You've got to hand it to the administration, neither policy makers nor their mouthpiece president seem exhibit any shame.  To get out there every day an blatantly rewrite history with a straight face takes big-time talent. 

Seriously.  Imagine you're the CEO of a major biotech company and you've convinced your board to let you go ahead with a new pesticide that conventional wisdom considers dangerous and ill-advised.  Predictably, the spray doesn't seem to be working in the field as well as your handlers claimed it would  Not only does the pesticide kill those plants supposedly under its care, but airborne fumes seem to have spawned a race of deadly mutant bees.

The bad press is dragging the company down and the board is furious.  Not to worry though, because you're able to convince them that the reports are imbalanced, that your enemies have conspired to show only the bad news from the spray while neglecting to point out the tremendous success that you swear it's having elsewhere.  In fact, since you commandeered all the resources of the company to pursue keeping the spray on the market, you have been making demonstrable gains.  The dumbfounded board started to call your bluff, but got distracted by news of a pop star's pregnancy and decided to adjourn for the summer. 

Your respite only lasted so long.  By the time the next meeting rolled around, what was already a hefty population of mutant bees has now ballooned  into a global pandemic.  Since no young white girl was kidnapped that week, the board had it's full attention on your mess.  So you do the only logical thing you can do - you tell them that, even though it may take 20 years, the spray is going to work.  Then you tell them that if only we had used the spray in Vietnam we would have won the war.

Yes, you say that.  You say that with a completely straight face. 

And then you say it again.

The implication is obvious - the Democrats are going to pull out of Iraq and will therefore be responsible for all the deaths that will likely occur without a US military presence.  And how can Democrats be so heartless as to kill all those innocent people?

I think BooMan said it best:

I don't think the Republicans understand that people who have been watching the war in Iraq for the last four years have been internalizing their grief all along...preparing for the day when all hell breaks loose. The time is long since past when rational people could expect a remission of  the metastasis. One last blast of radiation is not, and has not, solved the problem.

Hell, everyone knows that the only way to win a war is to never start one.  This was not World War II.  Iraq was never a just war and we are not the good guys.  We made a horrible, planet-altering mess in the backyard of our brothers and sisters and people - real people - are dying every day because of it.  And bloody stalemates don't just end in five or ten of fifty years, they go on and on until everyone is dead.  The only way to end it is to break down the status quo.  And in this case, we are the status quo.

Iraq's body count this year may double 2006 numbers as has Iraq's prison population.  Meanwhile, since the surge, US deaths are also on the rise and millions of more Iraqi's have been displaced from their homes.  Millions. 

And in the end, the entire analogy is a big lie anyway.  As Matthew Rothschild points out:

"The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens," he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By the way, he's counting the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who came to power only after the U.S. ruined Cambodia.

And he's not counting the three million people the U.S. killed in Southeast Asia during that war.

Just as he's not counting the 70,000 to 700,000 civilian Iraqis his war has killed, or the one in ten who have been forced to leave their homes.

The fact is, not a single person is calling for a US withdrawal - we are calling for a troop withdrawal.  Demilitarizing our Iraqi presence has been a moral imperative from the beginning.  But the withdrawal of the US is the kind of irresponsible action only a naive, self-serving, and arrogant administration could conceive of.  Given that Bush speaks for just such an administration, I can see why he would say that.  But as usual, just because the "president" said it does not make it true.

With so much interesting news in the world, I was looking forward to coming home and blogging up a spate of shinning brilliance for you. But I'm just too damn tired!

I'm too tired to harp on the fact that Israel is accusing Iran of genocide without any demonstrable evidence of even base anti-Semitism. And of course, U.S. security insiders are predicting an attack on Iran within six months from an administration desperate to make it happen before their term ends or they face impeachment.

I'm too tired to mention that the only vaguely rational approach to counter-terrorism is dismissed outright, not just by Fox News zealots, but even the ordinarily intelligent who just can't seem to grasp that, having inserted ourselves as a causal factor, we are only escalating our own threat.

I'm wa-haay too tired to point out that President Iraq-is-not-Vietnam is, you guessed it - pulling out the Vietnam analogy as an argument against troop withdrawal while fancying himself a 'dissident' among dissidents.

