trying to send a warning to institutions like the police and the Red Cross not to cooperate with the United States. Has the United States been able to identify who's behind this surge of attacks, where they come from, and how to stop them?
“THE PRESIDENT: Yes. I think it's a very interesting point you make in your question, "they're trying to send a warning." Basically, what they're trying to do is cause people to run. They want to kill and create chaos. That's the nature of a terrorist, that's what terrorists do. They commit suicide acts against innocent people and then expect people to say, well, gosh, we better -- better not try to fight you anymore...”
A sawbuck to anyone who can actually identify an answer to the questions posed...
But wait, W’s just getting warmed up... After making some general statements in his introduction, that were themselves of a highly dubious nature, such as trying to sell his failure in Madrid to get international support for the war as a masterstroke of diplomacy and others, he was asked this very pointed question: “Mr. President, In recent weeks, you and your White House team have made a concerted effort to put a positive spin on progress in Iraq. At the same time, there's been a much more somber assessment in private, as with Secretary Rumsfeld's memo. And there are people out there who don't believe that the administration is leveling with them about the difficulty and scope of the problem in Iraq.”
And the President’s intellectually stunning rejoinder? “Yes, I can't put it any more plainly, Iraq is a dangerous place. That's leveling. It is a dangerous place. What I was saying is there's more than just terrorist attacks that are taking place in Iraq. There's schools opening, there are hospitals opening. The electricity -- the capacity to deliver electricity to the Iraqi people is back up to pre-war levels...”
Fine, but be that as it may, less than a minute after the Maximum Leader was bragging about “pre-war” levels he was also saying that the pre-war levels were horrible, dehumanizing conditions; “economy that has been wrecked by Mr. Saddam Hussein. I mean, he just destroyed their economy and destroyed their infrastructure...”
S. But here were a couple of zingers that actually made it past the censors: “Mr. President, if I may take you back to May 1st when you stood on the USS Lincoln under a huge banner that said, “Mission Accomplished.” At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?
THE PRESIDENT: Nora, I think you ought to look at my speech. I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we've still got hard work to do, there's still more to be done...The "Mission Accomplished" sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff -- they weren't that ingenious, by the way.”
Nice job, blame it all on the sailors, what’s up with those guys.
And then there was this comment on the people who voted for Al Gore by a million more votes than Bush in 2000: “Well, I think the American people are patient during an election year, because they tend to be able to differentiate between politics and reality. As a matter of fact, the American people are -- the electorate is a heck of a lot smarter than most politicians.”
That one just left the press gaggle misty eyed and staring in mute wonder...
As a final bit of Dada from the Dadaist in Chief, we are left with this, and ask you to remember this bit of surreality when you stand in the voting booth next year thinking about the life and death decisions a President makes: “...Mr. President. You recently put Condoleezza Rice, your National Security Advisor, in charge of the management of the administration's Iraq policy. What has effectively changed since she's been in charge? And the second question, can you promise a year from now that you will have reduced the number of troops in Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: The second question is a trick question, so I won't answer it. The first question was Condoleezza Rice. Her job is to coordinate interagency. She's doing a fine job of coordinating interagency. She's doing -- the role of the National Security Advisor is to not only provide good advice to the President, which she does on a regular basis -- I value her judgment and her intelligence -- but her job is also to deal interagency and to help unstick things that may get stuck, is the best way to put it. She's an unsticker. And -- is she listening? Okay, well, she's doing a fine job.”
Thank you Bobo the Simpleminded...Oh God, we’re doomed!
HELL NO, WE WON’T GO...
J. The Defense Department made a move last week that sent a scary chill up the spine of all Amercian men and women ages 18 to 29 years-olds. They put out a general call for volunteers to sit on local draft boards.
Now for those of you unfamiliar with how selective service would work, go ask your local aging stoner or ex-hippy, and if they are cogent long enough, they will tell you that the draft board is a local board of the citizenry in charge of receiving the manpower requests from the Defense Department for your neighborhood, then conducting the lottery, determining draft status, as well as maintaining the records of who’s fit to serve, served already, skipped to Canada, etc...
This would be the first call for draft board volunteers since Selective Service was deactivated in 1973, and by itself, it has made a lot of people very nervous about what the hell is going on in Iraq and at the Pentagon.
But before we get all aflutter, supplamental expenditures for the current fiscal for Selective Service carry the magic phrase: “Provided that no funds provided herein shall be used in any way for the induction of anyone into the Armed Services.”And yet, there is this interesting little piece of incongruity, like a blood stain in the carpet where you didn’t remember there being one before.
“This is significant. What the department of Defense is doing is creating the infrastructure to make the draft a viable option should the administration wish to go this route,” said Ned Lebow, a presidential scholar at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and former professor of strategy at the National War College in Washington.
Looking at the numbers in Iraq alone, 130,000 U.S. troops with increasing pressure to bring the boys home and now Turkey being the most recent Ally to balk at sending their army to help us, is creating a bit of a manpower utilization problem.
This becomes even more problematic when you consider our positions in Afghanistan and a Korean penninsula that could go completely sideways with little or no warning.
So when you start crunching the numbers, suddenly it is understandable how a draft starts to look like a viable option, indeed even a desirable option, for manpower wonks in the basement of the Pentagon.
S. But that would ignore the all-important political question. I mean, how would it be possible in less than year for the President to go from “we will stroll through Bagdad on the road of Baathist bones, to the cheers and flowers of the populace freed from the evil of Saddam and the legion of doom...” -- to -- “Sorry about ongoing war we can’t seem to win in Iraq, you don’t mind sending us all your sons and daughters between 18 and 29, do you?”
This is not the political happy ending the Bush people wanted going into an election year with at least a few of the Democrats having enough of a right arm to bring the nasty heat to Bush in an all-out campaign rut.
No, the West Wingers are throwing a shoe over this issue right now. They don’t care if there’s a draft or not, just please no draft until after Nov. 2, 2004. This would be tantamount to an admission of failure, stupidity and lies on the part of the administration. Political suicide for the President and his gang.
Perhaps this is why some notable Democrats are trotting out the whole pro-draft thing, like Charles Rangel of New York, who is this year’s lucky sponsor of the Universal National Service Act of
And suddenly, instead of languishing in a committee on committees in a disused cloakroom of the Rayburn building, this thing is in the manpower subcommittee House Armed Services and the committee is actively soliciting comments from the Department of Defense.
Again, this might not mean very much to those who don’t watch regularly, but it is a step up in the activity ladder for this kind of legislation, and a sign that some on the manpower subcommittee at least are taking it seriously.
What if, and we must stress this is nothing more than grotesque conjecture, Congress gets weird and decides to actually bring a Draft resolution to the floor for a real vote. What does the President do? Does the President reinstitute the draft?
Hard to say at this point. On the one hand, he just might, especially as the force utilization in Iraq and Afghanistan spreads U.S. troops way too thin. But if he does, then he is back to explaining why this was necessary, and then why it took Democrats in Congress to do what had to be done by pushing the bill only for the President to come crawling at the end to sign their legislation.
No, I think at this point, the President needs to be disavowing any plans for a national draft, and then get on the phone to Rummy and tell him to cool out with the bad noise emmanating from the Pentagon about draft boards.
If not, then this time next year, they’ll be out on the street looking for real jobs.
