Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The One That Takes The Biscuit

Richard T. Race is the kind of guy you would hope was squeaky clean. He was after all George W. Bush’s specially appointed special Chief Investigator to the Pentagon’s Inspector General. His job description: “investigating fraud and official misconduct.”

Let’s hear that again: investigating fraud and official misconduct. Well, this is going to hurt: Richard T. Race has been arrested and charged with nothing less than fraud and attempting to violate the country’s banking regulations as Bloomberg reports:

Race, 61, admitted he made cash deposits at the Pentagon's credit union on three straight days in March 2007 that were designed to evade laws that track large currency transactions.

I know, the Democrats have these people too, what with William Jefferson and Eliot Spitzer. But I think Race is in fact the 58th Republican Bushie being nailed in a hypocritical scandal in the past 16 months if my memory serves me well. In fact, in 2007, there was a new Republican under investigation pretty much every single week of the year.

What makes it even more palatable is the fact that this is the man that George W. Bush personally chose to trust with the investigation of financial wrongdoing. A man who stoops so low as to try and hide a $20,000 transaction. It’s pathetic. Very, very funny, but pathetic all the same. It is the most succinct and condensed representation of Bush’s presidency I’ve seen so far.

Five Years

Five years ago, the order was given to start one of the most ignominious military campaigns in the history of human kind. It smacked of over-eager beavers sitting in Washington who could not wait to get the ball rolling and were worried every day, that a final discovery, that Iraq really did NOT have WMD would thwart their grubby little plans to invade a sovereign country under the guise of freedom, the tatty umbrella of the war against terrorism and the absurd notion of installing democracy as if it were a 50” plasma TV one could just set down and hook up.

Seldom has so much stupidity been collectively exercised by such a distinguished group of moronic mass murderers as in the lead up to this war.

George W. Bush
Dick Cheney
Paul Wolfowitz
Richard Perle
Doug Feith
Donald Rumsfeld
General Franks
Condoleeza Rice
Colin Powell
George Tenet

These are the criminals we have before us that set a charade in motion as see-through as Hitler’s attempt in 1939 to accuse Poland of having fired the first shots over the German border and starting the Blitzkrieg to flatten a country that fought his tanks with horses.

The shouts of bravado have grown quieter and the excited arm-chair would-be marines and weapons experts are no longer laughing at videos of American and British tanks destroying Iraqi houses, of planes dropping 500 lb bombs on people’s homes, of cruise missiles raining down on a populated city, at slogans like “Shock and Awe.”

Now, five years later, the Iraqi resistance is still giving pretty much as good as it gets. Faced with a 700 billion dollar war machine, they seem to be holding up pretty well with their sandals and scooters, their decade old Kalaschnikovs and their Chinese made RPGs. We have a David and we have a Goliath and David ain’t having any of it in this battle.

Today, on the fifth anniversary of the launch of the “days, maybe weeks, hardly months” long war, two thirds of Americans are opposed to the conflict and believe the cost in lives was not worth it. Cheney says “So?”

Now there’s a man either to be respected for being so headstrong that he doesn’t care what the people think because he’s forgotten that he’s in a democracy, or reviled because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks, he’s lined his pockets, thank you very much.

Five years after the launch of the barrage of bombs on Baghdad that signaled the start of the war, Bush will be defending his decision to go into Iraq despite the high cost saying that it:

"opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror, making Iraq a place where Arabs fight alongside Americans to drive Al-Qaeda out."

You want to tell him or shall I? No one really believes this clap trap anymore Mr. Bush. You engaged the United States military in an intractable conflict which your successor will have to deal with. You have created a situation of barely comprehendible chaos where stability was of utmost importance. You have kicked out a secular tyrant only to have him replaced by a religious fanatical group. In short, you have thrown Iraq to the dogs and don’t know what to do.

Five years on, nearly 4,000 US service men and women are pointing their fingers from the grave. You and your demented, lunatic Administration, your idiotic guesses as to the costs of the war, your ‘slam dunks’ and ‘cake walks’, your ‘bring it on,’ are a testimony to your complete misunderstanding of the responsibility you had and that you squandered for personal gain and agenda.

Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis rotting in the desert sands bear witness to a crime for which you and your war-criminal friends should rightfully be incarcerated for life. You have destroyed a country and destroyed its people and are just itching to get your grubby little hands on that country’s oil. Five years later, as Iraqi children sit without parents, by the lights of candles as they wait for a generator somewhere to get more gas so it can provide a couple more hours of light, as widows still weep over lost husbands, parents cry over lost children, you can observe your legacy in their stories of horror, death and poverty.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Loophole

Bezerkistan passed a new regulation compelling companies who observe fraud being perpetrated to report it to the authorities. This was to close a loophole that had existed for years which allowed companies to ignore fraud, a practice which cost their government billions of Bezerkistani Schlocks (1.22 BezSchlks to the US $).

However recently, His Royal Highness the President of Bezerkistan, snuck in a separate piece of legislation exempting companies from the new law if they discovered the fraud abroad. This was because many of Bezerkistan’s companies, who’s CEO’s were personal friends of His Royal Highness the President of Bezerkistan, had contracts that were abroad.

This would make an amusing read except for the fact that the country was not Bezerkistan but the United States of America and the President is unfortunately George Bush, who has again defeated logic in support of his buddies, and thwarted the law in favor of corporations.

The proposed rule, put forth by the White House Office of Management and Budget last year, exempts all companies who do work overseas from a new regulation requiring US contractors to report waste, fraud or abuse they encounter while doing work for the government.

The whole sordid affair can be read in The Raw Story.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

McCain With Parsley On The Side

Or Why McCain Won't Do Part II

"Tell me what company thou keepst, and I'll tell thee what thou art."
- - Miguel de Cervantes (1547 - 1616) Spanish novelist.

In our friend’s case it’s Televangelist Rod Parsley whom we are talking about, who’s endorsement of the Republican Presidential front-runner is valuable to McCain who, it has to be said, is not that picky. The trouble is that our Televangelist is one of those with a particular axe to grind. It isn’t enough for Rod Parsley to proclaim, quite falsely, but who cares at this late stage in the proceedings, that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is:

"In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore."

Holy Mackerel! Say it like it is, Bob, But before that statement even has a hope of being asorbed by the surrounding audience it get’s worse. What? You think it can't get worse? Listen up!

Parsley is not shy about his desire to obliterate Islam. In Silent No More, he notes—approvingly—that Christopher Columbus shared the same goal: "It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492…Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America." He urges his readers to realize that a confrontation between Christianity and Islam is unavoidable

Christopher Columbus set out to defeat Islam? Holy Smokes! That's revisionist history if ever I heard it. Last I read, Columbus wanted to find India. But at the end of his chapter on Islam in which he invokes its destruction, Parsley asks:

"Are we a Christian nation? I say yes." Without actually specifying how Islam should be eradicated, he effectively calls for a new crusade. Parsley was eventually made to shut up but not before he had thoroughly discredited every Muslim in the world as an enemy of the United States.

The core of the matter however is this:

McCain's relationship with Parsley is politically significant. In 2004, Parsley's church was credited with driving Christian fundamentalist voters to the polls for George W. Bush. With Ohio expected to again be a decisive state in the presidential contest, Parsley's World Harvest Church and an affiliated entity called Reformation Ohio, which registers voters, could be important players within this battleground state.

In view of the fact that the Ohio Republican Party has been reduced to shreds by the myriad of scandals that have befallen it and that Ted Strickland, a popular Democrat, is now the state's Governor, McCain and the Republicans will need all the help they can get in the Buckeye State this fall. It's a real question: Can McCain win the presidency without Parsley?
And who is he, that he has to rely on a nutter to do so?

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john-mccain-rod-parsley-spiritual-guide.html

Monday, March 10, 2008

"War Is Inevitable"

As the Bush nightmare slowly draws to a close and everyone holds their breath that the idiot in the White House won’t start another war before he leaves office, former Bush loyalists are dropping out and trying to settle scores before the whole mucky neocon house of manure collapses.

Now it’s Doug Feith’s turn and in his new book, Doug doesn’t pull any punches. On his list of targets is Condoleeza Rice, Paul Bremer, General Tommy Franks and Colin Powell amongst others. The funny thing is, that every time one of these Neocons does his little semi-defection dance, all he or she does, is confirm what the left has been saying about the whole Iraq episode.

Feith confirms what Ron Suskind and Richard Clarke had already stated in their books The Price of Loyalty and Against All Enemies; namely that Bush had decided to go to war on Dec. 18, 2002, well before the UN inspectors were anywhere near done and well before all the seriously dodgy intelligence reports about WMDs were published. Feith states that Bush said on that day: “War is inevitable.”