And I'm rah-ha-hee - wait for it ... heeeeely too tired to deal with our national menace once again claiming himself exempt from the executive branch no matter what the constitution says, and for refusing, in true GOP style, to surrender incriminating documents to congressional authority.

So screw it, just surrender to the flow ... zombies are coming to eat your brains!

 

 

After all these years, The Daily Show still represents one of the most implausibly consistent half hours in tee-vee land. I've never managed to watch a single episode in which I did not at least once:

• Get to laugh at a wingnut,
• Get to laugh at myself,
• Get angry about something,
• Find some optimism,
• and learn something I never knew before.

For the abject futility of trying to encapsulate concise clips, THF readers have probably noticed that I rarely post TDS vids on this site. But John Stewart's interview with sycophantic "historian", Stephen Hayes, about his biography of Dick Cheney is one clip that is just screaming to go viral.

Big thanks to Glenn Greenwald for pulling this up from the latest Pew Poll:

Notably, there is an erosion in the favorability of virtually every political and media institution in the United States, but the Republican Party is at the very bottom -- lower than the press, the judges, the liberals, the Congress and all of its other Evil bogeymen. Yet the Democrats continue to give them whatever they want, dreadfully fearful of their great power and popularity.

 

This may be a bit dated ... I was going to post it just before my laptop crashed.  But the question is no less relevant: Is the U.S. Drug Czar completely stoned??

The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment.

John P. Walters, President Bush's drug czar, said the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties. Walters made the comments at a Thursday press conference that provided an update on the "Operation Alesia" marijuana-eradication effort. "Don't buy drugs. They fund violence and terror," he said.

After touring gardens raided this week in Shasta County, Walters said the officers who are destroying the gardens are performing hard, dangerous work in rough terrain. He said growers have been known to have weapons, including assault rifles. 

"These people are armed; they're dangerous," he said. He called them "violent criminal terrorists."

Whether or not you enjoy using marijuana, I have a few obvious problems with this kind of grandstanding. The first, of course, is that it's patently ridiculous to equate growers with terrorists. While certainly a black-market enterprise, pot-farmers are trying to run a business whose success depends entirely upon a strong, vibrant economy where people have disposable income and are, you know - alive to spend it! Moreover, unlike heroin, meth, or cocaine, pot ranks among the lowest income as a factor of quantity, space, time, and overhead. If you really want to fund terrorism, there are far better cash crops to go with. Just ask post-invasion Afghanistan where recently supercharged opium production finances everything from rocket launchers to identity fraud.

Secondly, and this is a quibble, but the accusation of pot being harmful to the environment is nothing but a cheap ploy at exploiting a hot-button liberal (and recently conservative) issue. In fact, marijuana is one of the best rotation crops in existence by outcompeting other weeds, adding abundant organic material to the growing fields, and protecting ground nutrients through a strong root system. Moreover, with a rapid growth system, cannabis rivals most crops for year-round absorption of carbon emissions and has the potential to replace many higher-polluting industrial materials.

Finally, of course farmers have guns. They are operating outside the law in a very dangerous and often unscrupulous black market. Not only does this criminal environment lead to a great deal of paranoia, but also to the very real threat of death on a daily basis. Sure, this doesn't make them good people, but having a gun does not post hoc make you a terrorist any more than Charlton Heston is bin Laden's demented, wrinkly old right-hand man.

Alternate title: Cheney's 8-year slide into dementia

What can I say?  When Dick Cheney is right, he's right.  If only he had such good sense when it really mattered.

My new equipment has arrived and I am computing with the reckless abandon of a thousand Elvises (or is it Elvi?).  So you can all stop your little tiff now.

Thank you for your emails - I miss you too.  Within a 3-day period, both my backup and primary computers have experienced hardware failure.  I'm in hell - hell I say!

Anyway, I have some new equipment on the way and expect to be back online sometime within the next week. 

Jezebel has a great before and after shot on the perils of photoshopping people in the publishing industry. Honestly, we seem more than eager to outlaw personal freedom to smoke indoors or regulate forms of free speech considered destructive, yet we have no qualms in allowing big media to corrupt our sense of beauty even when clearly implicated as a causal factor in poor body image, eating disorders, mental illness, and fiscal irresponsibility.

On a related note, check out this blog of fast-food advertising photos versus the in-store reality. It’s about time someone took this on!