SEE PART II
MojoWire for 11/08/03
PART II
And now the music is telling me that we have an incoming transmission from the redoubtable Dr. S9…
J. That’s right. It is time once again for our regular contributor Dr. Strychnine, reporting from his super-secret, ultra-dope, mega-cool, extra-jiggy, Mojohaus spy satellite of love high in geosynchronous orbit above Baghdad by the Bay…take it away S9…
S9 Yuri A. Gagarin on a pogo stick! Have we been having a bad hair day up here on the Satellite of Love, or what? We lost the main generator for three days, micrometeoroids peppered the downlink array to smithereens, and-- to top it all off-- the waste recycler caught fire and nearly
turned our whole site into a salvage operation. So, please forgive me if our message from low Earth orbit this week is a little scattered. Blame it on solar flares, if that works for you.
It looks like it's been "upside-down world" for you down there too. I turn away for a brief moment to attend to local matters, and next thing I know: the economy gives the impression of being on the President's side for once, and the situation in Iraq is finally starting to make him look weak on national security. Wasn't it the other way around not so long ago?
And hey, what's up with the Dow Jones Industrial Average? You'd think the market would be smoking after the latest labor figures showed that employers have slowed up on the pink slips-- down from nearly 400,000/week to a little under 350,000/week. We also see that about 125,000 new jobs were filled, which is up from about half that much in the previous week. Another forty or fifty weeks like that and the White House might be able to keep from beating out the Hoover
administration for largest contraction in the job market during a single term of a one-term President.
There are reasons to be hopeful about the prospects of a short-term turnaround in the economy. There has been-- after all-- a *massive* amount of stimulus in the form of government fiscal policy. To repeat what The Economist magazine quoted a Republican analyst as saying last week, "[President Bush] has been spending like a drunken sailor." A recently published Cato Institute study says that, under his administration, non-military discretionary spending has soared by 21%.
Interest rates remain low because nobody really wants to get into a bidding war with the Bush administration over loans. And, well, there is also the fact that Alan Greenspan is pursuing a policy of *trying* to blow some heat into the fire with deliberately lowered federal reserve rates. Low market rates for loans *do* tend to suppress household savings rates. It's *great*, however, for blowing asset valuation bubbles in the residential real estate markets of North America.
What I'm saying here is that the fiscal stimulus is just about all run out. It's like you're driving up Interstate 5 and you're running on fumes and you're in that spot north of Coalinga where the petrol
stations are spaced out about every sixty-five lightyears. You're climbing up a small hill, and you're hoping like crazy that there's petrol just on the other side where you can't see it. So you floor it-- hoping that when you run completely out of fuel, and the engine just stops, that you can coast into the petrol station and refill the tank.
Real short term interest rates are almost zero, so there's little or no room to cut rates for any further stimulus. Mortgage refinancing activity is dropping, which ought to be no major surprise-- there's
been a six-fold increase in that kind of business in the last two years.
So... if the fiscal stimulus is enough to kick the economy into a stable growth trajectory, then the jobs may return to your neighborhood fairly soon, which would once again give you the opportunity to think about telling the boss to shove it while you go work for his competitor.
On the other hand, if you're one of those doom-and-gloom types who isn't really happy unless the sky is falling *and* you have good seats for watching the wreckage break up over Texas, then you might want to ask any of those economists on your Saturnalia gifts list to compare and contrast the current economic outlook with the actual historical examples of successful applications of fiscal stimulus to kick start an economy into a stability.
Hint: the traditional way this is done is to use temporary government deficits to fund infrastructure improvements. And as we have seen, the current Federal budget is in a 'structural' deficit-- in other words, it's out of balance as far as the mind can conceive-- no sane economist could believe that the Federal budget can be brought back into balance without major policy changes that neither the majority nor the minority parties are willing to consider openly.
And then there's the minor little niggling detail about how much of that fiscal stimulus is really being used to fund infrastructure improvements.
Okay, Ahmed Chalabi will clearly be able to install the soak tub of the Gods in his bathroom. That might not really help the employment picture in South Carolina very much, however...
J. Since you no doubt have been suppressing the foul memory of the craven patriotic flag licking that was broadcast 24/7 during our glorious defeat of the fell legions of Hannibal Hussien, allow us to remind you of one particular fine moment. Remember Jessica Lynch...
Okay...Okay...deep cleansing breaths... allow the tremors and the shooting pain to pass as the memory forms up...Yes...Pfc Lynch was the sole survivor of an ambush on her convoy. She was captured and ended up in an Iraqi hospital.
U.S. Special Forces busted into the hospital with guns ablazing, all captured dramatically on grainy night vision video, to rescue Private Lynch and spirit her away from the foul clutches of Iraqi medicine, where they were no doubt going to use Iraqi WMD supermedicne to construct a clone army of Lynchs armed with Anthrax vision and VX Nerve breath...
Okay.. maybe not the Nerve breath..but the outpouring of yellow ribbon love and grooviness througout Red Blooded America could have made even the most deranged Fox News junkie slip into a Red, White and Blue stupor.
Stories about how Private Lynch heroically emptied her weapon at the Iraqi horde while floating in a Trinty-esque bullet time until she was taken prisoner by Iraqi’s filled the Fox News crawl.
Suddenly Private Jessica Lynch, the photogenically impish soldier became a cause celebré, a living breathing personification of everything the administration wanted us all to believe was right and good about the war, and the people fighting it.
There were often lurid allusions to what the Iraqis would do to any female member of the armed services caught or captured, and were reminded that all we could do was pray for her rescue. Forget at that time, there were several other soldiers including one young African American lady from Texas who acquitted herself well as a captive. But hey, no one wants to see one of those on the front cover of a magazine...
Even then, however, questions started to surface regarding what many automatically recognized as the creation of an official mythology surrounding Lynch’s capture and subsequent rescue. The BBC, after talking with the staff at the hosptial, cast doubt on the need for a guns abalzing rescue, reporting that Lynch was well cared for by hopstial staff.
Naturally, the usual suspects howled in ecstasy over the SCLM conspiracy, particularly those greasy Euro’s, and the canonization of Pfc Lynch went largely unchallenged.
We waited with horrific anticiaption for the Lynch book and TV Movie. Becasue, of course, nothing is real or concrete to America unless a network makes a cringingly distorted TV Movie about it...Right?
S. Now, Pfc Lynch has emerged from her convelescence, with a book on the eve of the TV movie. And guess what...she openly questions the offical Agitprop from the Pentagram, stating she was out like a light after the ambush, and never got off a shot. She appears to have been well treated by the Iraqis, as near as she can remember.
This is in direct contradiction to the Iraqi informant who tipped off the Americans to Lynch’s capture. He claimed she was interrogated violently by Iraqi officals.
Asked by the ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer on Tuesday if the military's portrayal of the rescue bothered her, Lynch said: “Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong.”
Asked how she felt about the reports of her heroism, Lynch told Sawyer, “It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't.”
And asked about reports that the military exaggerated the danger of the rescue mission, Lynch said, “Yeah, I don't think it happened quite like that,” although she added that in that context anybody would have approached the hospital well-armed. She continued: “I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say the things they did, you know, all I know was that I was in that hospital hurting. I needed help.”
Clearly this is an inconvenient unraveling of the official account of our glorious road to victory in Iraq. So naturally, some fine subhuman scumsucker in the Rummy Pentagram “leaked” a story from Lynch’s post capture medical exam.
The story claimed Lynch had injuries consistent with Sexual Assault. Lynch has no recollection of this. Big props to the fine patriots in the Pentagram for leaking this information to the public. I’m sure Pfc Lynch feels likes a hero now, and I am sure all those fine upstanding young White Christians back home in North Carolina will feel the same about her, even though she has been defiled by the swarthy Arab-Men. Yeah...I’m sure she wanted that detail made public.