The right however scoffed at Suskind who basically wrote on behalf of Paul H. O’Neill, probably one of the men with the highest integrity who ever served office and they scoffed at Clarke who himself had served under four Presidents, when he stated the same thing. How are the Neocons going to scoff at Douglas Feith, one of the leading architects of the Iraq war?

Feith joins a long line of ex-Bush Administration fatheads who led the country into war and are now backpedaling to save their future careers. What I find so funny though is how all these people are falling over themselves to blame everyone else.

McLellan blamed Cheney in What Happened, George Tenet blames everyone except the CIA, David Kuo blames the entire Rove apparatus and Doug Feith blames everyone except Rumsfeld but especially the CIA. It’s quite clear that everyone in the Bush Administration, without exception was to blame for the fiasco that Iraq has become although Feith concentrates on Tommy Franks who he criticizes for not having any interest whatsoever in any kind of postwar planning as well as the fact that Paul Bremer and the rest of the Bush Administration didn’t listen to him as The Washington Post reports:

The key mistake that the United States made in Iraq, Feith asserts, was "the mishandling of the political transition." The good that Bremer did, he concludes, "was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation."

I can only laugh as I watch this ship of inept fools implode and sink in the very quagmire that they created. These people are criminals, should be treated as criminals and should be made to pay as the criminals that they are – the whole pack of deceitful, pompous, self-righteous, arrogant boneheads that have been trying to steer this country and the rest of the world off a cliff for the past seven years.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Why McCain Won't Do.

In a symbolic gesture, G.W.Bush today, vetoed legislation passed by Congress that would have banned water boarding. Why symbolic? It’s a symptomatic demonstration that the pack of lying, deceitful, arrogant, pig-headed neocon barbarians running this country do not understand that if you do not uphold the values under which your country was founded, you no longer have a country worth defending.

Congress’ legislation to ban waterboarding as a means of interrogation by the CIA would not have been a revolutionary, nation-threatening move that would have fed the country to a radical Islamic wolf pack. The right wing cabal of fascists in the White House would have the country think so of course, but in fact, this legislation would have brought the CIA in line with the military with regards to the questioning of prisoners. The U.S. Army Field Manual expressly prohibits waterboarding along with several other techniques for extracting information from captives.

In the article run by The Raw Story, Bush cites National Security as a reason for his vote. The real humdinger though, is that the bill was passed along partisan lines – virtually all the Republican Congressmen voted against the measure restricting the methods of questioning to those within the bounds of the Geneva Convention.

If anything, this should be a final reminder to those Democrats irresponsible enough to consider for a minute voting for McCain should Obama lose the nomination. McCain, after his famous torture flip-flop a fortnight ago would certainly also veto such legislation. If you want to finally rid this country of the scourge of torture and the blight that the collective Republican body but in particular, the neocon criminals have instilled upon it, you have to vote a Democratic candidate into the White House.

You have to.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

No Need for Wishy-Washy

The Bush Administration have proven to be world champions of wishy-washiness. One of the major wishy-washy prizes went to Donald Rumsfeld for his Weapons of Mass Destruction Statement:

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Wishy-washy gave way to “I don’t recall” when Alberto Gonzales managed to reply 97 times to questions during a hearing using that statement.

They continue however their inability at precise communication when it comes to torture and more specifically waterboarding. “It’s umm, like torture but isn’t. It isn’t torture unless someone else is doing it? It’s torture unless the bomb’s about to go off….”

All of these have been stammered statements made amongst much coughing into assorted closed fists by members of the Bush Administration or some members even of the Supreme Court. So where to look for a country that has something definite to say about it? Because Great Britain won’t help out – they are traditionally vague and imprecise about everything.

But Canada is coming to our rescue. Canada, that has decided to single-handedly reject ALL the evidence obtained from Al Qaeda suspects if it was obtained through waterboarding – a form of torture. Of course the CIA went nuts and immediately asked the Canadians how they could possibly exclude all this evidence from the dossiers of Harkat and Charkaoui, suspects who may have had some fringe involvement in 9/11. This was the reply as reported by Newsweek:


Bernard Beckhoff, a spokesman for Canada's public safety ministry, which oversees CSIS, said he could not comment on developments in either case because they are both still before the courts. But he then added, pointedly: "The CSIS director has stated publicly that torture is morally repugnant and not particularly reliable. CSIS does not knowingly use information which has been obtained through torture."


Clear, concise. No wishy washy.