V-USA Day

On this day eighteen years ago today another war began, a war that continues to this day, a war that was, eventually subsumed and engorged by lies and fear, driven by greed and stupidity and hubris, and that ended up covering the bodies piled up here - in New York City and Washington D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania - with piles and heaps and mountains of bodies; bodies of innocent women, of small children, of innocents without so much as a drop of blood on their hands, with young men and women sent to fight and kill and die for those lies and that fear.

And those who shed that blood and took those lives?

"Don't you wonder if they ever pause on September 11 every year and ponder how they all used the dead of that awful day for their own purposes, to fulfill their long-held desires for empire-building in the countries of oil, to use other people's children in service of their profane desires? Don't you wonder if they ever pause on September 11 and ponder how they'd all screwed up so badly throughout the summer of 2001 when, as Richard Clarke recalled, "all the lights were blinking red"? Do you wonder if they make the connection, in the softening dark of the early morning, between their own incompetence and the use they ultimately made of it?

Of course, you don't wonder. Because they don't. Introspection was never a priority with this crew. And as we see so many of them on television today, deeply troubled by the actions of another underprepared, incompetent president*, and using the dead of 9/11 as protective camouflage for all their deception and bloody blundering that occurred beginning that very morning, we should all take time to mourn the dead of that day, and all the days thereafter, and, yes, say, Never Again."

The country we live in today; the country of security gates and drones and surveillance and national security letters and yellow-ribbon patriotism was built, bloody brick by bloody brick, from the foundation these people laid on that day.

THAT's what we should never forget, on this day, every year.

Damn them.

Damn them all to Hell.

Fruit of the Poison Tree, Continued

I really don't like writing about Iraq. That pooch has been so thoroughly screwed - and the possibility that the United States can do anything to UNscrew it at this point being about as likely as Donald Trump recommending a national holiday for Cesar Chavez's birthday - that there's really nothing of value I can say.

But when I read this I felt almost physically sickened.

One of the stupidest of the many, many stupid things that the Bushies believed about Iraq is that there really was an "Iraq"; that is, that short of the capability for murderously violent force (and the willingness to use it) that the former Ottoman and British colonial provinces of Kurdistan, Iraqi Sunnistan, and Iraqi Shiastan could be forced together into some sort of pathetic facsimile of a Westphalian nation-state.

And that there was truly a significant political faction that stretched across those three polities that was interested in some sort of coalition of shared power.

Instead the fucking morons invaded and the fucking inevitable happened. Iraq fractured along regional and tribal lines as ambitious and ruthless men concluded that it was better to rule in Sunni (or Shia, or Kurdish, or Basran, or Tikriti...) Hell than serve in someone else's heaven.

Of the Iraqi factions my personal sympathies have always been with the Kurds. No real particular reason, just my own sense that of the groups in What-Used-To-Be-Iraq the Kurds in general - though the linked article makes good points that "Kurds" is a pretty broad blanket for the congeries of political groups fighting for Iraqi Kurdistan - seem the most "reasonable" in Western terms, the least susceptible to the sort of ethnic and religious monomania that has made the modern Middle East such a goddamn sewer of lethal grudges and yes, I'm looking at you, too, Israel.

One of the things that pissed me off most about Dubya's Most Excellent Middle Eastern Adventure was the need to pretend that there was an "Iraq" and that that "state" was something that was run through whoever sat on the gaddi in Baghdad. That weapons-grade idiocy prevented the sensible accommodations that the U.S. might have made with the varying factions to gently dismember the undead thing that was "Iraq" to cater to the fears and fantasies of the rulers of OTHER Frankensteinian sinkholes such as Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.

This sensibility to the tender fee-fees of the Saud dynasty and whoever-the-fuck is currently tending the various North African dumpster fires was, of course, rewarded with the same sort of cheerful cooperation that our Middle Eastern "allies" are known for. And that cooperation appears to be just as wanting as it ever was.

I cannot understand anyone who would advocate the the United States needed more direct involvement in the Middle East's current Wars of Religion. As Lord Chesterfield said once, the pleasure would be transient, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.