Where do you start with this?...The White House..Again....is revealed as conjuring up yet another deranged story to prop up the Iraqi Clone Wars, this time using a loyal soldier in their own army like, well, a banner on an Aircraft carrier.
When she decides to tell her own story, some debased loyalist demeans her service by openly (and quite possibly unlawfully) leaking a rape story. This is yet another case of where you *think* this administration can not get any lower or amoral, they launch a thinly veiled retaliation on one of their own soldiers injured in the line of duty for puerile political reasons...
Yeah..One nation under God...Ummm does the God the White House worships have tentacles, a big red eye, and live on the bottom of the ocean in a non-Euclidean city? Just asking?
J. First this week on the Presidential roundup, our standard disclaimer. We are Dean supporters, he rules the rest of the pack are scrubs, deal with it clones... and Dr. Dean has had quite the week. They say times like this are a crucible for a campaign and that you either emerge as a frontrunner or you are headed for the political scrapheap.
The week started for Dean when Democratic pack was stricken with a political version of Tourette’s Syndrome, barking and growling at Dean for his wish to be a Presidential candidate for all Americans, even Rednecks.
His entire point was that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interest by a morally corrupt GOP and that Democrats need to reach out to those people, or as Dean says, “I want to be the Presidential candidate of the guy with a Confederate Flag on his pickup with a shotgun rack, because their kids don’t have health insurance either.”
Paul Krugman got it absolutely right in Friday’s New York Times when he said: “Mr. Dean wasn't suggesting that his party adopt the G.O.P. strategy of coded racial signals, and by and large African-Americans — my wife included — understand that. What he meant by his flag remark was that Democrats must make the case to working Americans of all colors that the right's elitist agenda isn't in their interest. And he's right.”
But as the week progressed, it became clear that the Dean juggernaut, far from being damaged, has started to pick up steam from this latest contretemps, and is now gaining a certain momentum from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
It looked like the confederate flag issue was not enough to keep Dean from getting the endorsements of the 3 million- plus members of the AFL-CIO’s two largest unions, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
And now, he is poised to take his vast legion of followers completely off the reservation by giving them the power to decide whether the campaign sticks with the federal matching funds pledge, or go it alone raising their money from individual donors.
So far, Dean has beaten all fundraising expectations by raising now, going on $30 million total at an average of $80 per shot.
But this hasn’t stopped the rest of the gang from piling on. Kerry unleashed another desperate barrage of attacks last week, that do nothing more than point out Kerry’s desparation. Wesley Clark also heated up the rhetoric towards Dean, only showing that he has nothing really to add to the overall debate.
Which in Clark’s case is really a shame. While being a pale imitation of the poltical gamer that Kerry is, he is also a very experienced military man, who actually made some good points last week when he also unveiled a plan to get America out of Iraq. The other candidates, including Dean, would do well to listen to this.
Much of the plan surrounds involving our European allies and reconfiguring the nature of the Ameircan military presence in Iraq, leading to a draw down of American forces. But unfortunately, that will all get lost in Clark’s braying about what a bad guy Dean is.
S. Kerry finds himself in a similar boat. Strong military background, and a veteran political campaigner, he is being forced to fight the battle Dean’s way. He is reacting, playing defense. As chess masters like to say, if you are not thinking four moves ahead already, you are just reacting.
That let’s Dean fight the campaign his way and lets him get out ahead of the rest of the pack. Everyone has essentially ceded the notion that he is now the guy to beat. And it doesn’t help Kerry that Edwards seems to be the real drain on the front runners.
Edwards is like the kid who is sitting at the adults table at Thanksgiving for the first time making an idiot of himself, but not realizing it. And the rest of adults are only going to put up with this behavior for only so much longer.
This week is going to be pretty interesting in the chats Sunday morning. John Edwards will be on Meet the Press, and Tim Russert will probably beat him like a gong, since he has decided that he is the official executioner for the Republican establishment.
At the same time, Kerry will be on with Bob Schiffer on Face the Nation, where he will undoubtedly be given the loving ministrations and peeled grapes of the favorite son candidate. But if you can stomach the love fest, it might prove interesting.
And now for a Mojohaus call from the poll, are you listening Dr. Thompson? We are calling that the next guy to drop out of the race will be Dick Gephardt after New Hampshire, possibly after Iowa if Dean does well enough against him.
J. So our patriotic thought for the day: Honoring our troops with truth means the Terrorists win... or as John Ashcroft says... “Keep lookin’ at me like that boy, I might just decide yer an A-rab...”
S. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.
And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com.
J. This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...
PART II
J. That’s right. It is time once again for our regular contributor Dr. Strychnine, reporting from his super-secret, ultra-dope, mega-cool, extra-jiggy, Mojohaus spy satellite of love high in geosynchronous orbit above Baghdad by the Bay…take it away S9…
S9 Yuri A. Gagarin on a pogo stick! Have we been having a bad hair day up here on the Satellite of Love, or what? We lost the main generator for three days, micrometeoroids peppered the downlink array to smithereens, and-- to top it all off-- the waste recycler caught fire and nearly
turned our whole site into a salvage operation. So, please forgive me if our message from low Earth orbit this week is a little scattered. Blame it on solar flares, if that works for you.
It looks like it's been "upside-down world" for you down there too. I turn away for a brief moment to attend to local matters, and next thing I know: the economy gives the impression of being on the President's side for once, and the situation in Iraq is finally starting to make him look weak on national security. Wasn't it the other way around not so long ago?
And hey, what's up with the Dow Jones Industrial Average? You'd think the market would be smoking after the latest labor figures showed that employers have slowed up on the pink slips-- down from nearly 400,000/week to a little under 350,000/week. We also see that about 125,000 new jobs were filled, which is up from about half that much in the previous week. Another forty or fifty weeks like that and the White House might be able to keep from beating out the Hoover
administration for largest contraction in the job market during a single term of a one-term President.
There are reasons to be hopeful about the prospects of a short-term turnaround in the economy. There has been-- after all-- a *massive* amount of stimulus in the form of government fiscal policy. To repeat what The Economist magazine quoted a Republican analyst as saying last week, "[President Bush] has been spending like a drunken sailor." A recently published Cato Institute study says that, under his administration, non-military discretionary spending has soared by 21%.
Interest rates remain low because nobody really wants to get into a bidding war with the Bush administration over loans. And, well, there is also the fact that Alan Greenspan is pursuing a policy of *trying* to blow some heat into the fire with deliberately lowered federal reserve rates. Low market rates for loans *do* tend to suppress household savings rates. It's *great*, however, for blowing asset valuation bubbles in the residential real estate markets of North America.
What I'm saying here is that the fiscal stimulus is just about all run out. It's like you're driving up Interstate 5 and you're running on fumes and you're in that spot north of Coalinga where the petrol
stations are spaced out about every sixty-five lightyears. You're climbing up a small hill, and you're hoping like crazy that there's petrol just on the other side where you can't see it. So you floor it-- hoping that when you run completely out of fuel, and the engine just stops, that you can coast into the petrol station and refill the tank.
Real short term interest rates are almost zero, so there's little or no room to cut rates for any further stimulus. Mortgage refinancing activity is dropping, which ought to be no major surprise-- there's
been a six-fold increase in that kind of business in the last two years.
So... if the fiscal stimulus is enough to kick the economy into a stable growth trajectory, then the jobs may return to your neighborhood fairly soon, which would once again give you the opportunity to think about telling the boss to shove it while you go work for his competitor.
