Month: November 2005

Very Good News

Expanding on tristero’s good news below, may I just say how pleased I am that California voted down every single initiative yesterday, thereby shoving Schwarzenegger’s useless 70 million dollar special election down his throat. Even the parental notification for minors seeking abortion went down.

Schwarzenegger is toast. After watching Bush and him in action maybe people are finally beginning to move beyond the “dumbshit guy I’d like to hang out with” and “movie stars are, like, awesome” methods of choosing our leaders.

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Win Some, Lose Some

Good news:

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

[SNIP]

The election will not alter the facts on which the judge must decide the case. But if the intelligent design policy is defeated in court, the new school board could refuse to pursue an appeal. It could also withdraw the policy, a step that many challengers said they intended to take.

“We are all for it being discussed, but we do not want to see it in biology class,” said Judy McIlvaine, a member of the winning slate. “It is not a science.”

Bad news:

The fiercely split Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 on Tuesday to adopt new science standards that are the most far-reaching in the nation in challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution in the classroom.

[SNIP]

Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations.

[SNIP]

“This is a sad day, not just for Kansas kids, but for Kansas,” Janet Waugh of Kansas City, Kan., one of four dissenting board members, said before the vote. “We’re becoming a laughingstock not only of the nation but of the world.”

[SNIP]

In the standing-room-only crowd in the small board room for Tuesday’s session were two dozen high school students fulfilling an assignment for government class by attending the public meeting. They shook their heads at the decision.

“We’re glad we’re seniors,” said Hannah Teeter, 17, from Shawnee Mission West, a high school in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. “I feel bad for all the kids that are younger than us that they have to be taught things that aren’t science in science class.”

Good news, good news:

The Republican loss in Virginia, which President Bush carried with 54 percent just a year ago, came after an 11th-hour campaign stop by Mr. Bush and the kind of all-out Republican effort to mobilize the vote that reaped rich rewards last year.

Republicans argued on Tuesday that Virginia was a local election driven by local events, with little long-term national significance. But the loss clearly stung, as did the double-digit defeat in New Jersey, a blue state that had seemed within reach for the Republicans.

Good news:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was dealt a stinging rebuke on Tuesday by voters who rejected the centerpiece of his efforts to change the balance of power in Sacramento, an initiative to cap state spending and grant sweeping new budget powers to the governor.

Bad news:

Jerry Sanders, a former police chief, outpolled a surf-shop owner and City Council member on Tuesday to be elected mayor of San Diego, a city that has been tainted by corruption and fiscal mismanagement.

With 90 percent of the precincts reporting, Mr. Sanders, a Republican, had 54 percent of the vote, to 46 percent for Donna Frye, his Democratic opponent.

Bad news, good news, bad news:

Doctors would have to tell women seeking abortions in their 20th week of pregnancy or later that their fetuses might feel pain — an assertion debated in the medical community — under a bill passed by Wisconsin lawmakers.

Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, promised to veto the legislation, which the Assembly passed 61-34 Tuesday and the Senate passed earlier.

[snip]

Three states have similar requirements and federal legislation is pending in Congress, the National Conference of State Legislatures said.

Bad news:

Texans voted overwhelmingly to add a prohibition of same-sex marriage to their constitution on Tuesday, becoming the 19th U.S. state to do so.

Good news:

[I]n St. Paul, Randy Kelly became the city’s first incumbent mayor in more than 30 years to lose a re-election campaign.

Polls suggested that Mr. Kelly’s endorsement of President Bush last fall was a factor in his loss to a fellow Democrat, Chris Coleman, by 70 percent to 30 percent.

“I have never seen anything quite like this,” Lawrence Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, said about what he called a firestorm over the endorsement.

A poll conducted by Mr. Jacobs found that more than half of likely voters in the city said Mr. Kelly’s endorsement would influence their votes. Most of those respondents said it would lead them to vote for Mr. Coleman, a former City Council member.

Confiding in Vic

It looks like DC is just crawling with wingnuts claiming to have spotted Elvis er… claiming that Joseph Wilson told them that his wife was CIA while they were waiting to go on one News show or another. Oddly, none of them ever came forward to support poor little Scooter and Karl during their ordeal. How selfish of them.