But if any of the benighted denizens of this dangerous and incomprehensible place deserved tangible, physical help from the United States to defend themselves from the rapacious bastards all around them it is the people of Kurdistan, and the fact that the powers that be in this country cannot openly acknowledge and act on that is just another weight to the burden of grievous guilt borne by this nation and the mendacious, conscienceless scum infesting the Bush Administration that opened this Hope-less Pandora's Box in hopes of finding the glory their childish fantasy had convinced them was hidden within.

No. No, no, no. FUCK no.

Proving that like the Bourbons the people that constitute the "leadership" of the United States government learn nothing yet forget nothing the Obama Administration has gone to the poo-flinging monkeyhouse technically known as the United States Congress for a new authorization to use military force, this time against the congeries of wanna-be Sunni Muslim theocrats that go by the nickname "Islamic State".

"President Obama asked Congress on Wednesday for new war powers to go after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria...The president’s request would replace the 2002 legislation that authorized the Iraq War but leaves in place a very broadly worded resolution passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Proving that you don't have to be a dry-drunk simpleton driving a short-bus-full of rage-drunk idiots and conniving weapons-grade-moron Machiavellis to fail to understand the words "don't", "involved", "land war", and "Asia" as well as the catastrophic decade of clusterfuckery that has followed Dick and Dubya's Most Excellent Middle Eastern Adventure the Obamites seem to believe that they can repeat the procedure without repeating the results.

I have absolutely no idea why they would believe this.

For one thing, the Daesh people (NB: apparently "Daesh" is the Arabic equivalent of the WW2 perjoratives "Huns" and "Nips" - it's the name that these guys' enemies use for it, since "Daesh" sounds similar to the Arabic words Daes ("one who crushes something underfoot") and Dahes ("one who sows discord") would like nothing better than for more U.S. joes to stumble around their 'hood killing people and breaking shit seeing as how that worked so goddamn well in Iraq. Doing what your enemy wants you to do is...well, "fucking stupid" are the words that come to mind but "the opposite of strategy" seems like a more measured way to describe it.

For another, well...fuck. IRAQ. Did we learn nothing? The reality on the ground is that the conditions in Iraq and Syria now are worse than when we invaded Iraq in 2003. There is no "government" in any sense of the word. The place has dissolved into a brawling mess of competing groups and semi-decrepit nation states (Turkey and Kurdistan being something of the exceptions...)

There are only two ways this will go.

The U.S. and it's "allies" will raze Sunnistan - the western portions of Iraq and the eastern portions of Syria - to the ground. They will kill and destroy until, as Bill Sherman would have put it, a crow flying over the Sunni lands will have to carry its own provisions. The U.S. will utterly destroy the Sunni capability and will to fight. And then...

...and then I have no idea. Perhaps the Sunni will consent to live under the rule of the other rump states, Alawite Syria and Shia Iraq, as chattel, as the Britons did under the Romans and the Tamils now do in Sri Lanka under the Hindus. That level of violence can produce submission.

Or, perhaps not.

But short of that level of violence?

I have no fucking clue what will happen. Nothing good, I assure you.

My friend Seydlitz says that the powers that be in the U.S. government have lost the ability to think about geopolitics strategically; to assess the economic, political, and military conditions realistically and then plot a course of action that uses U.S. strengths and the weaknesses of the area under consideration to produce a political, economic, and military endstate that benefits the United States.

I have always considered this optimistic. I don't know if the U.S. government has EVER had this ability outside of brief periods when smart people like George Marshall were running things.

But Marshalls seem to be in short supply, while we seem to have a never-ending amount of Dougie Fucking Feiths and Dick Goddamn Cheneys.

And now this.

It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the entire world...

...but for Wales?

I'm having a hard time saying anything coherent at the moment because my mind keeps circling the sewer drain of torture that is the national honor of my country, the country I served for 22 years as a soldier, the country I pledged to defend from all enemies foreign and domestic.