On the other hand, if you're one of those doom-and-gloom types who isn't really happy unless the sky is falling *and* you have good seats for watching the wreckage break up over Texas, then you might want to ask any of those economists on your Saturnalia gifts list to compare and contrast the current economic outlook with the actual historical examples of successful applications of fiscal stimulus to kick start an economy into a stability.
Hint: the traditional way this is done is to use temporary government deficits to fund infrastructure improvements. And as we have seen, the current Federal budget is in a 'structural' deficit-- in other words, it's out of balance as far as the mind can conceive-- no sane economist could believe that the Federal budget can be brought back into balance without major policy changes that neither the majority nor the minority parties are willing to consider openly.
And then there's the minor little niggling detail about how much of that fiscal stimulus is really being used to fund infrastructure improvements.
Okay, Ahmed Chalabi will clearly be able to install the soak tub of the Gods in his bathroom. That might not really help the employment picture in South Carolina very much, however...
J. Since you no doubt have been suppressing the foul memory of the craven patriotic flag licking that was broadcast 24/7 during our glorious defeat of the fell legions of Hannibal Hussien, allow us to remind you of one particular fine moment. Remember Jessica Lynch...
Okay...Okay...deep cleansing breaths... allow the tremors and the shooting pain to pass as the memory forms up...Yes...Pfc Lynch was the sole survivor of an ambush on her convoy. She was captured and ended up in an Iraqi hospital.
U.S. Special Forces busted into the hospital with guns ablazing, all captured dramatically on grainy night vision video, to rescue Private Lynch and spirit her away from the foul clutches of Iraqi medicine, where they were no doubt going to use Iraqi WMD supermedicne to construct a clone army of Lynchs armed with Anthrax vision and VX Nerve breath...
Okay.. maybe not the Nerve breath..but the outpouring of yellow ribbon love and grooviness througout Red Blooded America could have made even the most deranged Fox News junkie slip into a Red, White and Blue stupor.
Stories about how Private Lynch heroically emptied her weapon at the Iraqi horde while floating in a Trinty-esque bullet time until she was taken prisoner by Iraqi’s filled the Fox News crawl.
Suddenly Private Jessica Lynch, the photogenically impish soldier became a cause celebré, a living breathing personification of everything the administration wanted us all to believe was right and good about the war, and the people fighting it.
There were often lurid allusions to what the Iraqis would do to any female member of the armed services caught or captured, and were reminded that all we could do was pray for her rescue. Forget at that time, there were several other soldiers including one young African American lady from Texas who acquitted herself well as a captive. But hey, no one wants to see one of those on the front cover of a magazine...
Even then, however, questions started to surface regarding what many automatically recognized as the creation of an official mythology surrounding Lynch’s capture and subsequent rescue. The BBC, after talking with the staff at the hosptial, cast doubt on the need for a guns abalzing rescue, reporting that Lynch was well cared for by hopstial staff.
Naturally, the usual suspects howled in ecstasy over the SCLM conspiracy, particularly those greasy Euro’s, and the canonization of Pfc Lynch went largely unchallenged.
We waited with horrific anticiaption for the Lynch book and TV Movie. Becasue, of course, nothing is real or concrete to America unless a network makes a cringingly distorted TV Movie about it...Right?
S. Now, Pfc Lynch has emerged from her convelescence, with a book on the eve of the TV movie. And guess what...she openly questions the offical Agitprop from the Pentagram, stating she was out like a light after the ambush, and never got off a shot. She appears to have been well treated by the Iraqis, as near as she can remember.
This is in direct contradiction to the Iraqi informant who tipped off the Americans to Lynch’s capture. He claimed she was interrogated violently by Iraqi officals.
Asked by the ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer on Tuesday if the military's portrayal of the rescue bothered her, Lynch said: “Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong.”
Asked how she felt about the reports of her heroism, Lynch told Sawyer, “It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't.”
And asked about reports that the military exaggerated the danger of the rescue mission, Lynch said, “Yeah, I don't think it happened quite like that,” although she added that in that context anybody would have approached the hospital well-armed. She continued: “I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say the things they did, you know, all I know was that I was in that hospital hurting. I needed help.”
Clearly this is an inconvenient unraveling of the official account of our glorious road to victory in Iraq. So naturally, some fine subhuman scumsucker in the Rummy Pentagram “leaked” a story from Lynch’s post capture medical exam.
The story claimed Lynch had injuries consistent with Sexual Assault. Lynch has no recollection of this. Big props to the fine patriots in the Pentagram for leaking this information to the public. I’m sure Pfc Lynch feels likes a hero now, and I am sure all those fine upstanding young White Christians back home in North Carolina will feel the same about her, even though she has been defiled by the swarthy Arab-Men. Yeah...I’m sure she wanted that detail made public.
Where do you start with this?...The White House..Again....is revealed as conjuring up yet another deranged story to prop up the Iraqi Clone Wars, this time using a loyal soldier in their own army like, well, a banner on an Aircraft carrier.
When she decides to tell her own story, some debased loyalist demeans her service by openly (and quite possibly unlawfully) leaking a rape story. This is yet another case of where you *think* this administration can not get any lower or amoral, they launch a thinly veiled retaliation on one of their own soldiers injured in the line of duty for puerile political reasons...
Yeah..One nation under God...Ummm does the God the White House worships have tentacles, a big red eye, and live on the bottom of the ocean in a non-Euclidean city? Just asking?
J. First this week on the Presidential roundup, our standard disclaimer. We are Dean supporters, he rules the rest of the pack are scrubs, deal with it clones... and Dr. Dean has had quite the week. They say times like this are a crucible for a campaign and that you either emerge as a frontrunner or you are headed for the political scrapheap.
The week started for Dean when Democratic pack was stricken with a political version of Tourette’s Syndrome, barking and growling at Dean for his wish to be a Presidential candidate for all Americans, even Rednecks.
His entire point was that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interest by a morally corrupt GOP and that Democrats need to reach out to those people, or as Dean says, “I want to be the Presidential candidate of the guy with a Confederate Flag on his pickup with a shotgun rack, because their kids don’t have health insurance either.”
Paul Krugman got it absolutely right in Friday’s New York Times when he said: “Mr. Dean wasn't suggesting that his party adopt the G.O.P. strategy of coded racial signals, and by and large African-Americans — my wife included — understand that. What he meant by his flag remark was that Democrats must make the case to working Americans of all colors that the right's elitist agenda isn't in their interest. And he's right.”
But as the week progressed, it became clear that the Dean juggernaut, far from being damaged, has started to pick up steam from this latest contretemps, and is now gaining a certain momentum from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
It looked like the confederate flag issue was not enough to keep Dean from getting the endorsements of the 3 million- plus members of the AFL-CIO’s two largest unions, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
And now, he is poised to take his vast legion of followers completely off the reservation by giving them the power to decide whether the campaign sticks with the federal matching funds pledge, or go it alone raising their money from individual donors.
So far, Dean has beaten all fundraising expectations by raising now, going on $30 million total at an average of $80 per shot.
But this hasn’t stopped the rest of the gang from piling on. Kerry unleashed another desperate barrage of attacks last week, that do nothing more than point out Kerry’s desparation. Wesley Clark also heated up the rhetoric towards Dean, only showing that he has nothing really to add to the overall debate.