From last July, here’s a friend of Victor Davis Hanson, regaling the Freepers with lurid stories of Wilson’s crass materialism and bragging about his hot blonde wife in the make-up room:

Based upon a personal conversation (we were in a small group eating; it was NOT an “off the record”) I had with eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson (we were at a luncheon table together during a trip to Europe), it appeared entirely possible that Joe Wilson himself was the (or one source, if not the original one) possible source in revealing his own wife’s status as a CIA agent or employee.

Victor Davis Hanson (Wilson presumably knew Victor Davis Hanson wrote regularly for NRO (National Review Online), had done OpEds for the Wall street Journal, and other publications, and had his own Website with a widespread following) said he (VDH) & Joe Wilson were both in the same “Green Room” before a televised debate-discussion on Iraq, etc. and Joe first warned the TV make-up person not to get powder on his $14,000 Rolex watch, then he bragged to Victor about several things (possessions and trips to Aspen, etc.), like his expensive car (I think it was a Mercedes), and then bragged about his beautiful wife who, Joe Wilson said (braggingly) was a CIA operative.

I asked Victor Davis Hanson Why he didn’t write up this account.(?) He replied that Joe Wilson would probably simply deny it, since only he (VDH) & Joe Wilson were in the Green Room together before the broadcast.

Fitzgerald is going to have to round up every wingnut in Washington. Seems they’ve all been holding out on him, allowing him to spend years investigating and hundreds of thousands of dollars and now he’s going to have to start from scratch. After all, he is under the impression that Wilson’s CIA status was classified and not known outside intelligence circles. Apparently, Wilson spilled his guts with uncommon frequency in the Green Rooms of television studios.

For those of you who need a primer on the hard, masculine, manliness of the brave Victor Dave, (who was evidently much too busy tucking into his terrine of duck confit whilst entertaining his little friends with insider tales of crass nouveau riches clods to step up and help out his pals Scoot and Turdblossom) here’s James Wolcott on the subject.

By the way, did I ever tell you that I once heard Dick Cheney recite the codes to the nuclear football over tacos at Michael Ledeen’s house? He did. And while he was doing it he was picking off the neighborhood cats with a bb gun and bragging about his three-way with Lynn and John Bolton. I never said anything before because he would just deny it. We were alone together in the bathroom at the time.

Crooks and Liars has a whole list of interesting links on the Valelly/McIntyre Swift boat smear.

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Whole Lotta Love

Wow. CNN is reporting that Trent Lott just said that the Washington Post leak was probably perpetrated by a Republican Senator! Apparently, the gulag was discussed at the Republican-Senator-only meeting last week in which Cheney begged them to back-off the anti-torture policy.

Lott said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Man a majority leader scorned is fearsome creature, ain’t he?

I do find it fascinating that Cheney was discussing this Gulag opernly in front of the GOP caucus after they had just recently voted 90-0 for the anti-torture amendment. Seems old Dick is a little slow on the uptake. He didn’t learn a thing from his earlier leaking campaign, did he?

Update: Think Progress has the video.

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Losing On Defense

As Dear Leader would say, I think it’s a “faahbulous” idea to hold hearings into how the Washington Post found out that we have established an illegal gulag (yes, a gulag) in countries around the world where we are holding and torturing prisoners indefinitely and with impugnity. I hope it creates headlines every single day for months as we explore this issue of how reporters found out that we are behaving in an illegal and immoral fashion along the lines of the Soviet Union. We need to get to the bottom of how such a thing happened and if it requires days and weeks of media coverage discussing how we torture and imprison people in foreign countries, so be it.

This Republican implosion is really becoming interesting to watch. These people lose their wits when they are forced to play defense. They think they are being clever and “turning the tables” on the Democrats by holding hearings into a leak but they apparently don’t understand that they are playing right into the Democratic narrative about Republican secrecy, lies and incompetence.

As Terry at Nitpicker says:

If Republicans think this is a good idea for the political health of their party, they’re stupider than I’ve ever thought they were. First, they’re all but admitting to the world that we do have such sites, especially when someone on the Hill tells Drudge the leak “damaged national security.”

More importantly, we’re finally going to get to talk about issues that we should have been talking about all along. The Geneva Convention debate will be renewed. Dick Cheney’s walk on the “dark side” will show. Eventually, leaders in countries that haven’t avoided the International Criminal Court will go on trial and save their own asses by ratting out the Bushies.

We’ll probably also get to see a real First Amendment debate, which will demonstrate just how ridiculous Judith Miller’s claims of higher moral purpose were. The honesty of journalism “shield law” advocates like Sen. Dick Lugar and Rep. Mike Pence will likewise be tested.

