Do I Get to Say, "I Told You So"?

You might accuse me of picking on Condi Rice for being an incompetent in every government job she's ever held, so let's just stick to recent history--her tenure as Secretary of State. Well, folks, even Robert "I finked out a CIA agent" Novak is reporting that Republicans line up on this issue with Olaf.

Republicans in Congress, who do not want to be quoted, tell me the State Department under Secretary Condoleezza Rice is a mess.

Rice leading the State Department into disaster was easily predictable given her previous tenure as national security advisor ("No one could have predicted...", etc.), but the persistence with which she has been promoted and applauded by the administration, the Republicans, and still by elements in the mainstream media who are terrified of challenging her for reasons that totally escape me, have enabled her to become a one-woman diplomatic wrecking machine. This, according to Novak, is why John "Honduran Death Squad" Negroponte was pressured to give up his intelligence czar job to become Rice's number two at State--he's supposed to bail her out so she can be reassigned to bring failure to some new arena.

I've got a suggestion--make her chair of the Republican National Campaign Committee for 2008.

Final thought--I wonder if Rice's failure at diplomatic duties is one reason that the administration decided on an escalation of military force. There may have been no alternative because she could not get a foot in the door with essential players in the region.

Not to Belabor the Point, But More Clear Evidence of Sociopathy

Now maybe Chimpie is not a sociopath, but actually a psychopath. I dunno--Wikipedia explained it to me thus:

The difference between sociopathy and psychopathy, according to Hare, may "reflect the users views on the origins and determinates of the disorder."Most sociologists, criminologists, and even some psychologists believe the disorder is caused by social conflicts, and thus prefer the term 'sociopath.' Those who believe as Hare does, that a combination of psychological, biological and genetic factors all contribute to the disorder are more likely to use the term 'psychopath'.

In either case, here is Bush's expression of responsibility.

"Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," Bush said.

Note the passive construction in "mistakes have been made," and the corresponding avoidance of active responsibility in that it "rests with me." He simply is incapable, essentially physically and mentally incapable, of saying "I have failed." If he did, it would result in something I would love to see just once in my life: exploding head syndrome. I watch people yakking into their cell phones hoping that sooner or later one will detonate, but chances were better when the first Iridium satellite phones came out. That antenna looks like a stick of dynamite. Considering the power requirements for sending a signal skyward, direct to a satellite, eventually I'd expect a few splatter events.

But I digress. Mark Crispin Miller opined in his 2002 book that Bush's malapropisms and seeming paralysis with the English language was actually a manifestation of his sociopathic inability to admit error or blame. But because his name is Bush and not Rotkohl, rather than intervention and counseling, or at least detainment, he gets to express his sociopathy through the instrument of the presidency, and the blood and treasure he wastes on his illness is always someone else's, just like the blame.

War is not a therapeutic remedy. The only question seems to be, is Bush's behavior criminal or insane?

Live Blogging El Presidente's Hail Mary Pass

• What's the realistic sick joke here?
• Note the blue tie--a sop to Democrats?
• Who designed this backdrop? Some dickey-doo on the left edge of the screen looks like part of a hookah. Note the primary red theme in the bookshelves--sets off the dark suit.
• "The consequences of failure are clear." You're right, Chimpie. We see them every day, because failure has been occuring for quite a while now.
• Define "success." He talks as if only Baghdad matters. Is his plan to secure the city and cede the country?
• Oh, Christ--he wants to 'splain things to us.
• 18 Iraqi brigades plus local police patrolling Baghdad. Yes, there is definitely a positive precedent in the past 18 months.
• More than 20,000 Americans to be deployed, of which five brigades will embed with Iraqi units. There's something to look forward to.
  
• Why will this operation succeed? Because the "killers" realized that all they had to do was flow back into cleared areas. Does no one remember Vietnam?
• Ooooooh--a threat. Our commitment is not open-ended. "Now is the time to act." What we've just been fucking off for the last nearly four years?
• "...our television screens filled with death and murder." Hmmmm, why is that, I wonder?
• "...visible improvements to Iraqi neighborhoods." What the fuck was Halliburton, Brown and Root, Bechtel, et al doing all this time? Where's the money, dude?
• Speed the transition? Starting from what time?
• There, he admitted it--Iraq is on its way to becoming a base from which attacks on the U.S can be launched.
• 4000 military personnel for Anbar province. That should be pretty easy. It's only as big as North Carolina--roughly 53,000 square miles--and holds 1.4 million people. So that's, um, one additional GI per 13 sq. miles. That should settle the place down.
  
