Iraq War Blogswarm: Three Trillion Lies And Still Going Strong

Today, as we mark that dark mid-March day in 2003 when President Bush, complete with a raised fist pumping air like he was about to go into the final playoffs to give "'em one more for the Gipper..." gesture and dispatched the first soldiers off to war, the cold, harsh light of day makes it a heluva lot easier to see all the lies.

After all, it was not just one single lie that Bush used to get us into Iraq but a multitude of them, including:

weapons of mass destruction everywhere>

doctored intelligence reports that led to the outing of CIA covert operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, because Bushies did not like that Wilson's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, would not pretend Niger "yellow cake" uranium story was true

Saddam was about to launch a campaign to make kittens and puppies in perfect little American suburbia all sick

the war would take a few days to a few weeks, completely pay for itself, and there is "absolutely no way" to lose it

the entire world sees the war as right which is why we had to pay them and bully them into joining the "coalition of the willing"

actions in Iraq certainly won't distract us from catching Osama bin Laden, regroup al Qaeda, or exhaust our resources for the global war on terror

Need I list more?

Yummy Cut-to-the-Chase Quick Bytes for January 22, 2008

Questions About Terrorism? Invite “Ask Al Qaeda” To Your Next Social Organization Brunch!

Oddly enough, this is not entirely a joke though “Breakfast with the Bin Ladens” may not be quite as popular as “Have Hot Chocolate With Santa.” On the plus side, however, Osama does speak English better than President Bush and can pronounce nuclear correctly..(Though, to be fair, most three-year-olds speak and enunciate far better than our “MBA president”; where MBA stands for “mommy's biggest asshole.”)

But I digress when I want to share with you news so very twisted in its own way, you'd think it came out of Bush's Department of Homeland (In)Security: Namely, al Qaeda has apparently opened up its own customer service department on the Internets (all of them). There, al Qaeda operatives (so they say) are available to answer questions you may have about those 72 virgins they get for lethal missions, how to make a suicide bomb vest that is both functional and stylish, as well as how all six feet-four inches of Osama (with a beard almost as long) manages to terrorize below the radar abd remain unapprehended some six-and-a-half years after Bush declared, “he can run but he can't hide” and that he would personally catch OBL “dead or alive.” (That Mission isn't Accomplished either, Mr. President.)

Interestingly enough, the pediatrician al-Zawahri who is Osama's second in command made himself available for a (live?) online interview. Isn't it encouraging to learn that a radical terrorist network and its leaders manage to be far more available and accountable to its recruits than the entire Bush Administration has been to the American people for seven years now? But then, some would say that the Bushies actually represent the largest terrorist network in the entire world.

Yes, indeed, it's the Bizarro World out there and Bush is the leader of the biggest Bizarro faction of them all!

Forget Dinner: You Can't Afford It!

While the Bushies spin the economy as being much better than reported – while Fed chair Ben Bernanke meets “in secret” (the favorite Bushie way!) to cut the interest rate in a move many decry as fraught with more dangers than leaving it alone – more than 3 out of every 4 people taking the CNN poll (“Are we in a recession now?”) say yes! Of more than 125,000 people who've cast votes so far, 75% disagree with the Bush drivel.

See What Happens When You Forget To Take Your Anti-Psychotic Meds With Breakfast

Senator John McCain, if seeming to offer Repuglicrat Sen. JoeMentum a job as his vice president did not supply enough evidence his mental health is MIA on its fast track to being declared DOA, proves he's off his meds with THIS quote: (shudder!):

"Don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys."

As opposed to... uh... what, Mac? Are they disciples of Christ, beauty pageant contestants, Sunday School teachers, smiters of Harry Potter magic, and benevolent leprechauns all rolled into one of the most powerful lobbyist organizations in the entire world? You feeling OK?

Or are you just auditioning for your new gig as a PhRMA lobbyist once Diebold steals the 2008 presidential win from you and Arizona (finally) kicks you to the curb?