Because the domestic enemies who committed these crimes shat on that honor, and all for nothing.

Why do I say that? Given that the "defenders" of these crimes are raging and swearing that the crimes were done to protect me, that the crimes DID protect me in that they obtained intelligence that defeated nefarious plots and evil plans.

To which I say: bullshit.

Let's stop a minute and think about this.

Let's say that all this went down like the torturers and their buddies say it did. Let's say that the heroic CIA torturers knew that Evil Abu Badguy knew where the nuke was hidden. Knew it. Let's say that was you, or me, and we knew that the goddamn dune coon was holding information that could save lives if we just electrified his nuts long enough.

Would you be crankin' that generator?

I would.

Yes, I would. I know because I had to think about the possibility that I might end up with enemy prisoners of war that I knew had intel that could save my troops if I could get it quickly enough, and what would I do then?

Here's the thing, though. I'd be a criminal, a war criminal. My guys would be alive, so to me it'd be worth it. But I couldn't - and, I hope - wouldn't try to deny what I'd done.

I hope I'd have the guts to hunt up the nearest provost marshal and turn myself in.

So ISTM that the thing that sets off my bullshit detector is that the torturers and their masters went to such lengths to hide and destroy the evidence of what they did. If this really was "worth it", if I'm the torturer and my torturing really had produced some sort of valuable intelligence?

I'd have kept those cameras rolling.

Rolling through every horrific thing I did, every vile atrocity I worked on some helpless sonofabitch, every sob, every scream. Rolling as the broken bastard choked out the address of the hidden nuke, the name of the contact, the details of the murderous plan.

I'd present myself and that tape before a judge, or a jury, and say, look, here is what I did to save you. Here is how I did save you.

And then I'd throw myself on the mercy of the court.

Because I would be guilty. I'd just know that no judge, no jury, in America would convict me and if they did no President would be able to refrain from pardoning me. Because my guilt was their guilt, too; they lived because I did horrors in their name.

And yet...there is none of this.

So I know there was no hidden nuke. No contact, no plan, no secret. Just what torture does best at producing; what the torturer wants to hear.

These people tortured because they wanted confessions, for the same reasons that the Inquisition and the NKVD tortured. They wanted confessions. They wanted what they needed for their auto-de-fe, for their show-trial, they wanted to hear that we needed to fight them there so we didn't have to fight them here, that the smoking gun was going to be a mushroom cloud, that they hated our freedoms, that they were coming to kill us.

They wanted to make us afraid, and they did.

So these fucking bastards sold our honor, my honor, for nothing. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. For worthless fucking bullshit to support their goddamn lies. For a mess of goddamn pottage.

And I think I'm as furious about the worthlessness of the reasons as for the infamy of the torture itself.

Sinners and the angry God

Fallows has another post up in which he discusses the Third Gulf War. Among the issues he addresses are the justifications put forward at the time for the war and the various reasons that he, among others, believed those justifications were mistaken. Among the most central is the "Saddam is bad" theme:

"Much of the stated case for war was in two parts: (1) Saddam Hussein is evil and dangerous, and (2) there is a quick and feasible answer to that question. I was saying about part (2): No, there is not a quick and feasible answer. In cases of life-or-death imminent existential threat or emergencies like Pearl Harbor, questions of practicality don't matter. But they sure do in a "preventive" war of choice -- which I hoped we would not launch."

Even when you think of the "smoking gun = mushroom cloud" sort of NBC-based arguments they came back to "Saddam is bad"; the nukes (or bugs, or gas) were dangerous because they were in the hands of a dangerous madman.

Well, we now know that the answers to both the "mushroom cloud" and the "easy-peasy" memes were "no".

But you still here people arguing in favor of this because "Saddam was bad and everyone is better off since we topped him."

And here I want to argue, instead; "We don't know that and we knew at the time that we were juggling nitroglycerine knocking the Saddam cork off the Iraqi bottle."