This could be an all-out, to-the-mattresses fight over the values that we Americans truly hold dear and, in the process, we might even save our country’s soul.

General Wacko and General Crackpot

Via Americablog: I see that the GOP attack machine is swift-boating Joe Wilson, saying that he casually spilled his wife’s CIA status in the FOX greenroom back in 2002. I kid you not. They got two wingnut ex-generals to say that Wilson told them about his wife before they were about to go on television.

I suspect they might get a visit from the FBI about this because the last I heard, there was still an ongoing investigation into the matter of how reporters found out about Plame’s employment. Patrick Fitzgerald might just be interested to know why these fellows haven’t come forward before. After all, the story sounds a little bit wierd considering the fact that Joe never let it slip to his own friends and neighbors that Valerie was CIA, yet he supposedly blabbed to a couple of total strangers in the greenroom of a news network.

See, Fitz will wonder if after they heard this juicy little nugget about about a CIA spy married to an ex-Ambassador that they, in turn, told a FOX news reporter who might have then slipped it to Karl or Scooter sometime later. After all, both of those guys have very faulty memories and have said that they don’t remember exactly where they heard about Plame.

I think somebody needs to get on the horn and let Pat Fitzgerald know that there are a couple of witnesses going around on right wing talk radio who could blow his case wide open. He needs to get the FBI out to talk to them right away.

Just in case anyone is wondering about these two guys’ political orientation, here’s an excerpt of the Publisher’s Weekly review of these two patriots’ Regnery book called “Endgame: The Blueprint For Victory in The War On Terror”

As the authors would have it, North Korea must dismantle its nuclear program or face U.S. invasion. Syria, unless it stops supporting terrorism and coughs up the Iraqi WMDs the authors say it’s hiding, should also be invaded. Saudi Arabia should be nudged toward a diversified economy and political reform, but if Islamic radicals take over, it too must be invaded. Iran, too big to invade, should be slapped with an embargo and naval blockade,[that view is no longer operative. Iran should now be tactically nuked — ed] while Pakistan should be enticed with aid packages into curbing its nuclear proliferation and cracking down on the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The authors’ ambitious schedule of ultimatums and conquests leads them to focus almost exclusively on the U.S. military, for which they recommend the Rumsfeld doctrine of light, mobile forces, supplemented by additional weapons spending.

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But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Considering what we know about Dick Cheney, it is not surprising that these two fellows would come to his defense. Let’s consider General Paul Vallely, Fox news analyst and certified Strangelovian freakshow. From Newshounds November 2004:

Colmes questioned the wisdom of a Judeo/Christian holy war against Muslims. “That’s what’s going on,” Vallely said. “If you don’t understand that, then you don’t get it.”

But that’s not General Vallely’s claim to fame. He is known for a paper he wrote with a military intelligence officer named Michael Aquino in the late 1980’s called From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory. Aquino is also the founder of a Satanic cult called “The Temple of Set” which has had many run-ins with the law regarding satanic pedophile rings on military bases. I still kid you not. You can find a copy of this paper on the Temple web-site. He founded the cult in the mid-1970’s more than a decade before he wrote this paper with our friend Vallely. I’m not big on guilt by association — but really.

Vallely and Aquino’s views are a bit eccentric, to say the least:

In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe – neither through primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics – but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth. These media are, of course, the electronic media — television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts made possible a penetration of the minds of the worlds such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and the integrity to civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.

[…]

Unlike PSYOP, MindWar has nothing to do with deception or even with “selected” – and therefore misleading – truth. Rather it states a whole truth that, if it does not now exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States. The examples of Kennedy’s ultimatum to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Hitler’s stance at Munich might be cited. A MindWar message does not have to fit conditions of abstract credibility as do PSYOP there; its source makes it credible.

[…]

“MindWar must target all participants to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war.”

As Rigorous Intuition notes here, that sounds remarkably like the comment made to journalist Ron Susskind about “creating reality:”

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

This “Mindwar” paper evidently made the rounds in the military when it was published and informed a lot of wingnut thinking. What are the odds that Sec Def Cheney wasn’t impressed? He’s the guy who wanted to use tactical nukes use during Gulf War One, after all.

