This Veterans Day

I think it's important to consider that IF Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney truly respected our American service men and women, many of them now vets, than they would NOT be talking about another bloody, useless, war without end with Iran - worse than our endless wars with Iraq and Afghanistan rolled together.

Instead, it's telling just to remember how hard Bush fought to keep from fighting in Vietnam while Dick Cheney, speaking of this time and his many evasions of the draft: "I had other priorities."

Obscene: Bush "Leans" On Dead Soldiers' Families For Support

Grrrrrrrr.....

While Bush and Cheney and Petraeus keep insisting "the surge" has been an unprecedented success, and given that the "surged" numbers were there just about all year, then how is it that 2007 became the deadliest year on record for American and coalition forces in Iraq?

And that doesn't even address how deadly it's been for Iraqis.

At the same time, this story by Stolberg in The Times about how Bush and the families of dead soldiers are "leaning on each other for great support" just makes me sick. Bush, who wouldn't attend one damned service funeral, who certainly won't meet with the families of ALL fallen soldiers because he wants a guarantee the grieving loved ones won't ask him any pesky questions. I find this to be the height of obscenity.

Nicholas D. Kristof: "Cheney's Long-Lost Twin"

That there can be even one Cheney has cost many meals and countless times worshipping the porcelain goddess" after reading about the Bushies' latest atrocities; the idea, as Kristoff proposes in this Times OpEd column, he may have a twin is beyond frightening (read it all here):

Could Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be twins separated at birth?

The U.S. vice president and Iranian president, each the No. 2 in his country, certainly seem to be working together to create conflict between the two nations. Theirs may be the oddest and perhaps most dangerous partnership in the world today.

Both men are hawks who defy the international community, scorn the U.N. and are unpopular at home because of incompetence and recklessness — and each finds justification in the extremism of the other.

“Iranians refer to their new political radicals as ‘neoconservatives,’ with multiple layers of deliberate irony,” notes Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University, adding: “The hotheads around President Ahmadinejad’s office and the U.S. foreign policy radicals who cluster around Vice President Cheney’s office, listen to each other, cite each others’ statements and goad each other to new excesses on either side.”

So one of the perils in the final 18 months of the Bush administration is that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ahmadinejad will escalate provocations, ending up with airstrikes by the U.S. against Iranian nuclear sites.

Already we’re seeing a series of leaks about Iran that echo leaks in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The reports say that Iran is turning a blind eye to Al Qaeda, is using Hezbollah to wage a proxy war against U.S. forces in Iraq, is transferring bomb-making skills to Iraq insurgents and is handing out armor-piercing bullets to fighters in Iran and Afghanistan so as to kill more Americans.

Yet the jingoists aren’t all in our government: These leaks may well all be accurate, for Mr. Ahmadinejad is a perfect match for Mr. Cheney in his hawkishness and contempt for the international community.

It’s worrying that Iran has just recalled its most able diplomat — Javad Zarif, ambassador to the U.N. — and sent him out to pasture as an academic. Hard-liners always hated Mr. Zarif; goons from a mysterious Iranian security agency detained me on my last trip to Tehran and accused me of being a C.I.A. or Mossad spy, apparently because they were trying to get dirt to use against Mr. Zarif (who had given me my visa).

[...]A recent opinion poll in Iran found that 70 percent of Iranians want to normalize relations with the U.S., and 61 percent oppose the current Iranian system of government. Any visitor to Iran knows that it is — at a people-to-people level — the most pro-American Muslim country in the region, and the regime is as out of touch and moribund as the shah’s was in the late 1970s.

The ayatollahs’ only hope is that we will rescue them with a military strike, which would cement them in place for many years to come. But look out, because that’s what may happen if bilateral relations are driven by those jingoistic twins, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ahmadinejad.

JP at Pottersville offers more.

On This Memorial Day Weekend...

Let us appreciate America's 25 million living veterans (one in every dozen citizens), demand we stop unnecessary aggression against other countries, and begin to worry about our own massive problems. At the same time, think about all the many wars this Republican chickenhawk vice president (Dick Cheney) and chickenshit commander in chief, Mr. Bush, have started since they used corrupt court processes to take the White House in December 2000:

Besides those declared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the proxy war Israel waged for Bush to break the spine of Lebanon in proxy:

• War on the military and our veterans (asking so much while cutting services to them every damned day)
• War on basic human rights
• War on individual privacy
• War not on poverty but against the poor
• War on families (you have to be the "right" kind of family not to feel "intruded" upon
• War on science
• War on reason
• War on truth and accountability as well as the whistleblowers who try to make the Bushies honest
• War on public education and against the best conditions for our kids
• War on young minds, trying to lure them away from high school or college with lies
• War on drugs (which got rolled into the War on Terror which, as they say, is a bumper sticker motto but hardly a game plan) which includes the ability for Americans to afford them, to get them for their most urgent needs (ex: contraception, pain relief, and yes, even decongestants in cold formulas), and to make decisions about their own bodies
• War on anyone who isn't of the Fascist Fundamentalist Christian "faith" (Muslims, especially)
• War on America's honor, its reputation, its compassion
• War on the sick (remember Terri Schiavo, kept alive when there was little brain left in her while the Bushies had no trouble discontinuing treatment to the ultra poor minority babies)
• War on journalism
• War on the United Nations, NATO, and other worldly agencies

Care to name some other wars?