• Oh goody! Condi Rice is heading for Iraq on Friday. She's so competent...well, except for ignoring the "Bin Laden Determined to Attack U.S." PDB, and admitting to never imagining someone using planes to attack buildings, and failing to show any progress anywhere on the diplomatic front in the Middle East. Yeah, she's perfect.
• The insurgents are without conscience? What about a sociopathic president who cannot say, "I screwed up"?
• Victory won't look like what our fathers experienced? I get it--we redefine victory to resemble Iraq as it is today. Hooray! We won!
• A withdrawal would cause mass deaths on an unimaginable scale? Yeah, the scale so far was expected, right?
• Oh, so now it's the Democrats who are failing to provide a solution. And he praises Lieberman, big surprise. God, how Joe must feel like he mistook an anchor for a life preserver when he tied his wagon to Bush's star. It's fun watching Joe-mentum slow into reverse.
• "...worthy of their sacrifice." How dare this AWOL jerkoff tell us about "sacrifice."
  
• What a fucking worthless 20 minutes. Now for screaming head analysis which will yield exactly zero light--more of my life down the drain. Only Olbermann has anything thoughtful to offer. Matthews makes me puke--I think of how lavishly and shamelessly he used to praise Bush. Some analyst.
• I gotta go throw up.

My Dream for Tomorrow Night

Tomorrow, of course, is when El Bushito will unveil his "surge and accelerate" plan, this being a Rovism for "blame someone else," or a clumsy translation for "decent interval," which was war criminal Kissinger's immortal contribution to egocentric ass-covering.

My dream is that near and far, from the rural open spaces and the urban crush, from the north and south, from the red states and from the blue states, a swelling mass of Americans take to the streets. I think of Yugoslavia in 2000, when the population of Serbs "surged and accelerated" into the streets of Belgrade to demand that another war criminal of the 20th century, Slobodan Milosevic, get out of the presidential palace, and yield to the demonstrated will of the people, who had elected Vojislav Kostunica to replace him. Milosevic was at the point of ordering the army to shoot his countrymen in order to retain power.

"Gotov je!" the thousands shouted in the streets in Serb0-Croatian. "He's finished!"

The army sided with the people. Milosevic was out.

Now we confront an American president with a very recent Gallup poll putting his handling of Iraq at 26 percent. He faces objection to his plan by 30 percent of his own party, and 85 percent of the opposition. He has demonstrated that he will lie, that he cares little for the Constitution, and that he believes himself to possess an imperial right to strip citizens of their rights to privacy, to illegal search and seizure, to even deny their citizenship, and that he believes he has the power to subject them to torture on his orders.

Imagine if, during his speech, there was heard in the background a low and distant hum. Slowly it would begin to increase and gain a rhythm. It would start to thrum against the walls of the White House, and crystal in the dining room would begin to tinkle as though an earthquake was commencing from deep beneath the earth's crust. Soon, even the directional microphones pointed at Bush could not filter out the now-deafening shouts of tens of thousands of people jamming the streets outside.

"He's finished! Get out! You're finished! Get out!"

That is my dream.

Trivia Quick Quiz

Question: What do Joey Buttafuoco and Lynne Cheney have in common?

Answer: They both had sex with people who shot someone in the face.

Take cover, folks. Dickie's on the hunt again, this time in Pennsylvania.

New! Olaf Goes Visual!

I stumbled upon some pictures from a trip to Prague two summers ago, and that made me think of my digital camera, which I ought to carry more often to document items and people of interest that might support, detract, or render irrelevant the text that I erratically bonk out here at Olaf World HQ. Actually, I do occasionally stumble on some worthwhile images and why not share them with Olaf's massive readership (I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful)? Given the unimaginably high standard of literary intelligence that you all have exhibited, why not cleanse the intellectual palette with a few snaps now and then?

So here is a Czech take on our illustrious El Presidente for your delectation and dissection. Funny how much I've come to love good graffiti, in spite of all the lame shit that litters the urban, suburban, and (worst) rural landscape.

More to come.

You All Know Some Guy Like Him

Bush's pathology is nothing complicated.

He's simply the dumb guy who truly believes he is smarter than everybody else.

Why else would he insist on forcing through his "New Way Forward" in Iraq against the will of Congress, many of his own military commanders, and even members of his own party? Of course, behind Bush, we have to remind ourselves, is Karl Rove. He hasn't gone anywhere, except underground, but you can be sure he's cheerleading Chimpie into thinking that he's just so much more of a visionary than anyone can give him credit for (excepting a few diehard bootlickers), that he can interpret all opposition as coming from people too unenlightened to realize his uncanny genius.

Except that his genius lies in his ability to fuck up not just anything, but everything. Because, in the back of that withered seed of his brain, Chimpie is enough of a sociopath to want to take the whole country down with him if it won't recognize his genius. He's now in the extreme end of the Bunker Mentality, and thus he is now at his most dangerous. This final stage will be marked by a Bush accusation that the nation is too weak-willed to join him on the route to paradise, and so he will have to make them pay for their betrayal.

As a sociopath, he cannot admit error, cannot admit failure, cannot assume any point of view other than his own. He's the guy in the company who's out of step and, like Lou Costello in Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, claims it's the other 199 guys who are out of step with him. The trouble is that this time it's not funny.

I could be wrong, of course. Bush could just be a guy so dumb that no one can explain to him how dumb he is.

Especially those 59 million suckers who voted for him again in 2004. Yeah, now who is dumb?