The Fallows post dismisses the "better off" argument fairly easily:

"First (we) are really in no place to say what makes Iraqis 'better off'. That is a question for actual Iraqis living in Iraq. But from what we can say as outsiders: Iraq under Saddam was no paradise, but the infrastructure of the country was completely obliterated during the war, leaving people who previously had electricity, running water, general physical safety and comfort with none of those. Second, a huge number of Iraqis died as a result of the war. Huge. Well over a hundred thousand."

Add to that the political trainwreck that has succeeded Saddam and the very real possibility of a future military coup...well, it's hard to say that things are "better". Some are, some aren't. It probably matters very little on the moral scale whether the "rape room" features Sunnis raping Shiites or Shiites raping Sunnis. Or variations of both.

Regardless of what comes out of post-Saddam Iraq, however (and it will be to the credit of the Iraqis if they produce something better than what we handed them) the problem with trying to give ourselves credit for anything is that we knew at the time that the problem wasn't Saddam; the problem was Iraq. The reality - and everyone who knew anything about Iraqi knew this at the time - is that Iraq in 2003 was a political disaster created by fucked up history, centuries of misgovernment, decades of poorly-managed colonialism, and the twenty-year-long depredations of the Tikriti mafia. Here's what I wrote back in 2010:

"(I)n a moment of hubris and willful ignorance we kicked it to splinters and had to lie our asses off to do it and what did we get in return? I don't think we even know yet. I think we will have no idea what we will see there for a decade, or two, and whether it will make us long for Saddam's mere brutality as a zek perishing in Stalin's lead mines may have pined for the Tsar."

And 2009:

"Was there really a time when we thought we could "make our own reality"? That with our tiny, undermanned colonial-period expeditionary force we could reshape the lands of Asia without butchery at a genocidal level? When we dreamed the dreams of the Caesars with the army of Marlborough and de Saxe, the political hardheadedness of Jefferson Davis and the economic discipline of Lindsey Lohan?

And now the dreamer wakes to the cold light of a cheerless dawn."

and 2008:

"Is there anything to be saved from this mess? Well it beats the fuck out of me. But I can tell you this: I don't know of a single functional democracy in what used to be the old Ottoman Empire. Not one. Not a damn one. Turkey - the closest thing to one - needed a ruthless dictator (that's what Ataturk was, though his intentions were good his methods were pretty hard) to get even that close. They didn't call that bastard the "Sick Man of Europe" for nothing. I'm not even sure how you'd go about making an impoverished former Ottoman province with a long history of despotism and corruption into one."

and 2007:

"Given the political and social history of the "country" of Iraq, no amount of foreign blood and treasure were ever likely to produce the originally stated outcome. An ethnicly and politically divided former Ottoman province was never a good candidate for "democratization". Once the Baathist lid was removed the Iraqi pot was almost sure to boil. By promoting sectarian, "Divide and conquer", politics we ensured that it would. Iraq is now effectively a failed state or nearly so. The "central government" does not have a monopoly on violence and is unlikely to have in the immediate future. In fact, the only institution that our Occupation has succeeded in strengthening is the Iraqi Army. Expect a military coup in Baghdad within a decade."

“But I'm also not stupid enough to believe that we're gonna produce anything worth the blood and treasure we're spilling in the Fertile Crescent. I don't see the point in kacking a Sunni Saddam to end up with a Shiite Saddam. So I'm a WASFer: We Are So Fucked.”

and 2006:

"If it has not become obvious by now, let me state the reality in simple English: the political leadership that ginned up this war has not idea where it is going, can not figure out a way to either lead or drive its' Iraqi proxies (who, in true cat fashion, have no intention of doing what we want just because it's either good for us, good for them or commonsensical), and is both unwilling and unlikely to accept the reality that it has sunk almost 25,000 lives in dead and maimed and untolled billions in treasure into what is unlikely to soon, if ever, resemble the original goal of a US/Israel-lovin', free-market havin', Western-values embracin' American client state in the Gulf."

And that's without all the stuff I posted back at the old Intel Dump.