Which in Clark’s case is really a shame. While being a pale imitation of the poltical gamer that Kerry is, he is also a very experienced military man, who actually made some good points last week when he also unveiled a plan to get America out of Iraq. The other candidates, including Dean, would do well to listen to this.
Much of the plan surrounds involving our European allies and reconfiguring the nature of the Ameircan military presence in Iraq, leading to a draw down of American forces. But unfortunately, that will all get lost in Clark’s braying about what a bad guy Dean is.
S. Kerry finds himself in a similar boat. Strong military background, and a veteran political campaigner, he is being forced to fight the battle Dean’s way. He is reacting, playing defense. As chess masters like to say, if you are not thinking four moves ahead already, you are just reacting.
That let’s Dean fight the campaign his way and lets him get out ahead of the rest of the pack. Everyone has essentially ceded the notion that he is now the guy to beat. And it doesn’t help Kerry that Edwards seems to be the real drain on the front runners.
Edwards is like the kid who is sitting at the adults table at Thanksgiving for the first time making an idiot of himself, but not realizing it. And the rest of adults are only going to put up with this behavior for only so much longer.
This week is going to be pretty interesting in the chats Sunday morning. John Edwards will be on Meet the Press, and Tim Russert will probably beat him like a gong, since he has decided that he is the official executioner for the Republican establishment.
At the same time, Kerry will be on with Bob Schiffer on Face the Nation, where he will undoubtedly be given the loving ministrations and peeled grapes of the favorite son candidate. But if you can stomach the love fest, it might prove interesting.
And now for a Mojohaus call from the poll, are you listening Dr. Thompson? We are calling that the next guy to drop out of the race will be Dick Gephardt after New Hampshire, possibly after Iowa if Dean does well enough against him.
J. So our patriotic thought for the day: Honoring our troops with truth means the Terrorists win... or as John Ashcroft says... “Keep lookin’ at me like that boy, I might just decide yer an A-rab...”
S. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.
And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com.
J. This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...
Saturday, October 25, 2003
Mojowire for 10.25
PART I
MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
S9/ Supreme Beings of Leisure, Under the Gun
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master
J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire... I’m Mojo...
S. And I’m Sean, it’s Saturday, October 25, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...
J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:
S. First this morning, Sy Hersh, who has been quiet of late -- almost too quiet -- unleashed a massive butt kicking on the administration’s treatment of intelligence data, and how it was abused to get our nation into war in Iraq and damaged our campaign against terrorism at the same time.
J. But there is good news in the war, though. No, not that South Asian distraction, the Bush Administration’s real war; the one against the nation’s poor. Their strategy is working, according to a recent report that shows more Americans falling into poverty and median incomes nose diving.
S. Next we take a look at the national energy policy with the help of The American Prospect. In spite of 9/11 “changing everything,” the plan looks like just another GOP giveaway to big oil, in a vain attempt to drill, dig and pollute our way out of our current energy conundrum.
J. With this week’s horror forecast, Dr. S9 asks the arcane question: why is the President deliberately allowing the Chinese army to get total control of Global Crossing? Story is there are some disgruntled Americans who are angered that their higher bid was rejected, and they're raising a stink...and it's a pretty weird stink.
S. And those liberal, hippy scientists are at it again, trying to scare everyone with lurid tales of a coming global catastrophe. I mean, so what that this most recent September was the warmest on record anywhere and that glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. Don’t you know there’s a war on?
J. And then with this week’s Presidential roundup, we take a look at the DNC’s most recent visit with the Oracle of Bill of Clinton. He pronounces party infighting and liberalism as “not good.” Then Kerry is having a problem selling his new found respect for peace, and Sen. Eyore is now really grasping at straws, saying he would make John McCain Sec. of State if elected. Great. Eyore in the White House and Tigger down at Foggy Bottom...what could *possibly* go wrong...
S.... So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...
J. This intercepted by the SooperSnooper UltraLowFrequency Mojohaus Listening Station at Ice Station Echo deep beneath the Arctic: “By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.”
So a proven threat to the security of the Nation was pushed to the background while we diverted precious resources to beat up someone who never landed a successful punch against the United States. This administration has allowed Al Qaeda to regroup and reform, which they have undoubtedly done since the decision to go to Iraq.
And all that jabbering from the Administration about going to the UN and leaving all options open was utter garbage. The President decided to go to Iraq, at least 6 months before his dad’s pals outed the administration in August on the nations Op/Ed pages. They possessed rigged intelligence, offered up by crooks and thieves pimped by dubious sources like Ahmad Chalabi, and spiced up by secret cabals within the Pentagram errr...Pentagon and the White House.
You know, all the Duct Tape and plastic sheeting in the world isn't going to help this administration if a revamped Al Qaeda takes another crack at the Motherland...
“inside the military, ‘stovepiping’ is slang for the practice of taking a piece of intelligence or a request that should be pushed through the chain of command-checked at levels and sent from one level to another-and bringing it straight to the highest authority. One of the things that people in the intelligence community have learned over the years is that early reports are often wrong. And so, before you respond to the first piece of information you have, you analyze it, you vet it, you study it, and then you make a decision about what you're going to do with it. Stovepiping allows them to cheat the process. When you stovepipe stuff, you leave yourself open to the worst kinds of results.”
The Hersh story confirms our worst fears about this administration. This practice of Stovepiping, ignoring the process and views of the experts and using political hacks to decipher complex information and twisting it to support their established opinions, is how this administration conducts themselves not only Iraq, but the War against Al Queda, the economy, the environment, all their policy decisions.
Remember, this is from an administration where the President doesn’t even glance at a daily newspaper, but relies on underlings to “synopsize” the day’s news for him, because he wants the “unvarnished truth.” This is an administration that has turned intellectual laziness and disengagement into a kind of zen thing that they are getting way too much mileage out of.
S. This story is a crucial piece in understanding how dangerous these people really are. They embroil us in Iraq because they refuse to listen to contradictory information, no matter how well sourced or grounded.
They bankrupt the government and put the American economy on the brink of a devastating financial crisis, even putting Social Security and Medicare at risk, no matter what their economic advisors or the Treasury Secretary tells them. They ignore the threat of global warming because it would displease their corporate contributors. Scared? You should be.
This problem is compound by President's admission to Fox News that he never cracks open a newspaper or reads anything his aides don't prepare for him.
So if they are ignoring evidence that might call their views into question, is it any wonder that mendacity and deceit just congeal out of thin air every time he opens his mouth. This is Hubris on a scale that even shocks us. This is bad enough at any time in history, but the in face of the real national security threats facing the country, Al Qaeda, North Korea, a nuclear Iran, and the threat of world wide economic melt down, it's downright scary.
I'm talking the "Ring" Scary, like a fuzzy scaly chick climbing out of a well while you are watching The O’Reilly Factor and going postal on you.
Jesus!..How many times do we have to say it..There are no WMDs...The administration is lame and mendacious...They lied to us and themselves...They have risked American lives for minimal return on the National Security dollar.
They only know one thing, making their money while they are in office, and making sure that the right contributors get paid, while average Americans like us get to suck hard vacuum. This is not a government, this is an organized crime gang, a low-rent, intellectually-crippled version of the Corleone family, that got over in one of the most massive election frauds of all time.
They suck and have no game. They should be run. Not just out of the building, but out of the country and possibly off the planet to an icy asteroid in the OOrt cloud where they can ponder the vastness of space and scare each other during the eternal night with stories of Saddamzilla and his radioactive fire breath and the alien saucers he use to control Rodan and Monster Zero...