“Let Me Have a Pastrami on Toasted Pumpernickel; Hold The Cole Slaw And Give Me Some Progressive- and Fairness.”

Pass the mustard and napkins and prepare to smile, The very same America that's been fighting in the Bush years to relegate evolution to “crazy theory” status and to wage war on science, critical thinking, AND its own working class citizens sits poised to knock our (figurative) socks O-F-F. It's high time, too, though not even British Colombia's super pot and/or “chronic” deserves the credit for this encouraging about-face.

In a major CNN poll first reported yesterday (on the late Martin Luther King Jr's birthday), more Americans than ever before acknowledge the United States is “ready” for a black president. Specifically, this “readiness” was opined by:

72% of whites

61% of blacks

(and perhaps as many as two whole Southern Republicans?)

Adds CNN:

That number is higher than it was two years ago, when 65 percent of whites and 54 percent of blacks felt the same way. It's also higher than the proportion of either men or women -- 64 percent and 65 percent, respectively -- who currently believe the nation is ready for a woman in the White House.

The top six concerns for both whites and blacks in making their presidential choice this year are exactly the same in the following order -- the economy, Iraq, terrorism, health care, gas prices and Iran -- though blacks place a higher level of importance on all those issues.

However, as glad as many of us are to see this, and yes, it is encouraging, it is also shocking to recognize that four full decades since the assassination of Dr. King, such a poll question can be considered fair game, that it took us this long to achieve such results, and that the same questions are still asked about a potential woman commander in chief, a Jew, a Mormon... and probably is not yet capable to consider a candidate (in today's Christian fascism insurgemce) who commits the guaranteed act of political suicide by stating he or she does not believe in a “higher power” or chooses not to share those beliefs with the media/public...

Benazir Bhutto's Assassination

Since Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf plunged his country of Pakistan into one of its maddest states ever in his efforts to control the results of voting a few months ago that threatened to unseat him, it became not a question of IF his major opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, twice elected and twice unseated as a Muslim country's first major woman leader, would be assassinated, but when.

I find much about the reaction to her death to be completely disingenuous. The first was the Bush Administration's reaction, acting like they were saddened when I doubt they were; my biggest questions with her death, in fact, center around just how much involvement Musharraf - who was to face Ms. Bhutto in elections in less than two weeks - and the Bushies may have had with her assassination earlier today.

While we've heard that the Bushies really wanted her there in a power sharing arrangement with Musharraf, there is far more evidence that neither Musharraf nor Bush actually did want her there, since the progressiveness she represented is hardly what the Bush Administration wants in trying to control that part of the world.

But I am just as suspicious concerning the rush by the Bushies and their ilk - including "I see 9/11 everywhere" Rudy Giuliani - to identify al Qaeda as responsible for Bhutto's death. Sure, Bhutto did not pose herself a good candidate for al Qaeda; she also wasn't who Musharraf and Bush want either.

In truth, there are any number of groups and individuals who could have put the hit on this woman. Sadly, the more the Bushies point to al Qaeda and boast "they know" Osama bin Laden is behind it, the more questions I feel arise as to their own culpability here. After all, the Bushies - and this is clear right from their administration HERE at home - are no champions of democracy; they like the "absolute monarchy" kind of arrangement. While Bush is hardly the first "monarch" to decide who lives and dies, a hell of a lot of destabilization and attempted coups around the world since 2000 (including the short ouster of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez) point right back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Not Just Iraq: U.S. Also Marks Deadliest Year In Afghanistan

Not only does the Bush-led campaign in Iraq result in more U.S. and coalition deaths than ever in 2007 despite all the happy horseshit about the "grand success" of the "surge" to kill the insurgency; no, Bush has something else to boast about (and he's enough of an ass to do so, too): this is our deadliest year for American troops in Afghanistan (remember them?) since we invaded in early October 2001.