Iraq was a mess. We knew it was a mess. We pretty much knew that the problem in Iraq wasn't Saddam, but the problem that was Saddam was because of Iraq.

The Bushies fucking knew that but went and did it anyway.

That's done and dusted. The dead cannot be resurrected, the money unwasted, the lives unfucked, the past undone.

But there is one thing; as Pierce says "This catastrophe killed more actual people than it killed the careers of the people who planned it and cheered it on. We should all be ashamed. And we're not."

And that, to me, is the most grievous crime and the most unforgivable sin of all.

Ten Years After

Can it be that it's been almost a decade since the first day of the Third Gulf War, the Cheneyan Mess-o-potamia?

Yep.



A good place to begin is here: with James Fallows. In it Fallows makes the point which I consider the most essential one that we as We the People should be contemplating:

"For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage. Robert McNamara did worthy penance at the World Bank. Rusk, Rostow, Westmoreland were not declaiming on what the U.S. should and should not do.

After Iraq, there has been a weird amnesty and amnesia about people's misjudgment on the most consequential decision of our times. Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 primary race largely because she had been "wrong" on Iraq and Barack Obama had been "right." But Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Rice, McCain, Abrams, and others including the pro-war press claque are still offering their judgments unfazed. In his post-presidential reticence George W. Bush has been an honorable exception.

I don't say these people should never again weigh in. But there should be an asterisk on their views, like the fine print about side effects in pharmaceutical ads."

I read the article Fallows refers to in the spring of 2003 and remember thinking "Yep. Yep. This is gonna suck." It prompted me to do something I'd promised myself I'd never do; march in a "peace protest". And, yes, it was as fucking worthless as the rest of them. All I got was the fucking T-shirt, and the caissons went rolling along.

But to me, the real damage we have done to ourselves over this has nothing to do with blood or treasure, but the formal codification of the Washington Rule that says you can harm your nation and your nation's People deliberately, intentionally, with greed and self-interest aforethought and pay no price - not a fucking penny or a moment of your liberty or even your social standing - for it.



We'll talk some more here about this when the anniversary arrives.

Harvest of Shame

I had a chance to stop for a moment this morning and got to read the World's Worst Newspaper over my coffee. And for just a moment I was pleased to see that the headline had nothing to do with the events of twelve years ago today.

That's nice, I thought; maybe we're starting to get over ourselves.

And then I continued to think about the entire business.

And realized that the silly, self-licking-ice-cream-cone of our Middle Eastern "policies" remain both unchanged and unquestioned,

Recognized that our national greed for the sweet, sweet crude remains unslaked, and we have not even seriously considered any sort of sensible attempt to even discuss weaning ourselves from the petroleum teat proffered by the unstable, violent strumpets that feed our lubricious petrochemical craving,

Acknowledged with bitter anger that the willful crimes, errors, and omissions made because of the events of that day have never even really been examined, much less punished or expiated. The doors to that madhouse still stand open, ready for another cabal of idiots, criminals, and grifters to pull us back inside,

And accepted with rueful regret that we appear to have learned nothing and yet forgotten nothing from that eminently forgettable day.

I rose from my table angry at myself, at my "fellow citizens", but most of all at the greedy, cynical opportunists that have continued to use this day to create the United States they crave; the fearful, ignorant, credulous Skinnerbox of useful idiots that will continue to prefer "safety" to liberty and "strength" to honor.

I looked out over the green hills of Portland and saw, instead of the dark firs and big-leaved maples a broad field sown thick with the foolish ideas planted that day twelve years ago; planted by fools, would-be oligarchs, and con-men, yes, but nurtured and grown to ripeness by the carelessness and indolence of you and I.

And clenched my fists with my useless fury at the grief of it.

Because - as vile as are the shoots that we have already gathered - I know that someday, perhaps in my time but more likely in my children's, we will likely come to reap a bitterer harvest from that poisoned field.

Not just "no" but "FUCK, no!"

Any Bonds Today?

Like I said, lately it takes a lot to get me assed up.