Maureen Dowd: "Ozone Man Sequel"

Here's the latest MoDo; since I offer but a snip, you can find it all at Welcome to Pottersville (leave JP a snack while you're there).

Al Gore now has a movie with an Oscar and a grandson named Oscar.

Who could ask for anything more?

Al Gore could.

The best ex-president who was never president could make one of the most interesting campaigns in American history even more interesting. Will he use his green moment on the red carpet in black tie to snag blue states and win the White House?

Only the Goracle knows the answer.

The man who was prescient on climate change, the Internet, terrorism and Iraq admitted that maybe his problem had been that he was too far ahead of the curve. He realized at a conference that “there’re ideas that are mature, ideas that are maturing, ideas that are past their prime ... and a category called ‘predawn.’

“And all of a sudden it hit me,” he told John Heilemann of New York magazine last year. “Most of my political career was spent investing in predawn ideas! I thought, Oh, that’s where I went wrong.”

As Mr. Gore basked Sunday night in the adoration of Leo, Laurie David and the rest of the Hollywood hybrid-drivers, Democrats wondered: Is this chubby guy filling out the Ralph Lauren three-piece tuxedo a mature idea or an idea that’s past its prime?

With Hillary overproduced and Barack Obama an unfinished script, maybe it’s time to bring the former vice president out of turnaround.

Hillary’s henchmen try to prognosticate the Goracle’s future by looking at his waistline, according to Newsday; they think if he’s going to run, he’ll get back to fighting weight.

With her own talent for checking the weathervane, Hillary co-opted Mr. Gore’s eco-speak right after the Oscars, talking environment throughout upstate New York. Given his past competition with Hillary, Mr. Gore must have delighted in seeing his star rise in Hollywood as hers dimmed.

If he waits long enough to get into the race, all the usual-suspect-consultants will be booked — which would be a boon for Mr. Gore, since his Hessian strategists in 2000 made him soft-pedal the environment, the very issue that makes him seem most passionate and authentic. The same slides about feedback loops and the interconnectedness of weather patterns that made his image-makers yawn just won his movie an Academy Award.

But what’s going on in his head? Like Jeb Bush, Al Gore was the good son groomed by a famous pol to be president, only to have it snatched away by a black sheep who didn’t even know the name of the general running Pakistan (the same one he just sent Vice to try to push into line.) It must be excruciating not only to lose a presidency you’ve won because the Supreme Court turned partisan and stopped the vote, but to then watch the madness of King George and Tricky Dick II as they misled their way into serial catastrophes.

Even though Chickenhawk Cheney finally got close to combat in Afghanistan, his explosive brush with a suicide bomber has not served as a wake-up call about the danger of Osama bin Laden’s staying on the lam, and Afghanistan’s slipping back into the claws of the Taliban and Al Qaeda while we are shackled to Iraq.

A reporter asked Tony Snow yesterday what the attack on the Bagram Air Base that targeted the vice president and killed at least 23 people said about the Taliban’s strength. “I’m not sure it says anything,” he replied.

Mr. Gore must be pleased that he’s been vindicated on so many fronts, yet it still must rankle the Nobel Peace Prize nominee to hear the White House spouting such dangerous nonsense. He must sometimes imagine how much safer the world would be if he were president.

The Bush-Cheney years have been all about dragging the country into the past, getting back the presidential powers yanked away after Watergate, settling scores from Poppy Bush’s old war, and suppressing scientific and environmental advances. Instead of aiming for the stars, the greatest power on earth is bogged down in poorly navigated conflicts with ancient tribes and brutes in caves.

Read the rest here.

Lieberman Won't Leap To GOP - Or So He Says

Apparently trying to quell conjecture that Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman (and remember: you can't spell Lieberman without L-I-E) would jump from "independent Democrat" status with which he was only just elected to the Senate (after years as a Dem) to the Republican Party, Joementum says he won't go.

One issue is that - no longer so tainted by all that non-Connecticut money the Rovean Empire pushed into Joe's campaign - Connecticut voters could impeach and/or remove him if he switched.

This is called trying to have one's cake (Republican war rhetoric) and eat it, too (hope that once Iraq ends, maybe voters won't remember how much he wanted us in there, to stay there). Joe has to realize, very sadly, that today's far right ranking Repugs are never going to let someone non-Christian white extremist anywhere near a position of true power.

And that brings me to my next post.