And this distinction was earned BEFORE Pakistan fell apart to prop up Musharraf's ego; with the chaos there now, one must assume that Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and friends have more room to manuever than ever. And each day, the Bushies push harder and harder for war with Iran, a country where we can't even begin to claim it will be a "cakewalk" to wage war.

The Bush Administration: fucking the world over since January 2001.

Pakistan and Osama Bin Forgotten Laden

See my post here for why I think we should be paying very close attention to the Pakistan mess and the possible "resurgency" of the Bushies' favorite bogeyman, Osama.

Paul Krugman: "All The President's Enablers"

Like Krugman, I couldn't care less if Bush is "certain" and "confident" we'll defeat Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda because Bush was just as confident about the ease of the Iraq war, how fast he would find Osama bin Laden, and how the world would love our War on Terror, areas in which he failed light years beyond miserably. Read the rest here:

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits — amazingly, they still exist — to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don’t understand is why we’re supposed to consider Mr. Bush’s continuing confidence a good thing.

Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush’s poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

Sorry, but that’s not reassuring; it’s terrifying. It doesn’t demonstrate Mr. Bush’s strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.

Actually, it’s not clear that he ever was in touch with reality. I wrote about the Bush administration’s “infallibility complex,” its inability to admit mistakes or face up to real problems it didn’t want to deal with, in June 2002. Around the same time Ron Suskind, the investigative journalist, had a conversation with a senior Bush adviser who mocked the “reality-based community,” asserting that “when we act, we create our own reality.”

People who worried that the administration was living in a fantasy world used to be dismissed as victims of “Bush derangement syndrome,” liberals driven mad by Mr. Bush’s success. Now, however, it’s a syndrome that has spread even to former loyal Bushies.

Yet while Mr. Bush no longer has many true believers, he still has plenty of enablers — people who understand the folly of his actions, but refuse to do anything to stop him.

Pottersville delivers the rest (say "hi" to JurassicPork for me).

Maureen Dowd: "Hey, W! Bin Laden (Still) Determined To Strike In U.S."

Maureen lays it on the line, most ably (find the rest here at Pottersville):

Oh, as it turns out, they’re not on the run.

And, oh yeah, they can fight us here even if we fight them there.

And oh, one more thing, after spending hundreds of billions and losing all those lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re more vulnerable to terrorists than ever.

And, um, you know that Dead-or-Alive stuff? We may be the ones who end up dead.

Squirming White House officials had to confront the fact yesterday that everything President Bush has been spouting the last six years about Al Qaeda being on the run, disrupted and weakened was just guff.

Last year, W. called his “personal friend” Gen. Pervez Musharraf “a strong defender of freedom.” Unfortunately, it turned out to be Al Qaeda’s freedom. The White House is pinning the blame on Pervez.

While the administration lavishes billions on Pakistan, including $750 million in a risible attempt to win “hearts and minds” in tribal areas where Al Qaeda leaders are hiding and training, President Musharraf has helped create a quiet mountain retreat, a veritable terrorism spa, for Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri to refresh themselves and get back in shape.

The administration’s most thorough intelligence assessment since 9/11 is stark and dark. Two pages add up to one message: The Bushies blew it. Al Qaeda has exploded into a worldwide state of mind. Because of what’s going on with Iraq and Iran, Hezbollah may now “be more likely to consider” attacking us. Al Qaeda will try to “put operatives here” — (some news reports say a cell from Pakistan already is en route or has arrived) — and “acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks.”

(Democrats on cots are ineffectual, but Al Qaeda in caves gets the job done?)

After 9/11, W. stopped mentioning Osama’s name, calling him “just a person who’s now been marginalized,” and adding “I just don’t spend that much time on him.”

This week, as counterterrorism officials gathered at the White House to frantically brainstorm on covert and overt plans to capture Osama, the president may have regretted his perverse attempt to demote America’s most determined enemy.

W. began to mention Osama and Al Qaeda more recently, but only to assert: “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th.” His conflation is contradicted by the fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni terrorist group in Iraq is known, did not exist before 9/11.

Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, did her best to put a gloss on the dross but failed. She had to admit that the hands-off approach used by Mr. Musharraf with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan, which always looked like a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup, was a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup.

[...]W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because: “This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West.”

Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.

If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now.

The rest is here.

The Newest Season of The Fear Factor: Bush Pulls Osama Bin Laden From Mothballs to Terrorize Us Again

He's baaaaccck; not just Bush (who must be due for his annual 6 week summer vacation which should never be confused with the approximately 22 weeks of other vacations he takes each year) but his favorite convenient bogeyman, Osama bin Forgotten; the same one Bush can never decide whether he is the worst threat EVER or "completely unimportant so we don't need to bother to even pretend to catch him anymore". Writes Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post today:

Nearly six years after President Bush pledged to capture him "dead or alive," Osama bin Laden is not only still at large, but he and his al-Qaeda organization have apparently benefited greatly from Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

That's not just me saying so. It's the inevitable conclusion from the declassified summary of a White House intelligence report released to great fanfare yesterday.

It turns out that bin Laden and his al-Qaeda leadership are safely ensconced in Pakistan. They're still trying to attack us. And the U.S. occupation of Iraq has provided them with a potent rallying cry, recruiting tool and training ground they would not have had otherwise.

The White House has time and again used the specter of al-Qaeda to cow Capitol Hill into doing its bidding. Similarly, Bush and his aides have lately gone to great lengths to conflate the multifaceted insurgency in Iraq with al-Qaeda. After all, when it's Bush vs. al-Qaeda, how many Americans will side with al-Qaeda?

The report's release shot al-Qaeda back into the headlines. But this time, the al-Qaeda stories have a potentially devastating twist for the administration: As it turns out, Bush's policies may have helped bin Laden more than they've hurt him.

Gee, really?

Actually, I suspect that bin Laden and Bush are tied together not just at the hip, and not just at the wallet. Bush needs him as much as Osama needs Bush. What scares me most, however, is that I think their interests may be far more chummy - as profitable for each other as they are devastating to the rest of us - than we can yet even begin to conceive.

Bitter Vitters, Fred Thompson "Mole" For Nixon, And Fibby Libby

Even George Orwell could not have imagined, much less felt it would make believable fiction, some of most recent headlines out of the Bush White House, their "moralist" (which always means, "you better live by my moral standards if you want to stay out of trouble, but hey, if I falter, I'll just claim God's forgiveness and keep on keeping on") far right, and their subversion of democracy.

Let's look at a handful, shall we?

*As The Times reported several days ago, Donald Rumsfeld as then Defense Secretary called off a strike against a supposed major meeting of Al Qaeda officials, including the purported #2 man to Osama bin Laden, the former pediatrician al Zawari; because it was just too dangerous for the Navy Seals and CIA operatives who would have attacked; uh... so it's better to keep tens of thousands of far less trained 18 year olds out fighting where the biggest terrorist is often a (perhaps all too justifiably pissed off) civilian?

* Turns out Fred Thompson, the bad actor and even worse politician, may have been a "mole" for Richard Nixon (the original Tricky Dick, although he was never as good at it as Dick Cheney has proven to be), carrying confidential information from the 1970s Watergate Commission to Dick Nixon's White House to help a lying leader avoid pitfalls; really makes you want to entrust Fred with the White House, eh?

* While the tighty righties scream that Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich (who, I believe, gave a considerable amount of money to Republicans beyond the contributions of his ex-wife noted to Democrats) was MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more evil than George Bush's miraculous and quite probably illegal commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence in the PlameGate affair, none of them ever bothered to mention that Libby happened to have been Rich's lawyer and one of those lobbying Clinton for clemency; Libby has certainly been the benefactor of so many riches

* Senator David Vitters (R-Louse... er... Louisiana) who railed against Bill Clinton's immorality while screaming that marriage is too precious to waste on gays who just happens to have been a client of not just the infamous "DC Madam" but also other prostitutes during - and this is just toooooo precious - the same time period he was shaking his moralist finger at Clinton

Why Did Bush's FBI Allow Osama Bin Laden To Charter American Plane(s)?