J. So what is it really with this administration and the poor? What is the deal here? Is it the guilty hatred of the conqueror for the conquered? Do they fear some sort of Dickensonian visit from the ghosts of starving children and homeless wokrers? Are they really the central casting villains that they are trying to convince us they are, like the evil childnapping slaver from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?
Well, there may not be real answers for these questions, but the effects of the Bush Administration’s policies are very real. To wit: the Census bureau reported recently that another 1.7 million of your neighbors, friends, family and other assorted fellow Americans sank beneath the waves for the third time and drowned into poverty last year.
That brings the grand total of Americans in poverty to 34.6 million. Just suck down that one for a moment. More than 12 percent of Americans live in poverty. That means they can’t afford rent, food, clothes, medicines and all those other luxiries that Dick Cheney takes for granted.
And those people will be in good company soon... the median income in the United States edged down by more than 1 percent last year to $42,409. Yeah, and once the rest of the world starts calling in their markers on the U.S. dollar and we continue to sell our country to oil rich despots, see how much that $42,000 will buy you.
The best part about this is the answer from our Nation’s Tool-In-Chief, White House flack Scotty McClellan: “The president acted. He led, and he acted, and we passed those tax cuts to get more money back into people's pockets so they can spend it on a good or a service. The economy is growing. And as the economy picks up even more steam, the economists will tell you then that creates an environment for job creation.”
That’s right, think about that for just a moment. Forget the horrible untruth of the whole “we put money back in the pockets” thing. Even better is the “just ask the economists, they’ll tell you...” bit.
Well, no Scotty, they won’t. Why? Because when the President’s Council of Economic Advisors were trying to motivate Bush and his speechwriters to get off the bong long enough to listen to a little reason, they were summarily evicted from their digs in the Old Executive Office Building and exiled off into a basement in an old disused Housing and Urban Development suboffice down in Alexandria, Virginia somewhere where the White House wouldn’t have to listen to their continual carping buzzkill about “large structural deficits.”
No, the speechwriters in the West Wing assured everyone that they remember their macroeconomics class in High School, and as long as everyone just stays high all the time, the numbers really do work out, or at least workout long enough for your pot-addled attention span to make it to the next “Joe Millionaire” episode...
S. Now some people in the rough-trade wing of the economics department are asking: How can this be? We have a growing economy. Gross Domestic products are up, up, up! The stock market is cruising towards 10k again! There is a massive pool of new capital to fuel the next round of business mergers and acquisitions!
Well, hold on there, Diamond Jim... That, in fact, *is* the problem. It would appear that our glorious Maximum Leader will be the first glorious Maximum Leader since Maximum Leader Herbert Hoover to preside over net job loss on his watch. And of course, you all remember the era Hoover presided over...
Steny Hoyer, the terrible and ancient Senator from Maryland hit it right on the head: “Americans have listened for three years to President Bush's lofty promises of economic prosperity and ‘robust growth,’ while he dismissed the three million jobs lost under his watch as a ‘short-term problem,’ But increasing poverty and decreasing opportunity is not a problem easily dismissed. The policies pushed by the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress have been breathtaking only in their failure to improve the lives of average Americans.”
It is becoming apparent to even the most rock-brained, FOXNews addled, ditto-head that the current good news in economic statistics is only good news to a certain portion of the population, and they are beginning to suspect they are *not* a part of that demographic.
For instance, we were told the great news a couple of weeks ago that in spite of Daimler-Benz announcing plans to close plants and layoff thousands of American workers, it was all good, because WalMart was planning to open dozens of new stores across the country, and hire people.
And as for a new round of mergers and acquisitions? Hooray! More American workers shipped off to the Island of Redundant Toys... But that’s okay, there’s always room for one more at Sam’s Place...
So let me get this straight. We are going to trade $25 an hour auto-manufacturing jobs with great health benefits and retirement packages for minimum-wage parttime WalMart jobs that have no benefits whatsoever, much less a union to help the workers fight for their rights.
You know, this is how revolutions start... Memo to the President: Continually throwing your feces at all the people who voted for you in the first place, in the vain hope that the dread of Iraqi Flying Saucer Technology, will keep them from noticing that they are standing on a breadline in a cardboard city, is, perhaps, not the wisest political play in the book.
It didn’t work for Maximum Leader Hoover, and trust us, you are not even close to being in that intellectual ball park...
J. So, is there any really any surprise anywhere that the current national energy plan crafted by the White House and snaking its way through Congress ensures our continued reliance on fossil fuels imported from some of the most criminally violent regimes on earth?
I mean, seriously, in an administration absolutely awash in oil-barons, can anyone muster even a shred of shock that their energy plan would be a continuation of the same old policies, in spite of the fact that “9/11 changed everything...” or so they say.
Well, the truth is that for this administration’s outlook on energy, 9/11 didn’t change a damn thing. The American Prospect gave a pretty good rundown recently on where our current energy policy stands.
“As it stands now, the conference committee, headed by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Billy Tauzin of (R-La.), is cooking up much the same legislation as Vice President Dick Cheney did in his pre-9-11 secret tryst with energy lobbyists. They may remove the unpopular drilling in the Alaskan wilderness from the bill (though in recent days Alaska's Republican delegation has threatened to vote "no" unless it remains in).
“But the core of the legislation -- $18 billion in tax breaks to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries -- remains unchanged. The operating assumption, to the extent there is anything more than corporate greed behind the bill, is that the United States can drill, dig and pollute its way to energy independence.”
We are getting the big lie: just do whatever the Petroleum industry says, and no one gets hurt. Forget the fact that two-thirds of our domestic oil usage goes to internal combustion engines and that 60 percent of our supply is imported.
The fact remains that no matter what sort of goat-blood voodoo we enact in terms of economic planning, there simply is not enough oil in the freeking ground to meet our bulemic over-indulgent SUV fixation.
And that augers for an even worse national security situation than Al Qaeda sleeper cells haunting the bars of your favorite Appleby’s on a Monday night watching football. Forget someone flying a 747 into the Sears Tower... if you want to see an international economic crisis that will stop the world on a dime, wait until someone gets the bright idea of driving a massive truck bomb into the Al Abqaiq oil field in Saudi Arabia.
It was just recently that former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed out the dearth of the Emperor’s oily clothes, noting that most of the world’s largest producing oil fields have now peaked, and that we would already be in a supply jam if not for the increased production of Norway and the Russian Federation.
But it’s only putting the eventual day of reckoning off, and not putting it off very far into the future.
S. This is not a matter of ideology, this is not a matter of fuzzing thinking hippies or gun-toting racists...it is science, we are running out of the product, and we need to be preparing for that day.
The company or government that gets out ahead of the next big energy technology, solving some of the issues surrounding photo-voltaic efficiency or large-scale capacitor storage will be gazillionaires, they will simply rule the world.
Sure, we can go on and on about meeting our energy needs by solar, clean, carbon-sequestration coal, hydrothermic, hydrogen fuel cell, biomass ethanol and wind sources, to name a few, and those who are so inclined will dismiss the talk as the raving of aging hippies leaning on their pitchforks, shooting the breeze around the old compost heap.
Surprise... these sources already account for 20 percent of global energy production and growing by 30 percent per year. Everywhere, that is but in the world’s leading industrialized power. When it comes to renewable, efficient and clean energy (don’t worry, we’ll get to Global Warming in a few minutes) it is the United States that is stuck in 19th Century.
And that, ultimately, may be the real threat posed by the energy rip-off now being enacted in Washington. The Europeans are the technological leaders in wind power. The Japanese have seized the lead in photovoltaics. The Brazilians have mandated that new vehicles burn up to 85 percent ethanol.