This did it.One of the things that the goddam Bushies did that always pissed me off was this; pretending that the costs of fighting imperial war in the hustings of Southwest Asia wasn't part of the "Defense Budget", slipping these damn supplementals past the budgetary process like an old lady tiptoeing into bed with the gardener.

Now the Obamaites are doing the same damn thing.

It's not like we can't see what's coming. We've been in both places for donkey's years. Our wastage rate and resupply needs are pretty consistent. There's no reason that these couldn't go in the regular budget.

Oh, yeah. Except for the fact that it would remind everyone that were pissing cash down a firehose trying to simonize a couple of tribal Third World shitholes.

And this thing looks like they're not even trying. Let's see...

"The request includes $11.6 billion to replace military equipment, including $600 million to buy the last four Lockheed Martin Corp. F-22 fighters the Pentagon wants and $400 million for 12 Boeing Co. AH-64 Apache helicopters, $3.6 billion to beef up the Afghanistan Security Force, $1 billion in aid to Pakistan, $30 million to begin shutting down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and $350 million to fight narcotics trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. What else? How 'bout $1.5 billion to continue efforts to counter roadside bombs, $1.2 billion to accelerate “Wounded Warrior” programs for injured and disabled troops and $3.8 million for classified military intelligence gathering. Another $2.2 billion would speed up the growth of the Army to 547,000 personnel and Marine Corps to 202,000 members. A mere $5.5 million to deploy about 73 mail-screening devices to diplomatic outposts abroad. $800 million in aid to Gaza and the West Bank, $89 million for efforts to secure nuclear materials in Russia, $200 million in disaster aid for Sudan and elsewhere in Africa, $242 million in aid to Georgia that was pledged in the wake of that country’s 2008 conflict with Russia and $13 million in humanitarian assistance to Burma."

What? We couldn't see any of this coming? That $242 mil for our buddy Sakashvili was a black swan?

My ass. Obama's people managed to pull together a budget in the six months they've been working since the election, they couldn't have junked this crap in with it? The thing I tried for years to get my conservative pals to see (and which most of them just blinked at me owlishly when I mentioned it, like I was talking about frog sex or Dresden figurines or something) was that my headache with the Bushies wasn't that they were a bunch of unrealistic, rapacious, nepotistic and aggressive fatheads bent on shredding our governmental systems for their own selfish and/or partisan gain. It was that they were a bunch of unrealistic, rapacious, nepotistic and aggressive fatheads bent on shredding our governmental systems for their own selfish and/or partisan gain without a fucking clue what they were doing. They were like a bunch of special education kids using Semtex to blow the spillway gates off the Hoover Dam so they could get a drink of water. The damage wasn't just the damage they were doing at the time - it was the lasting damage they would leave behind.Morons.

So here it is, the truest, bestest Bushie legacy in action; their supposedly more adult, more responsible successors are using the Bush toys to play in the mud. It's like we've spent the past eight years living the Bourbon Dream: we've learned nothing but forgotten nothing.

Well, it's one thing for them to be Tom Fool and lead.

But it's another for us to be Jack Fool and follow.

A Man For All Treasons

I've been thinking about the soon-to-be gone loyal Bushies and, in particular, the heart of darkness

that beats at the center of the treasonous lawbreaking that has distinguished this felonious administration.

And I realized that as I thought of him, and it, that I was thinking also of this:As always, Robert Bolt's delectible words cut right to the heartwood. The laws around us are not there for the protection of "terrorists", or felons, or evildoers, or devils. These beings have arms and ruthlessness and hate and their own selfishness to protect them.

The laws are there for us, you and me, the clueless, nameless little nobodies caught up in a Kakfa story or a Beckett play, helpless before power and force and a conviction of righteousness.

And isn't Paul Scofield wonderful?

Before that Smoking Investment Becomes a Mushroom Cloud...

When the Bush Administration tells you that there's a dire emergency right outside...

...and you need to hand them your checkbook, PIN number, car and house keys, combination to your household safe, nude pictures of your children and the controls to the shocker collar on your watchdog.

