Rice/Other Bushies Subpoenaed to Testify

Secrets passed to pro-Israel lobbyists? Hmmm.

Our media pays little attention to this, but you can bet it's getting noticed elsewhere.

Star Wars II: Bush's Dangerous Missile Shield Plan

More than 20 years ago, Ronald Reagan, already clearly well into the slide into the mental abyss of Alzheimer's Disease (and sadly, I suspect he was incompetent possibly well BEFORE the start of his 2nd term), pushed the Star Wars defense shield program while all the experts said it would not work.

Now, Bush is pushing it - in a measure he started the summer of 9/11 in his first major divide with the rest of the world - in a way that not only costs many, many times more than Reagan's while even less apt to "work", but he's winning whole new enemies. These enemies include, perhaps, nearly every world leader at the G-8 summit.

Maureen Dowd: "Bush's Fleurs du Mal"

Try not to break a rib laughing too hard in this MoDo column from May 27th when you learn how Bush insists he "is credible because he reads the intelligence". Even if we can pretend Bush can read, the only credibility this man (loosely defined) has is that which the right demands everyone else provide him.

For me, the saddest spot in Washington is the inverted V of the black granite Vietnam wall, jutting up with the names of young men dying in a war that their leaders already knew could not be won.

So many died because of ego and deceit — because L.B.J. and Robert McNamara wanted to save face or because Henry Kissinger wanted to protect Nixon’s re-election chances.

Now the Bush administration finds itself at that same hour of shame. It knows the surge is not working. Iraq is in a civil war, with a gruesome bonus of terrorists mixed in. April was the worst month this year for the American military, with 104 soldiers killed, and there have been about 90 killed thus far in May. The democracy’s not jelling, as Iraqi lawmakers get ready to slouch off for a two-month vacation, leaving our kids to be blown up.

The top-flight counterinsurgency team that President Bush sent in after long years of pretending that we’d “turned the corner” doesn’t believe there’s a military solution. General Petraeus is reduced to writing an open letter to the Iraqi public, pleading with them to reject sectarianism and violence, even as the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr slinks back from four months in Iran, rallying his fans by crying: “No, no, no to Satan! No, no, no to America! No, no, no to occupation! No, no, no to Israel!”

W. thinks he can save face if he keeps taunting Democrats as the party of surrender — just as Nixon did — and dumps the Frankenstate he’s created on his successor.

“The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike our homeland,” he told Coast Guard Academy graduates. “The enemy in Iraq does. Nine-eleven taught us that to protect the American people we must fight the terrorists where they live so that we don’t have to fight them where we live.”

The president said an intelligence report (which turned out to be two years old) showed that Osama had been trying to send Qaeda terrorists in Iraq to attack America. So clearly, Osama is capable of multitasking: Order the killers in Iraq to go after American soldiers there and American civilians here. There AND here. Get it, W.?

The president is on a continuous loop of sophistry: We have to push on in Iraq because Al Qaeda is there, even though Al Qaeda is there because we pushed into Iraq. Our troops have to keep dying there because our troops have been dying there. We have to stay so the enemy doesn’t know we’re leaving. Osama hasn’t been found because he’s hiding.

The terrorists moved into George Bush’s Iraq, not Saddam Hussein’s. W.’s ranting about Al Qaeda there is like planting fleurs du mal and then complaining your garden is toxic.

The president looked as if he wanted to smack David Gregory when the NBC reporter asked him at the news conference Thursday if he could still be “a credible messenger on the war” given all the mistakes and all the disillusioned Republicans.

“I’m credible because I read the intelligence, David,” he replied sharply.

But he isn’t and he doesn’t. Otherwise he might have read “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” in August 2001, and might have read the prewar intelligence reports the Senate just released that presciently forecast the horrors in store for naïve presidents who race to war because they want to be seen as hard, not soft.

Intelligence analysts may have muffed the W.M.D. issue, but they accurately predicted that implanting democracy in Iraq would be an “alien” idea that could lead to turbulence and violence; that Al Qaeda would hook up with Saddam loyalists and “angry young recruits” to militant Islam to “wage guerrilla warfare” on American forces, and that Iran and Al Qaeda would be the winners if the Bushies botched the occupation.

Your Map To All The Security Features In The New American Embassy in Baghdad

Considering the multiple millions going into the new embassy headquarters for the U.S. in beautiful, brutal downtown Baghdad, you would think someone could have locked up the plans.

But they didn't which seems like a fatal flaw.

Of Catfights and Clintons and Cretins - Part 3

[Ed note: See Part I and Part II.]

Also as the holiday weekend revved came word of two Hillary Clinton books due out soon and another on the Clintons available long before the 2008 presidential election. Apparently ALL of these books "which have been touted as 'Hillary exposes".

And do you know what these scandal peddlers tell us BRAND SPANKING NEW about Bill and Hillary (which the right likes to call "Billary") Clinton? Here goes a list of items mentioned by mostly rightwing nutcases but also dim types like Chris Matthews:

That Hillary is calculating and competent. Really? Gee. How did that happen?

Oh wait... she went to good schools and was taught that critical thinking makes far more sense than "intelligent design." After all, MY GOD, what will we tell the children if they see a woman running for this nation's highest post is both calculating and competent? And remember the right's big cry during Monicagate? "What will we tell the children about blowjobs?!?

Is it much better to have a coke-addled dim bulb in the White House like Bush whose ONLY three skills are):

1. Smirk
2. Endanger America with every single act
3. Pass off any really important and respected parts of decision making and country-building to the most incompetent and corrupt people to walk this continent's soil?

As for the "resurgency" of the Hillary-Only-Stood-By-Her-Man-2-Win-Votes, puh-leez! After all those millions Ken Starr wasted of OUR money while keeping our attention onto Monica Lewinsky and blowjobs and some "anatomical oddity with CLENUS' penis (noted by rocket scientist Paula Jones) while OFF Al Qaeda and clear signs of danger, do we really have to sit through this crap again?

Just as with every other American, it is no one's business what decisions and deliberations and dilemmas these two mature, intelligent people make toward the present and future of their marriage. Neither of them owe an explanation.

If anything, I'd say a lot of parties should apologize to Billary for letting them be turned into a soap opera. Then these same folks need to apologize to ALL of America for keeping its attention on Gary Condit and Clinton's penis and the West Wing creator being stopped by airport security for traveling with psychedelic mushrooms RATHER than upon clear and present dangers on the horizon as Bush took over.

Excuse Me? Cheney Thinks Bush Takes Diplomacy With Iran TOO Far?

I must have read this story through seven times on Cernig's Newshog (aka The Newshoggers) before I could get my jaw up from my toes (yeah, I'm short, but not THAT short it doesn't hurt). It still has me speechless, which I've already been at least five times today just in pol reading.

Steve Soto has a tale for you - a tale of dumb and dumber...or more like crazy and crazier.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

Wait!

Let me picture this.

George "Nuke 'em first, then we'll see if they're the enemy!" Bush is just TOO willing to let diplomacy take its course. The same man, we're told, who's been upset with Condi Rice because (allegedly) she tells the president he should not have this "give Israel anything it wants, damn the criticism" because it's messy up the entire Middle East and hurting the U.S. [And if true, the only true "reason" we have ever heard from this Secretary of State.]