Chris Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, put it succinctly at a forum last week on Capitol Hill: “The danger we face today," he said, “is that if we don't develop a strong domestic market in these technologies, we will not have the companies and we will not have the jobs that will flow from the revolution taking place around the globe.”
But no, not us...what we get is a President giving away the treasury to their oil drilling pals, more American kids coming home in boxes for attempting to protect our access to a shrinking supply of a destructive commodity all because a gang of bible thumping weirdos proclaimed that they read in their Bible Code version of the Old Testament that the Earth will be cleansed by the firey wrathful fist of the angry pre-atomic space god Jehovah-1 before Bush’s second term is up anyway...so, what the hell, smoke’em if ya got’em...
SEE PART II
PART I
MUSIC: Intro/Hendrix, Star Spangled Banner
S9/ Supreme Beings of Leisure, Under the Gun
Exeunt/WildChild, Renegade Master
J. Good morning, and welcome to The Mojowire... I’m Mojo...
S. And I’m Sean, it’s Saturday, October 25, 2003, and here’s the news for the week gone-by...
J. Brought to you by Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988. Now headlines, from Mojohaus:
S. First this morning, Sy Hersh, who has been quiet of late -- almost too quiet -- unleashed a massive butt kicking on the administration’s treatment of intelligence data, and how it was abused to get our nation into war in Iraq and damaged our campaign against terrorism at the same time.
J. But there is good news in the war, though. No, not that South Asian distraction, the Bush Administration’s real war; the one against the nation’s poor. Their strategy is working, according to a recent report that shows more Americans falling into poverty and median incomes nose diving.
S. Next we take a look at the national energy policy with the help of The American Prospect. In spite of 9/11 “changing everything,” the plan looks like just another GOP giveaway to big oil, in a vain attempt to drill, dig and pollute our way out of our current energy conundrum.
J. With this week’s horror forecast, Dr. S9 asks the arcane question: why is the President deliberately allowing the Chinese army to get total control of Global Crossing? Story is there are some disgruntled Americans who are angered that their higher bid was rejected, and they're raising a stink...and it's a pretty weird stink.
S. And those liberal, hippy scientists are at it again, trying to scare everyone with lurid tales of a coming global catastrophe. I mean, so what that this most recent September was the warmest on record anywhere and that glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. Don’t you know there’s a war on?
J. And then with this week’s Presidential roundup, we take a look at the DNC’s most recent visit with the Oracle of Bill of Clinton. He pronounces party infighting and liberalism as “not good.” Then Kerry is having a problem selling his new found respect for peace, and Sen. Eyore is now really grasping at straws, saying he would make John McCain Sec. of State if elected. Great. Eyore in the White House and Tigger down at Foggy Bottom...what could *possibly* go wrong...
S.... So stand by to stand by while we get ready to kick this pig...
J. This intercepted by the SooperSnooper UltraLowFrequency Mojohaus Listening Station at Ice Station Echo deep beneath the Arctic: “By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.”
So a proven threat to the security of the Nation was pushed to the background while we diverted precious resources to beat up someone who never landed a successful punch against the United States. This administration has allowed Al Qaeda to regroup and reform, which they have undoubtedly done since the decision to go to Iraq.
And all that jabbering from the Administration about going to the UN and leaving all options open was utter garbage. The President decided to go to Iraq, at least 6 months before his dad’s pals outed the administration in August on the nations Op/Ed pages. They possessed rigged intelligence, offered up by crooks and thieves pimped by dubious sources like Ahmad Chalabi, and spiced up by secret cabals within the Pentagram errr...Pentagon and the White House.
You know, all the Duct Tape and plastic sheeting in the world isn't going to help this administration if a revamped Al Qaeda takes another crack at the Motherland...
“inside the military, ‘stovepiping’ is slang for the practice of taking a piece of intelligence or a request that should be pushed through the chain of command-checked at levels and sent from one level to another-and bringing it straight to the highest authority. One of the things that people in the intelligence community have learned over the years is that early reports are often wrong. And so, before you respond to the first piece of information you have, you analyze it, you vet it, you study it, and then you make a decision about what you're going to do with it. Stovepiping allows them to cheat the process. When you stovepipe stuff, you leave yourself open to the worst kinds of results.”
The Hersh story confirms our worst fears about this administration. This practice of Stovepiping, ignoring the process and views of the experts and using political hacks to decipher complex information and twisting it to support their established opinions, is how this administration conducts themselves not only Iraq, but the War against Al Queda, the economy, the environment, all their policy decisions.
Remember, this is from an administration where the President doesn’t even glance at a daily newspaper, but relies on underlings to “synopsize” the day’s news for him, because he wants the “unvarnished truth.” This is an administration that has turned intellectual laziness and disengagement into a kind of zen thing that they are getting way too much mileage out of.
S. This story is a crucial piece in understanding how dangerous these people really are. They embroil us in Iraq because they refuse to listen to contradictory information, no matter how well sourced or grounded.
They bankrupt the government and put the American economy on the brink of a devastating financial crisis, even putting Social Security and Medicare at risk, no matter what their economic advisors or the Treasury Secretary tells them. They ignore the threat of global warming because it would displease their corporate contributors. Scared? You should be.
This problem is compound by President's admission to Fox News that he never cracks open a newspaper or reads anything his aides don't prepare for him.
So if they are ignoring evidence that might call their views into question, is it any wonder that mendacity and deceit just congeal out of thin air every time he opens his mouth. This is Hubris on a scale that even shocks us. This is bad enough at any time in history, but the in face of the real national security threats facing the country, Al Qaeda, North Korea, a nuclear Iran, and the threat of world wide economic melt down, it's downright scary.
I'm talking the "Ring" Scary, like a fuzzy scaly chick climbing out of a well while you are watching The O’Reilly Factor and going postal on you.
Jesus!..How many times do we have to say it..There are no WMDs...The administration is lame and mendacious...They lied to us and themselves...They have risked American lives for minimal return on the National Security dollar.
They only know one thing, making their money while they are in office, and making sure that the right contributors get paid, while average Americans like us get to suck hard vacuum. This is not a government, this is an organized crime gang, a low-rent, intellectually-crippled version of the Corleone family, that got over in one of the most massive election frauds of all time.
They suck and have no game. They should be run. Not just out of the building, but out of the country and possibly off the planet to an icy asteroid in the OOrt cloud where they can ponder the vastness of space and scare each other during the eternal night with stories of Saddamzilla and his radioactive fire breath and the alien saucers he use to control Rodan and Monster Zero...
J. So what is it really with this administration and the poor? What is the deal here? Is it the guilty hatred of the conqueror for the conquered? Do they fear some sort of Dickensonian visit from the ghosts of starving children and homeless wokrers? Are they really the central casting villains that they are trying to convince us they are, like the evil childnapping slaver from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?
Well, there may not be real answers for these questions, but the effects of the Bush Administration’s policies are very real. To wit: the Census bureau reported recently that another 1.7 million of your neighbors, friends, family and other assorted fellow Americans sank beneath the waves for the third time and drowned into poverty last year.
That brings the grand total of Americans in poverty to 34.6 million. Just suck down that one for a moment. More than 12 percent of Americans live in poverty. That means they can’t afford rent, food, clothes, medicines and all those other luxiries that Dick Cheney takes for granted.