You need to remember this.

Because it doesn't take a thief to catch a thief. It takes a watchful cop to catch the thieves. Just because Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke want you to believe differently doesn't make it so.

As the decider himself might say: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...won't get fooled again.

Update 9/23: Hey, I just got this in the e-mail. I think it looks like a terrific opportunity! Let me know what you think but I'll be away from the keyboard for a moment to get my debit card!

"Dear American:

I cordially correspond today to request you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude which is most seriously important.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused urgent need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred. For this inconvenience you will be rewarded with grand fees of 1/1,000,000th of 1% of possible profits due to off shore laundering of skim funds due to reprinting of said funds.

Please reply with mother's maiden name, routing and account numbers of all of your bank account, IRA, 401K, pension funds, gold and silver accounts, serial numbers of any weapons you own, and college fund accounts and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Please Respond Immediately Forthwith In Confidence.

Yours Faithfully and Sincerely,

Minister of Treasury Paulson"Henh. Who'da thought it..? Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

You Couldn't Make This Up

No. You couldn't.

What did our President think was the very best, the very, very best, bestest, most fabu', coolest gee-whiz aspect of American Culture to show off to President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana at his state dinner at the White House last night?

"The Lion King"

I shit you not.

Can you imagine? Here's President Kufuor; MA Oxford, member of the Bar (Lincoln Inn), MP, Head of State, lingering over his Banana Coconut Pudding in its' Graham Cracker Crumble and Cocoa Pod Shell when from out of the East Lawn comes capering a bunch of bastardized pseudo-African pop culture icons who proceed to sing and dance to tunefully juvenile faux-African Elton John ditties.Now picture the situation reversed: our President saluted by an Ghanaian version of "The Man Show" live, complete with big-breasted Ghanian gals in "Juggy" whiteface, singing bison and mountain lions.

Dick Cheney gets to be "Scar", of course.

Does this mean that the next time Chancellor Merkel of Germany visits she gets serenaded with "Der Fuhrer's Face?" Or do we put on "The Mikado" for the Prime Minister of Japan, "Mucha Lucha" for President Fox?

Jesus fucking wept.

Is there no end to this humiliation, in even the smallest of things..?

January, 2009 can't come too soon.

Declaration

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
in general Congress assembled.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world...What does it take?

We have an Administration that publicly asserts that its actions are above the law and that works tirelessly in secret to subvert the laws that others claim apply to them. This shouldn't be news, exactly, to those of us who have been paying attention and giving a shit these past seven years. But this is sickening and unAmerican in the truest sense.

What's sickening to me, however, is that We, the People, now apparently lack either the capability or the willingness, or both, to BE sickened by the arrogant, monarchical beliefs of this Administration.

That's fucking wrong.

This country was founded by men who were so sickened by the arrogance, despotism and contempt of their sovereign that they were willing to risk their "Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor" to be rid of the royal pest. Have we - are we - so much less than they that today that we will suffer this wretched little man, this smirking, sneering, privileged patrician twerp and his bobos to undo in two piddling terms of office what the Founders fought and died to establish, and the hundreds of thousands who fought since have died to preserve?

Do these words have no more import then the scribblings of an idiot on a bathroom wall?

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:"

Jefferson famously said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." Our present leaders consider that bullshit will serve.

Why aren't we furious about that?

I hope you have a happy and thunderously good Fourth. I hope you have lots of good food, friends, fireworks...all the trappings of tradition.

But as you do, I hope you take a moment to consider what we're celebrating. Would the original authors of the Declaration of Independence really be celebrating today?

Everyone out at once!

On the stunningly unexpected Scottie McClellan revelations that the Bush Administration is characterized by an insanely partisan, uninformed, propagandistic conviction of its own destiny unswayed by events, facts or other intrusions of the reality-based world outside, that insulates the simplistic Decider from the regrettable consequences of his frequent lapses in judgement, and was crafted from the start to put its own goals ahead of protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States as well as the best interests of the American public?Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud] Everybody out at once!