Mcinerney is only slightly less kooky than Vallely. He is heavily involved in neocon circles, particularly the Iran Policy Group with more famous notables like Gaffney, Ledeen and Pipes. He is also an influential board member of NetStar, a very interesting global communications company. Jim Stanton at the Agonist reported:

At the Intelcon blast held this past February, McInerney chaired a panel on Securing Intelligence Networks. As a director of NetStar Systems, that subject matter is an important part of his job. According to NetStar’s website, it is “a fast-growing Virginia corporation with headquarters in Vienna, Virginia. It was founded in 1998 and most of our employees are cleared at the Top Secret or higher levels. NetStar is growing rapidly in the Intel and DOD sectors and has provided numerous solutions and staff to many of the Intelligence agencies in the DC metro area.” Clients include the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, DHS and the Office of Naval Intelligence. NetStar is a member of the National Military Intelligence Association (NMIA). Most of NetStar’s clients were at Intelcon 2005 including General Jim Williams, USA (Ret.), former director of DIA, and NMIA’s current director.

[…]

“He [Bush] doesn’t have any choice [but to attack Iran because] he understands [the Iranians] are the king of terror right now. They are striving for nuclear weapons that can get into the hands of terrorists and then it’s too late. B-2 stealth bombers, armed with the huge penetrating bombs commonly called bunker busters, would be able to pierce Iran’s aging air defenses and hit 20 or more sites. They have not updated that very, very old air defense system. McInerney said that as a colonel in 1977 he went to Iran and conducted a war exercise against various Iranian targets during the rule of the United States’ ally, the Shah of Iran. They were not very good then, and they have clearly just gotten worse…I can tell you from my personal experience we would have no problem there.”

Vallely is also a major neocon player. He was quoted back in February saying:

“Negotiations will not work,” said Maj. Gen. (ret.) Paul Vallely, chairman of the military committee of the neoconservative Center for Security Policy, who described the Iranian regime as a “house of cards.”

And who else but Dick Cheney was right in the middle of all this:

… the voices in favor of an “engagement” policy are being drowned out by crescendo of calls to adopt “regime change” as U.S. policy.

The latest such urging was released here Thursday by the Iran Policy Committee (IPC), a group headed by a former National Security Council staffer Ray Tanter, several retired senior military officers, and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The 30-page document, “U.S. Policy Options for Iran” by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Clare Lopez, appears to reflect the views of the administration’s most radical hawks among the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

It was Cheney who launched the latest bout of saber-rattling when he told a radio interviewer last month that Tehran was “right at the top of the list” of the world’s trouble spots and that Israel may strike at suspected Iranian nuclear sites even before the U.S.

These are all extremely creepy people involved in all kinds of neocon cloak and dagger fantasies. Just like Dick Cheney, whose idea of military leadership was gleaned from watching movies and TV series. They are part of the crackpot Cheney cabal.

These two men specifically are Jack D. Ripper and Buck Turgidson come to life. I think Pat Fitzgerald needs to talk to them. Immediately.

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Sickening

Reuters:.

U.S. forces in Iraq have used incendiary white phosphorus against civilians and a firebomb similar to napalm against military targets, Italian state-run broadcaster RAI reported on Tuesday.

A RAI documentary showed images of bodies recovered after a November 2004 offensive by U.S. troops on the town of Falluja, which it said proved the use of white phosphorus against men, women and children who were burned to the bone.

“I do know that white phosphorus was used,” said Jeff Englehart in the RAI documentary, which identified him as a former soldier in the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in Iraq.

The U.S. military says white phosphorus is a conventional weapon and says it does not use any chemical arms.

“Burned bodies. Burned children and burned women,” said Englehart, who RAI said had taken part in the Falluja offensive. “White phosphorus kills indiscriminately.”

A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said he did not recall white phosphorus being used in Falluja. “I do not recall the use of white phosphorus during the offensive operations in Falluja in the fall of 2004,” Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan said.

An incendiary device, white phosphorus is used by the military to conceal troop movements with smoke, mark targets or light up combat areas. The use of incendiary weapons against civilians has been banned by the Geneva Convention since 1980.

The United States did not sign the relevant protocol to the convention, a U.N. official in New York said.

This report may be wrong, or a malicious attempt to make the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld military look truly monstrous.* But given everything else that we know about – Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the black sites, the murders and “renditions” and refusal to abide by any law other than the president’s will – I can only assume this is probably true. And note: white phosphorous, an incendiary, is classified as a conventional, ie non-chemical, weapon. Well, since ketchup’s been a vegetable since the Reagan administration, I suppose napalm-like substances can be classified as little worse than rubber darts.