And those people will be in good company soon... the median income in the United States edged down by more than 1 percent last year to $42,409. Yeah, and once the rest of the world starts calling in their markers on the U.S. dollar and we continue to sell our country to oil rich despots, see how much that $42,000 will buy you.
The best part about this is the answer from our Nation’s Tool-In-Chief, White House flack Scotty McClellan: “The president acted. He led, and he acted, and we passed those tax cuts to get more money back into people's pockets so they can spend it on a good or a service. The economy is growing. And as the economy picks up even more steam, the economists will tell you then that creates an environment for job creation.”
That’s right, think about that for just a moment. Forget the horrible untruth of the whole “we put money back in the pockets” thing. Even better is the “just ask the economists, they’ll tell you...” bit.
Well, no Scotty, they won’t. Why? Because when the President’s Council of Economic Advisors were trying to motivate Bush and his speechwriters to get off the bong long enough to listen to a little reason, they were summarily evicted from their digs in the Old Executive Office Building and exiled off into a basement in an old disused Housing and Urban Development suboffice down in Alexandria, Virginia somewhere where the White House wouldn’t have to listen to their continual carping buzzkill about “large structural deficits.”
No, the speechwriters in the West Wing assured everyone that they remember their macroeconomics class in High School, and as long as everyone just stays high all the time, the numbers really do work out, or at least workout long enough for your pot-addled attention span to make it to the next “Joe Millionaire” episode...
S. Now some people in the rough-trade wing of the economics department are asking: How can this be? We have a growing economy. Gross Domestic products are up, up, up! The stock market is cruising towards 10k again! There is a massive pool of new capital to fuel the next round of business mergers and acquisitions!
Well, hold on there, Diamond Jim... That, in fact, *is* the problem. It would appear that our glorious Maximum Leader will be the first glorious Maximum Leader since Maximum Leader Herbert Hoover to preside over net job loss on his watch. And of course, you all remember the era Hoover presided over...
Steny Hoyer, the terrible and ancient Senator from Maryland hit it right on the head: “Americans have listened for three years to President Bush's lofty promises of economic prosperity and ‘robust growth,’ while he dismissed the three million jobs lost under his watch as a ‘short-term problem,’ But increasing poverty and decreasing opportunity is not a problem easily dismissed. The policies pushed by the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress have been breathtaking only in their failure to improve the lives of average Americans.”
It is becoming apparent to even the most rock-brained, FOXNews addled, ditto-head that the current good news in economic statistics is only good news to a certain portion of the population, and they are beginning to suspect they are *not* a part of that demographic.
For instance, we were told the great news a couple of weeks ago that in spite of Daimler-Benz announcing plans to close plants and layoff thousands of American workers, it was all good, because WalMart was planning to open dozens of new stores across the country, and hire people.
And as for a new round of mergers and acquisitions? Hooray! More American workers shipped off to the Island of Redundant Toys... But that’s okay, there’s always room for one more at Sam’s Place...
So let me get this straight. We are going to trade $25 an hour auto-manufacturing jobs with great health benefits and retirement packages for minimum-wage parttime WalMart jobs that have no benefits whatsoever, much less a union to help the workers fight for their rights.
You know, this is how revolutions start... Memo to the President: Continually throwing your feces at all the people who voted for you in the first place, in the vain hope that the dread of Iraqi Flying Saucer Technology, will keep them from noticing that they are standing on a breadline in a cardboard city, is, perhaps, not the wisest political play in the book.
It didn’t work for Maximum Leader Hoover, and trust us, you are not even close to being in that intellectual ball park...
J. So, is there any really any surprise anywhere that the current national energy plan crafted by the White House and snaking its way through Congress ensures our continued reliance on fossil fuels imported from some of the most criminally violent regimes on earth?
I mean, seriously, in an administration absolutely awash in oil-barons, can anyone muster even a shred of shock that their energy plan would be a continuation of the same old policies, in spite of the fact that “9/11 changed everything...” or so they say.
Well, the truth is that for this administration’s outlook on energy, 9/11 didn’t change a damn thing. The American Prospect gave a pretty good rundown recently on where our current energy policy stands.
“As it stands now, the conference committee, headed by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Billy Tauzin of (R-La.), is cooking up much the same legislation as Vice President Dick Cheney did in his pre-9-11 secret tryst with energy lobbyists. They may remove the unpopular drilling in the Alaskan wilderness from the bill (though in recent days Alaska's Republican delegation has threatened to vote "no" unless it remains in).
“But the core of the legislation -- $18 billion in tax breaks to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries -- remains unchanged. The operating assumption, to the extent there is anything more than corporate greed behind the bill, is that the United States can drill, dig and pollute its way to energy independence.”
We are getting the big lie: just do whatever the Petroleum industry says, and no one gets hurt. Forget the fact that two-thirds of our domestic oil usage goes to internal combustion engines and that 60 percent of our supply is imported.
The fact remains that no matter what sort of goat-blood voodoo we enact in terms of economic planning, there simply is not enough oil in the freeking ground to meet our bulemic over-indulgent SUV fixation.
And that augers for an even worse national security situation than Al Qaeda sleeper cells haunting the bars of your favorite Appleby’s on a Monday night watching football. Forget someone flying a 747 into the Sears Tower... if you want to see an international economic crisis that will stop the world on a dime, wait until someone gets the bright idea of driving a massive truck bomb into the Al Abqaiq oil field in Saudi Arabia.
It was just recently that former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed out the dearth of the Emperor’s oily clothes, noting that most of the world’s largest producing oil fields have now peaked, and that we would already be in a supply jam if not for the increased production of Norway and the Russian Federation.
But it’s only putting the eventual day of reckoning off, and not putting it off very far into the future.
S. This is not a matter of ideology, this is not a matter of fuzzing thinking hippies or gun-toting racists...it is science, we are running out of the product, and we need to be preparing for that day.
The company or government that gets out ahead of the next big energy technology, solving some of the issues surrounding photo-voltaic efficiency or large-scale capacitor storage will be gazillionaires, they will simply rule the world.
Sure, we can go on and on about meeting our energy needs by solar, clean, carbon-sequestration coal, hydrothermic, hydrogen fuel cell, biomass ethanol and wind sources, to name a few, and those who are so inclined will dismiss the talk as the raving of aging hippies leaning on their pitchforks, shooting the breeze around the old compost heap.
Surprise... these sources already account for 20 percent of global energy production and growing by 30 percent per year. Everywhere, that is but in the world’s leading industrialized power. When it comes to renewable, efficient and clean energy (don’t worry, we’ll get to Global Warming in a few minutes) it is the United States that is stuck in 19th Century.
And that, ultimately, may be the real threat posed by the energy rip-off now being enacted in Washington. The Europeans are the technological leaders in wind power. The Japanese have seized the lead in photovoltaics. The Brazilians have mandated that new vehicles burn up to 85 percent ethanol.
Chris Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, put it succinctly at a forum last week on Capitol Hill: “The danger we face today," he said, “is that if we don't develop a strong domestic market in these technologies, we will not have the companies and we will not have the jobs that will flow from the revolution taking place around the globe.”
But no, not us...what we get is a President giving away the treasury to their oil drilling pals, more American kids coming home in boxes for attempting to protect our access to a shrinking supply of a destructive commodity all because a gang of bible thumping weirdos proclaimed that they read in their Bible Code version of the Old Testament that the Earth will be cleansed by the firey wrathful fist of the angry pre-atomic space god Jehovah-1 before Bush’s second term is up anyway...so, what the hell, smoke’em if ya got’em...
SEE PART II
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