Very good question, especially considering the Bush family and the Bin Laden family - on which Dubya sat on a board with bin Ladens - have for a very loooonnng time financially benefited from their war profiteering. Can you say Carlyle Group?

Notice this is from Canada since the press here still quakes in its boots:

FBI were aware that Osama bin Laden may have chartered one of the flights that took members of the bin Laden family out of the United States immediate after the 9/11 attacks, yet allowed the planes to depart, new Agency documents reveal.

The formerly confidential documents obtained by Judicial Watch through Freedom of Information Act and ongoing litigation states:

ON 9/19/01, A 727 PLANE LEFT LAX, RYAN FLT #441 TO ORLANDO, FL W/ETA (estimated time of arrival) OF 4-5PM. THE PLANE WAS CHARTERED EITHER BY THE SAUDI ARABIAN ROYAL FAMILY OR OSAMA BIN LADEN…THE LA FBI SEARCHED THE PLANE [REDACTED] LUGGAGE, OF WHICH NOTHING UNUSUAL WAS FOUND.

Traffic control reports show that the plane was allowed to depart the United States after making four stops to pick up passengers, ultimately landing in Paris where all passengers disembarked on 9/20/01, according to the document.

FBI’s most recent document production includes details of the six flights between 9/14 and 9/24 that evacuated Saudi royals and bin Laden family members.

The documents also contain brief interview summaries and occasional notes from intelligence analysts concerning the cursory screening performed prior to the departures.

FBI did not consider a single Saudi national nor any of the bin Laden family members as possessing any information of investigative value.

According to Judicial Watch the documents contain numerous errors and inconsistencies which call to question the thoroughness of the FBI’s investigation of the Saudi flights.

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.

And Still The Bushies Do Nothing But Lie, Inflame, and Corrupt All They Touch!

So Emperor Bush continues to behave, while things worsen by the hour, like he's the only one smart enough to know what's going on and he's sure he owes the American people NO explanation, let alone apology. When great skepticism was tendered about Bush's "Iraq Surge", and a way to burn through a trillion more dollars and lives of soldiers and Iraqi citizens, the Bush crew either ignored the skeptics outright, tried to discredit them, or flat out lied. With it, they've concocted huge webs of lies and spin so convoluted and labyrinthian they are sure the "dumb" voting public will nap through it.

If you've been paying attention to any of the Bush Administration's latest ever-expanding lists of the reasons King George demands we "give war a (thousand more) chance(s))", you're welcome to share my bottle of Bush-strength Excedrin. While you swallow (and the longer Bush and Cheney stay in office, the harder it becomes each day to try to force down your palate their strange and twisted recipes), let me note some of the White House's wildly changing rational, talking points, and unofficially official statements: which include:

• why we haven't caught Osama bin ForgottenLaden whom Bush told us "can run, but can't hide!" - For a megalomaniac who smirks thinking how smart he is (anyone who disagrees with him is garbage), the president SURE is wrong a lot, a WHOLE lot
• it was necessary to LIE throughout the build-up to war
• why we waged war when we KNEW there was no reason to do so
• we keep forgetting that Afghanistan, since our invasion on October 8, 2001, has turned from a bottom-of-the-bottom third world country into a full fifth world humanitarian meltdown producing a truly STUNNING amount of drugs and people with no great love for Bush, the United States, or the Bush Far Right's war on Muslims/oil producing countries
• With it clear to almost every American now (and obvious to those outside the U.S. far sooner) that the War on Terror was to finally satisfy those rich dinosaur fatcats (in deep grief since the Cold War "ended") and their war-making hardware, how can anyone treat the War on Terror seriously when the Bushies and Neocons try to act like something out of a very dim-witted Marvel comic book?