What will it take to stop these horrors? When will this country demand, with one voice, that torture and atrocities committed by the US stop, and stop, now, today?

*For the benefit of the rightwingers amongst us, who assume that those of us opposed to Bush/Iraq hate the military and think all soldiers are sadistic beasts, I don’t believe the majority of American soldiers behave like the Abu Ghraib torturers. Obviosuly.

But I do believe that soldiers must follow orders from their higher ups and are often in no position to question what may be morally questionable orders. The sadistic beasts are the ones who condoned and ordered atrocities, not the soldiers who have been placed in an untenable position and cannot refuse without risking court martial or perhaps even summary execution.

Is Crucifixion Legal Under Bush And Cheney?

Jane Mayer, who along with Jill Abramson wrote Strange Justice, a definitive account of how Anita Hill was smeared and ridiculed during the Clarence Thomas hearing, has written a searing account of the death of a prisoner in Iraq.

Jamadi’s bruises, [a forensic pathologist who examined the case records] said, were no doubt painful, but they were not life-threatening. Baden went on, “He also had injuries to his ribs. You don’t die from broken ribs. But if he had been hung up in this way [with his hands tied behind him in a painful position known as a “Palestinian Hanging”] and had broken ribs, that’s different.” In his judgment, “asphyxia is what he died from—as in a crucifixion.”

As in a crucifixion. At the hands of Americans. And it may not be against the law anymore:

The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was “breathtaking,” the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous “enhanced” interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist.

So, is the “right to crucify” behind the objections of the Bush administration to McCain’s bill banning torture overseas? Someone should ask Scott McClellan. Today.

This is Not A Good Man

Kevin Drum says:

As a wise man said back in January 2003 regarding Cheney and his curiously enduring reputation for competence even in the face of mountains of contrary evidence, “his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see.” Looking back, perhaps historians will say that November 2005 was when they finally saw it.

I agree. It’s finally coming into focus that every single one of this administration’s so-called grown-ups are idiots. There were people who knew that the avuncular Dick Cheney was something of a nut, but nobody believed them. He just seemed so darned competent compared to the callow Junior, there was no need to look any further.

Frances Fitzgerald pointed out back in 2002 that Cheney was a bit of freak, in her fascinating article in the New York review of Books called “Bush and the World:”

In “A World Transformed,” the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior’s top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev’s reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures. In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union—even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.

The man is clearly a fool and always has been. Larry Johnson wrote about Cheney and torture today over on TPM cafe and mentions that the real CIA guys aren’t all that into torture because it doesn’t work. He suggests that Cheney and his minions got their ideas about all this from the movies.

That certainly does ring true to me. Here’s an old favorite, that’s amazingly illustrative of the incredible shallowness of Big Time, the man who was supposed to help little Junior get over his lack of foreign policy sophistication:

Following one White House meeting at which he’d asked for more time and more troops, Stormin’ Norman reports; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. “My God,” the official supposedly complained. “He’s got all the force he needs. Why won’t he just attack?” Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who’d made the comment “was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he’d been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert.”

And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: “(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns’s PBS series, The Civil War.”

But that wasn’t the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being “as bad as it could possibly be… But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn’t die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney’s staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.” (Throw in a Pete Rose rookie card?) None of this Walter Mitty posturing especially surprised Schwarzkopf, who points out that he’d already known Cheney as “one of the fiercest cold warriors in Congress.

Remember the adoring crowds and nearly hysterical screaming for this kook during last years election? What in gawd’s name were those people drinking?

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Ever Rightward

It is a wierd goddam day when Elliott “El Mozote” Abrams turns out to be the dove in the administration. (Check out Elliott’s link there if you aren’t familiar with his litany of crimes.) In fact, I can hardly believe it. It’s either a testimony to how radical Bush and Cheney really are or how mellow and peaceful Abrams has become. I’m pretty confident it’s the former.

I remember how dumb and scary I thought Reagan was. Compared to Junior, he was Einstein. What will they shove at us next?

What “compassionate conservative” are they going to foist on this country to take it even further to the right than we can imagine today? I’m thinking it has to be a Dobson or a Robertson Armageddonist. There’s nowhere else to go.

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