I don't know about you but I don't need superheroes. Especially pretend, fucked-up, corrupting superheroes like The Burning Bush, "Duck, It's Dick!" Cheney, Why-ever-would-you-conclude-I'm-a-woman-of-color? Captain Condi (Rice), Revoltin' Smotin' (John) Bolton, Karl "Blow Out The Pilot Lights On That Democrat's Gas Stove" Rove, and a cast of tens of thousands more representing "connected", crooked, confabulating, incompetent, factless fuckers of all time.

Remember. This is still the Bush Administration, where we consider Charles Darwin a greater threat than Osama Bin (over)Laden-with-business-contacts-with-Bush-Family bank accounts, where free speech should only be allowed to praise this president and to demand more war, and where the 25-year-old-and-never-held-a-job Bush Twins have spent more in one single night of partying (with some of the same drugs that would send you to prison) than almost all U.S. soldiers in Iraq each earn in a single year.

The President Is "Into" Sodomy?

I'm late in picking this up - or rather, I read it a few weeks ago elsewhere but yawned because every day's news is chuck full of Bush's infantile bully behavior but.... posted by All Spin Zone:

Well, that’s what Ariel Sharon’s biographer (and close associate) says in a new book. This statement certainly reveals a side of George W. Bush that we all new existed, but could never quite nail down (so to speak):

Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon’s delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: “I will screw him in the ass!”

So much for catching Osama "dead or alive"; Bush just wants to practice the buggering he probably learned in prep school. [God knows he didn't learn history!]

[The graphic is supplied by the good folks at Wrapped in the Flag.]

Frank Rich: "Where Were You That Summer of 2001?"

Frank Rich is excellent:

“United 93,” Hollywood’s highly praised but indifferently attended 9/11 docudrama, will be only a blip on tonight’s Oscar telecast. The ratings rise of “24” has stalled as audiences defect from the downer of terrorists to the supernatural uplift of “Heroes.” Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole’s decomposing corpse. Set this cultural backdrop against last week’s terrifying but little-heeded front-page Times account of American “intelligence and counterterrorism officials” leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda’s comeback, and ask yourself: Haven’t we been here before?

If so, that would be the summer of 2001, when America pigged out on a 24/7 buffet of Gary Condit and shark attacks. The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week’s Times, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The system “was blinking red,” as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.

The White House doesn’t want to hear it now, either. That’s why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States” (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on “24”). Al Qaeda is “on the march” rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces — it’s “not ready for transition,” according to the Pentagon’s last report — but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

This is why the entire debate about the Iraq “surge” is as much a sideshow as Britney’s scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what’s going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war’s critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it’s revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on “Meet the Press” that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It was “pretty well confirmed,” he said (though it was not), that bin Laden’s operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.

Read the rest here.

Osama bin Laden Missing From Bush's Threat 1,982 Days

Bob Geiger, each Monday, fills us in on the Osama bin Missing clock, or how long since President (man, it still hurts to type that) George W. Bush declared he would get Osama "dead or alive".

Bob's on a well-deserved vacation with his family, so here we are: 1,982 days since that declaration.

I no longer believe that Bush ever actually tried to find Osama.

There's an old saying, and yes, I think even people in Texas say it, that the truth usually lies somewhere between two extremes. Well, take the extreme from Bush that Osama was entirely responsible for 9-11 and everything bad around it as one, with the other extreme that Osama was the manufactured bogeyman that the Bush Administration, in its thirst for unlimited power and domination, put up as responsible for a series of events they helped orchestrate as the OTHER end of the spectrum.

Now, the middle ground between those extremes suggests that the Bushies have far more complicity in 9-11 than we perhaps ever will feel comfortable in accepting. and that we have no intention of finding Osama because, as our designated bogeyman, serves a much better purpose "on the loose", as a fear factor for us all, so Bush can continue his "War on Terror" which seems to create far more world terror than it resolves.